search

timusus / Shuttle

Shuttle Music Player
Other
2.2k stars 481 forks source link

Artists and albums should not take up multiple screenfuls of search results #418

Open stkAnon opened 5 years ago

stkAnon commented 5 years ago

When searching for a song with a somewhat generic title in a large music library, the results for Artists and Albums can go on for many pages before you even get to the "Songs" section.

For example, in order to find the song "Life", by Ludovico Einaudi, in my music library with the search term "life", I have to scroll past a full five and a half screens' worth of results for artists and albums first.

This is arguably a feature request rather than a bug report, but I suspect that most people using the search are probably looking for songs, so I don't think it makes sense for songs to often be buried so far down.

Suggested solutions:

Buttons to jump to each section Pros: -Keeps all results and versatility. Cons: -Clutter.

Hard cap on number of results per section. Possible implementation: -Cull both album results and artist results each to their first elements that can fit in two thirds of a screen. Pros: -Simplicity. Cons: -Arbitrary. -May make certain artists and albums impossible to find with their most fitting search terms.

Increase search similarity threshold with more results. Possible implementation: -Cull the lengths of both album results and artist results each to the square root of their original lengths. -Perform the equivalent transformation during the compilation of the results itself. (Preferred, so equal titles get treated equally.) Pros: -Flexible.

stkAnon commented 5 years ago

Since the search algorithm seems to effectively prioritize individual words differently based off of their position in the string, this is a particularly big issue with songs whose names begin with "The".

Songs such as "The Truth" by Foster the People, "The One" by Kodaline, "The War" by Angels and Airwaves, and "The Wheel" by Jerry Garcia are all almost impossible to search for in my music library, as they all require you to scroll past 20-50+ pages of album and artist results before you even get to the results for tracks.

timusus commented 5 years ago

The UI could definitely be improved, but it's not something on my radar at the moment. Definitely will keep this in mind for future UI updates though.