Option to filter artists, albums, songs, etc. by text input for local music library
As a user of the BluOS mobile and desktop app's local music library, I would like to filter artists, albums, songs, etc. so that it's easier to find what I'm looking for and without browsing long lists.
Motivation: Imagine a local music library with 200 albums covering 80-100 artists and roughly 2,000 songs. When you want to find AC/DC as an artist, they're on top of the list, but Smashing Pumpkins requires you to scroll far. The lists are even longer for albums and artists. Therefore a text filter – not a search function, but a text input to filter a list of existing results – would make the BluOS controller app more user-friendly.
I'm aware of the existing search feature, but note that this usually is much slower compared to a filter that only has to search in a single index of either artist names, album titles, song titles.
How the lists for artists, albums, songs currently appear in the iOS version of the BluOS app:
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Official comment
I have to admit I am sort of curious as to what you are asking for. I think you need to have a good grasp of how the indexing works. I have over 14,000 albums (maybe 180,000 tracks). The key is how you index and how Bluesound returns those indexes. Fortunately, if you search on an artist it will search both the track artist and album artist fields. Since I have 1600+ artists, I will always search on a particular artist. And from there I can select albums and tracks. And then the whole thing gets crazy when you add in streaming. I guess my whole thing is to know which artist(s) I want to hear. Thank goodness for Deezer Flow or Tidal Mixes.
Cheers!
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Curt A: My request is rather limited and specific in scope. It's only for the local music library (not streaming services or other add-ons), and please note it isn't a search (and maybe not even an index) you would need. Filtering is something different and is typically blazingly fast compared to a search because it potentially can be handled in the frontend app without network requests.
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Interesting. But my library is large enough that I have standardized all my entries (album, artist, album artist, genre, etc) and use Music Bee to organize (and EZ CD Audio Converter for tags and conversion). Music Bee outputs a great text file I import into MS Access where I have the full database of all tracks. From there I can filter however I want based on track, album, artist as well as artist genres. I can then use the results here to do quick searches on the Bluesound app and make play selections (using both my Library and my streaming services).
Yes complicated to build but very easy to use to figure out what I want to listen to.
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Curt A: That seems like a complicated setup, though I’m glad that you made it work.
Out of curiosity, how fast are your searches, or is there a delay of half a second or even more?-1 -
Building a database is relatively easy. And you can set up queries that group. For example, I group on album and can filter by artist or genre. The beauty of Access is how well it deals with large amounts of data. And in my case it is a useful tool to look up music. Yes, it is very fast.
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Curt A: I'm sure your solution works well for you. All good.
Regardless, a text filter would improve the experience and user interface (UI) out of the box. And I'm confident that a text filter option (for example simple string comparison operation) could be executed on the local device with low latency. As you know, most mobile phones have faster CPUs than BluOS so it's usually preferable to handle UI operations on the device and not via custom built databases over the network.
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