Wayne's dashboard

I do a lot of random searches within my music. Right now I can only do a general search and any possible hits are included in the results. Which, ya know, is cool and all. But I'd like the ability to make more refine searches without resorting to a smartlist. Smartlists are great for what they do, but they're not really "spontaneous" with the clicking and the naming and the selecting of features, etc... All that for a playlist that I don't even want to keep.

Plus I'm really, really, lazy.

So, in what ways can we enhance the search bar without it getting in the way of how it currently works?

This is what I've been able to come up with so far:

Rating: The "*" symbol isn't used in most track/album/artist names so why not have it represent the Star Rating Songbird currently uses? The default would be all ratings, then with each * typed it restricts the results to that rating or higher. Type "happy *****" and get the results for "happy" filtered down to 5 star ratings only.

Time: Again, the ":" is little used, but it is for denoting time. HH:MM:SS So following the pattern set above, if I type 2:00 it would restrict to songs longer then 2 min's. Which is great, but sometimes you want it the other way. So how about putting a "-" at the beginning to invert the search? Type "Iron Butterfly -5:00" would definitely filter out In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. There are also situations where you'd like a range of times. So let's reuse the "-" so we could type in 2:00-5:00 as a range. Type "jazz 2:00-5:00" to get jazz songs on the short side of things without being too short.

Year: This is a slightly more difficult thing to do, in a way. Years are 4 digit numbers, 1976, which is rare for a name but not unheard of. (I'm looking at you Smashing Pumpkins.) But once again, a range could be useful. "1959-1975" could give you all the songs published during the Vietnam War. But there's also a shortcut we could use for year. Music styles can alter dramatically based on era, The 60's, The 70's, etc. So let "60's" and "70's" and all the others act as shortcuts for the decades. Type "jazz 50's" to get all the results for jazz within 1950 to 1959. (Or should that be 1951 to 1960?)

So, a quick example of everything together. "Elton John *** 70's -6:00" That would give me everything by Elton John released in the 70's that I've rated 3 stars or higher and less then 6 min's. And on the fly I could replace Elton John with Rolling Stones without having to mess with the settings of a smartlist.

Yay!

As for search terms that are currently used, I'd also like to be able to "invert" them with a "-" in front. Such as "home -country" would at the very least filter out the genre "Country" like a Google search.

Keep up the good work (and faster release cycles!),
Wayne

Interesting plugin appeared today for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/t...

It takes your library from iTunes and displays it as a AJAXy page on your blog. The author has an example here: http://yannickcorner.nayanna.biz/my-m...

This is a nifty little trick but I get the feeling that more could be done with it. Tho' I'm not totally sure what yet.

What if you could back up your library to your blog in real time? Playcounts, ratings, etc always up to date and maybe shared across machines (home and work for example?).

How about linking Songbird to the "web library's" of friends to compare ratings or swap songs/playlists? rstevens of DieselSweeties ( http://www.dieselsweeties.com/blog/?p... ) sometimes hosts collective playings of albums with people getting together on twitter to talk about it - maybe Songbird could use a WordPress blog or Twitter to keep everyone in sync? I admit it's a limited use idea at the moment, but who knows what people could do with it.

A lot of Songbird's "social" integration has been along the big sites, like Last.fm, it might be interesting to see what can be done on a more personal scale.

I'm not really sure that these are good ideas, but if anyone else has something to add I'd be interested in hearing it.

I've been playing with Boxee ( http://www.boxee.tv ) the past few days and I'm rather impressed with the software. It's still early but it has a lot of promise. Much like the first time I tried Songbird.

So far I've been able to import all of my music and it's nice being able to browse on the big TV.

But... All the work I've put into my library in Songbird is unavailable to Boxee. Song ratings, Playlists, SmartPlaylists, etc...

Some things are not replicated in Boxee such as playlists and the rating system boils down to Yea or Nay. I imagine that's partly due to the interface, imagine manipulating Songbird with nothing but a remote control - not a lot of fun to build a playlist that way.

Plus playcounts and "last played" metadata become, effectively, incorrect in Songbird. If I spent the day listening to a album through Boxee any Songbird Smart Playlists that avoid recently played songs are going to backfire - at least from my perspective.

What I'm basically suggesting is a interface that other programs can interact with and update the Songbird library. Let Songbird do the heavy lifting for other programs when it comes to music management.

For anything that might interact with your music library it should be able to go though Songbird just to cut down on trouble and duplication of effort.

Should I have to import all my music *again* for Boxee? Should my already created playlists be unavailable? Should I have to re-rate my albums?

Hell, it's 2009. If I can't have my flying car can I at least have my software working together for me?

I was playing around with global hot-keys and noticed something missing that I'd like to see there.

How about adding a way to have Songbird to stop playing after the current track? Instead of just stopping in the middle of a song, let it finish first.

Winamp use to have this feature (the last time I used it...) you could right click on the Play/Pause button and select "Stop after current track" or something like that.

I can't think of a better way to implement it into Songbird other then to do the same thing. But I'm open to suggestions. And of course, I'd like it to be selectable as a global hotkey. (actually, there's a lot I'd like to see added to that)

Also, while we're on song stopping, how about an option to have the music fade in/out when paused and unpaused. It's a little less jarring when you have the speakers up on bust. ;)