Perhaps optional, it would be nice if search covered file names as well.

With certain collections, keeping every track tagged with the correct artist is unfeasible (like my "90's Dance" genre with ~200 artists and ~300 tracks).

I would like to throw away the artist information of such collections and pool them under a "Various Artists" heading, but I would also like to be able to find those tracks again easily, by searching. Since the artist name makes no trouble in the file name, one could keep it there and re-find it by searching -- if search included filenames.

:-*

The SimpleSearch widget, that is used in most layout, can be configured to search filenames and other fields by clicking on its left icon. If you can't find it, it's a text entry that contains an icon at each extremity.

About your ~200 artists from ~300 tracks you may be interested in a feature of the FilterPanes (the widget that displays the list of artist/album/...) if you show the button bar (you can show/hide it from the right click menu) it contains a number entry that, if you set it to for example 5, will make the FilterPane only show artist/album/... that contain at least 5 songs.
This is useful to hide minor artists. Thinking about it, it could group these artists into a "minor artists" row rather that hiding them completely.

Perfect!
I have been using gmb for a couple of years and I had no idea I could affect the searches that way! Thank you!

I have filtered out the minor artists in the way you suggested -- simply great!

I think making a "minor artists" artist would be nice -- then one could always select that, and in a filterPnae to the right also showing artists, one could then have a lower filter number set there and thereby re-find them.

Hello,

I just found this topic while checking if there's a way in gmusicbrowser to find files by file name.

I don't understand why current code does not include file names in search by default. It is a must when there are files without a tag, and it should not hurt if all files have tags.

I know what to do thanks to this post, but be aware that nothing invites user to click on the magnifier, making the fix unreachable to user (as testified above by LondonJohnny).

Only people that have :

  • a perfectly ordered and tagged collection (tags for all files, all informations in tag)
  • and no actual information in path or file name
would be happy with a search that does not include dir/file match in search.

For all the others, that is nearly everyone, current behavior of not including file name in search will never find many files, which is not what the user expects. See Principle of least astonishment.

In other words, while current feature set is capable, it fails on the "sensible defaults" criterion.

Changing the default search behavior will enhance the user experience for many users a bit.  :)

Thank you for your attention.