Search support

[Ricardo Barrios]

It's a great software, but it lack for a search tool to be fully usable.
Could be great to integrate tracker (http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/) to allow search and not reinvent the wheel ;). It could be done as a plug-in, like Library.

[Anonym25712 (anonym25712)]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll take a look at what can be done with tracker.

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

That sounds a bit overkilling to me... Decibel is meant to be a simpler audio player, but tracker is a big indexer!

Why not just add a box entry (maybe above the library/browser), and it searches for songs matching your request as you type it? Some apps do this (thunderbird 2.0, listen) and it's simpler that relying on tracker.

What do you think?

[Ricardo Barrios (ricardojbarrios)]

Tracker is just a library, it could be used like you propose, only that it abstract all code needed to search for (ie. search for metatags, filenames, etc.) i'm not talking about use his gui, only the library... but any search solution is great for me, it's only a propose,

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

Well, if you use tracker, you will have to use it's command line (tracker-search). Of course we aren't talking about using tracker-search-tool, since we want the search to be available inside decibel. But anyway, it adds a big dependency for a simple feature.

Also, note that using tracker would mean that if you add a song, it won't be available at search queries until tracker has indexed it.

But yes, this is a nice feature, and completely would like to see it implemented! I just thought it isn't a good idea to use tracker for it...

[Thomas Maroulis (thomasmaroulis)]

I'd like to second the request for a search feature. I just moved from using foobar2000 in Win to Decibel and a search function is the only think I'm really missing.

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

Hi Francois, I would maybe give implementing the search feature a shot. Would you be interested?

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

As you can see in the linked branch above, I have implemented a simple search feature for the file explorer. It features as-you-type case-insensitive multiword search ;) Would be really cool if you could integrate that feature into the next decibel version.

[m2xtreme (m2xtreme)]

Great idea! I can't wait for it to be implemented :-)

[David Poetzsch-Heffter (davidpoetzsch)]

Funny! I'm thinking of implementing a search feature using tracker (btw: tracker has a DBUS interface, so there no comandline stuff or so). Actually for me the thing is the following:

I plan to use tracker as a desktop search anyway. So why also use a memory-hungry app to manage my music? I looked for a simple player written in python and found DAP. For me, it looks perfectly to implement a plugin that uses tracker as library backend, as tracker has a lightning fast search engine (I need a very fast engine because I have a very large collection).

All this does not speak against a simple search like Jendrik proposed. It would be just one further option for those with really huge libraries (like the library plugin is).

@Francois: Did you yet make any steps towards implementing a tracker search?

[Markus (marnmar-markus)]

I would just like to add my name to this request. Having installed projectm for visualisations along with DAP, this is the only feature I miss.

And thanks for implementing the wild card for covers a while back.