Hello,

This has been bugging me for several releases now, so here we go:

eJukebox has some grey areas when it comes to sorting out artists and their albums. Note the following examples are real, and may contain some embarassing music selections

If I choose "View Artists Albums" and the artist is "EXTREME", I will get the EXTREME albums and the Vanilla Ice album "To The Extreme". However if an Extreme song is playing and I click on "Extreme" above the album image in Now Playing, only Extreme albums appear. If I then Quick Pick "All Songs by Extreme", no Vanilla Ice, so the problem here is only in "View Artists Albums".

Moving on to the artist "LIVE"... If through the ARTISTS menus I select "LIVE", included is the artist "Dead Or Alive". If I Quick Pick "All Songs by Live", then "Dead or Alive" makes the playlist too. If I'm playing a LIVE song and choose "View Artists Albums" I get EVERY ALBUM in my collection that has the word "live" in the album title, or any song.

Now, If I am playing a "Dead or Alive" song and I "View Artists Albums", I get Dead or Alive's "Youthquake" and of course, Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" that has the song "Wanted Dead or Alive" in it. If I'm playing a Bon Jovi song, and "View Artists Albums", all I get is Bon Jovi.

I could keep these examples going until Kevin Bacon eventually was linked to this mess, but I think I can sum it up as follows:

View Artist Albums - Should choose by EXACT artist name, but also includes albums in which the artist's name is also PART OF another artist's name, album name or song name.

Quick Pick "All Songs by [artist]" - Should choose by EXACT artist name, but also includes albums in which the artist's name is also part of another artist's name.

Selecting an artist throught the ARTIST tab - Should choose by EXACT artist name, but also includes albums in which the artist's name is also part of another artist's name.

I *think* this covers it.

Thanks,
Rich

I also agree with Rich here. I understand the reason eJukebox selects the way it does, but it would be nice to have an option to choose either a strict or loose selection mode. The loose mode perhaps being as it is now, and the strict mode always looking for exact matches on selections.

Some examples as to why I think such a mode would be useful.

1. Selecting Peter Gabriel's album "So" for viewing, or playing, always results in the view window and playlist queue by being populated with every album, song, or artist that has the letter formation "so" in it. I see all the albums by collective SOul, the best of van morisSOn, iSObel by bjork, and etc... all together it pulls 236 songs when I try to hear this album.

I know I have some other examples, will edit post as I remember them.

I tried to step around the Peter Garbriel "So" issue by renaming the album to "[So]", however as soon as i typed the first "[" into the eJukebox editor, the enter application locked up, and the buttons in the editor had diagonal lines draw through them. I had to open task manager and kill eJukebox to shut it down. I tried a second time to make sure it wasn't a freak occurence, and the same behaviour was displayed. Is "[" an illegal character? If so, it seems as if there should be a more graceful way to handle it's being typed.

I suggess adding a filter that pick up ENTIRE words i.e.:
- Cold, Coldplay: search on the word "Cold" will give only the entire word Cold and not Coldplay
- Korn, Korn & The Dust Brothers: search on the word "Korn" will give the entire words Korn + Korn & The Dust Brothers. It's good to have both because a same word means in almost any case it's the same artist.
- M: search on the word "M" will give only the entire word M and not in my case 1235 other songs containing the letter M!

However, I hope that will not too increase the searchs time...

Pirk

I just wanted to add that the official "Search" feature is not a problem with me if it returns results from any catagory with a partial match. The strict-loose search option is a great idea though!

However, I feel that the areas addressed in my original post, such as "View Artists Albums" - "Quick Pick All Songs by [artist]" and "Selecting an artist throught the ARTIST tab" should always return exact matches.

Thanks,
Rich

Hey! Bosh, Rich,

I've found a solution that provide some accurate searchs on my albums from the artist list:
I've noticed I don't have so many cases of wrong results than before. In fact it's since I put the year into my album names, i.e.:
So --> 1986 - So
Us --> 1992 - Us
Up --> 2002 - Up
...
That prevent all wrong results concerning album searchs.

The only cases that cause some problems concern some ARTIST names with only one letter: A, M. If I search the albums of these artist, I get a list of 3515 songs with the letter A in their Artist name and 1235 songs with the letter M.
In general way that work very well with the year into the album names. Furthermore, I get an interesting and exclusive additionnal info displayed in all eJ lists: the release year of each album.
But if it could be possible to get exact match whitout this trick that would be even better!

Concerning the official search, you are right Rich it's not a problem if it return results with a partial match as that is a general search. My request was not especially pertinent, sorry.

Pirk

I've found also a solution for my artists A and M by renaming like this:
A --> A(Artiste)
M --> M(Mathieu Chedid)

I think it's a simple and logical solution to get round this problem.

Pirk

I have the same frustration with selections of "All Songs by ____" returning more than the desired result. I would suggest that when the user clicks on an Artist or Album name to select all songs by that name, the interpretation should be STRICT and only contain the exact text that was selected.

If I want all songs by the Artist "Live" added to my playlist, I can't because "Dead or Alive" also gets added.

Even worse, I have an album "V" by the group Spock's Beard, when I try to add "All Songs in V" I get 40+ songs by various artists that happen to have a "V" in their album name!!

I hope Audiosoft will consider fixing this, I view it as a user interface bug.

Thanks!

The reason we do not want to make it be entirely STRICT / EXACT with the results is so that when a one of the songs has a slightly mispelled artist or album name that song does not get excluded. That way you can see the misspelled artist or album name in the results and use the editor to fix it. Otherwise you would never see the song with the misspelling in the results.

However, you are correct that it should not generate more songs for names like "V" or "live", etc. So what we will do for the version after v3.23 is restrict it to STRICT / EXACT results only when the album or artist name is a single word - in order to avoid this problem.

I saw that you allowed exact matching for one word artists like "Live", it does work in the next version and is much better, thanks!

However, it is a larger issue that causes serious problems for me to navigate the jukebox. Here are some more examples:

While trying to play "The Men" album by the group "The Men", clicking on the Artist name of the album cover itself also returns "Men at Work", "Felix Mendelssohn" and "Liquid Tension Experiement" even while clicking on the actual album cover or doing right-click "Quick Pick - All Songs in The Men". I CAN"T PLAY THIS ALBUM without individually clicking every track.

Clicking on "R.E.M." in the Top Artists list finds 294 songs in my database with the only correlation I can see that there is an 'R' an 'E' and an 'M' in each artist name: "Sky Cries Mary", "Extreme", "Emerson, Lake & Palmer", "Dream Theater", "Crash Test Dummies", and so on.

Artist "The Who" also finds songs with "who" in the title.

Personally I'd rather it be exact all the time, but I understand the desire to have it loose for other people. Is there anyway we could get a checkbox to choose strict vs. loose?

Rather than trying to come up with some clunky solution (like making it exact for 1 word titles only) why you offer an 'exact match only' option in the config and let the user pick?

Yes, this has been requested many times before and would be the most desired feature for many many users here.

Unfortunately, Audiosoft really doesn't seem to want to address it, whether it is for technical or for design reasons I don't know.

The same matching problem makes the Genre selection impossible to use when selecting "Rock" -- When I select "Rock" it returns any genre that contains "Rock" in the name. That's 4300 out of 6200 songs in my collection that contain Rock in the genre tag, not just the 891 tracks marked "Rock" (it even shows that in the drop down), the rest are split by various "Alternative Rock", "Blues Rock", "Classic Rock", "Progressive Rock" and other labels.

Please fix this! I really like the idea of a config switch to force exact matching for those of us that want it.

Hi all,

I agree bnylin, search results in the genre list between rock tendencies are completely... unusable!

I think searchs performed in eJ are only based on a sequence of letters recognition like that could be done by any word processing. I THINK Audiosoft "simply" use a pre-programmed basic search function applied on the entire database. An exact matching result needs to program some more complex algorithms to differentiate "Rock" and "Alternative Rock". Also, if the searchs was performed only inside the genre list when you search a genre, the artist list when you search an artist, the album list when you search a album... that could gives real exact matchs.

Hopefully Audiosoft finally takes care of these considerations!

Thanks.