don't get me wrong, i find that the search feature is great, and can do more than anything else out there is capable of. but i do wish sometimes that it can do the following things:

1) dedupe on addition. if you have a playlist and you search for a song and add it, any other instance of that song in the playlist should automatically be deduped. kind of annoying when you're on a random menu x3 playlist, then you search for a song, and after it plays, 3 songs later, it plays again.

2) an ability to add all matches so far in search. say that you want to load up every version of a certain song, including remixes, like space between by dave matthews band. you put in "space between" in title search, and it shows 10 tunes that match. no way currently to add all of them at once. you have to hit ok then go thru the process 9 more times. big time waster.

3) fuzzy searches, to take advantage of #2. might take up a lot more cpu to accomplish this, but i'm willing to wait. sometimes i just want to hear all tracks that i have which paul van dyk remixed. since title search only works from the starting, this isn't a possibility.

again, i'm not complaining about the current state of things.... just that i've caught myself wishing sometimes that these features were reality. hope other people think the same.

dedupe on addition

You can currently do this yourself by un-shuffling then re-shuffling after your searched song is playing.

Personally, I don't want this to happen automatically. If I deliberately insert an item into the current running order, I don't want it second-guessing what I want removed from the running order because of it. What if I was deliberately building a playlist that had something specific in more than one place? Such as a deliberate track of silence at a certain point.

you put in "space between" in title search, and it shows 10 tunes that match.

If all 10 of those tracks are named the same, then it will say "space between (10)" on the screen, and when you select it, it will play all ten of those (just like you wanted). The only way that it would play just one of them is if they were all deliberately named differently.

Personally, I prefer to deliberately name all of them differently. There are so many available versions of Rush's "Closer to the Heart", for example. I do this on purpose so that they can be distinguished from each other in a search. I can't think of at time that I'd ever want to hear all the different versions queued up one right after the other.

Others have wished for the exact opposite of the thing you're wishing for: When it says "space between (10)", they want to be able to sub-select out of that list of ten. I agree with this, but only where it applies to completely different songs with the same title. For instance, I get "Mother (5)" on my player, because there are five completely different songs which happen to share the same title on my player. I could rectify this by renaming them "Mother (Cyndi Lauper)", "Mother (Pink Floyd)", "Mother (The Police)", but I just haven't bothered to do that.

since title search only works from the starting

This could be useful in some cases, but it would make other things difficult.

I had one situation where I know it would have helped me. I had a song on my player that was titled "Greetings (Deckard Cain Rap)". For those familiar with Diablo II, this was a hilarious joke song that the Blizzard people did. So one day I was talking to the son of a friend who was also a Diablo II fan, and I told him that I had this funny song he should hear. So we went out to the car and I tried to do a search for the song. Problem is, I couldn't remember that the title of the song was "Greetings", I thought the title was "Deckard Cain Rap" so I kept typing D-E-C and coming up empty. So in that case, a fuzzy search would be useful.

But you also have to understand the flip side. If the fuzzy search didn't start at the beginning title, then each keypress of the fuzzy search would return MANY MORE matches than you wanted. It would cause the fuzzy search to require more keypresses per song than it does now. Some of this could be worked around if they "ordered" the search results (beginning-of-title first), but then you would have to scroll down to find the middle-of-title songs. Still, maybe worth doing if they could get it right...

un-shuffling then re-shuffling

that would be fine and dandy if it was only one song you're queueing up. but if theres several, then if you unshuffle/reshuffle, then the songs arent guaranteed to be next in line.

If all 10 of those tracks are named the same

i think you misunderstood. i have 10 remixes of space between, all named differently --- "space between (XXXX remix)". in search, it will say "10 matches" and allow you to pick which one you want when typing in just the common part of the title. i'd like to get the ability for all 10 to be added to the playlist at once.

If the fuzzy search didn't start at the beginning title, then each keypress of the fuzzy search would return MANY MORE matches than you wanted.

i was thinking about this, and the only way to rectify is having the ability to toggle fuzzy search. its only special cases that it would be useful, so i agree that it wouldn't be practical for it to be enabled all the time.

I'm not usually one to point out funny spelling mistakes, but... Search enchantments? I know the empeg guys are wizards, so to speak, but I don't know if they're actually qualified to cast spells...

sorry, was playing EQ, and posting while resting. excuse the spelling, i'm sure that the game was still on my mind. better correct myself before the grammar police come.
enhancements would be the correct word, no?

No problem dude it's a funny misspelling if I've ever saw one. The mental picture of Peter waving a magic wand over an empeg to enchant the search feature is rather amusing.

He did just that, but the spell wore off somewhere around Beta 13.

Rob

1) dedupe on addition. if you have a playlist and you search for a song and add it, any other instance of that song in the playlist should automatically be deduped. kind of annoying when you're on a random menu x3 playlist, then you search for a song, and after it plays, 3 songs later, it plays again.

Good point. (It should only do that in shuffle mode, of course, not when Tony Fabris is carefully concocting a running order in unshuffled mode. It should probably also only erase copies between the current position and the end of the running order.)

2) an ability to add all matches so far in search. say that you want to load up every version of a certain song, including remixes, like space between by dave matthews band. you put in "space between" in title search, and it shows 10 tunes that match. no way currently to add all of them at once. you have to hit ok then go thru the process 9 more times. big time waster.

Like a lot of enchantment requests, adding this would be more about figuring out the UI than implementing the feature. Do we have any spare buttons at that point? It would be kind of neat to understand parenthesised suffixes of song names to be versions, and offer a Jupiteresque submenu with "All versions" at the top. (Even if you're only doing this to find out how the versions differ, and thus what to put in the brackets when you retag them. Although I get nil points for scrupulous accuracy, I often find I've got different mixes of the same song on different compilation albums, and arbitrarily either tag the longer one as "12in Version" or the shorter as "Radio Edit".) It would be even neater to understand ID3v2 subtitle tags as equivalent to parenthesised suffixes.

3) fuzzy searches, to take advantage of #2. might take up a lot more cpu to accomplish this, but i'm willing to wait. sometimes i just want to hear all tracks that i have which paul van dyk remixed. since title search only works from the starting, this isn't a possibility.

Fuzzy searches would be good, although the Right Way to do the Paul van Dyk thing would be for the player to understand the ID3v2 "remixed by" tag, and offer menus on it. (We'd do "composer" and so on, too.)

A sort-of related issue is how difficult it is to search for the artist U2. Try it. Hitting those two buttons narrows it down, on my player, to still several dozen artists, and you need to scroll to find U2 near the bottom. There probably needs to be a way to tell the player that you've finished entering the search string.

Perhaps there should be a 3-cycle between the current behaviour ("starts with"), the van Dyk behaviour ("contains") and the U2 behaviour ("exact match"). But that little search screen title bar will get very crowded, and we would have to find yet another button to do it on.

Peter

when Tony Fabris is carefully concocting a running order in unshuffled mode

Truth is, I never do that myself, I just know that others have talked about using the player as a DJ device...

My primary wish for v3 is for Emplode.
The ability to clone players via ethernet in either dirrection.(from low serial # to higher or high to low).

Ability to clone and synchronize

Like a lot of enchantment requests, adding this would be more about figuring out the UI than implementing the feature.

ok, i thought about this.... long-press will be key. it kind of makes sense. since OK adds the track selected, longpress-OK will add all matching tunes. also, how MODE changes enqueue/insert/etc, longpress-MORE will toggle between regular/fuzzy/exact.