
This is an excerpt from the main AMPlay documentation.

* 3.2 The Search Window:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Enter the text you wish to search for in the box at the top, then
choose from the menus;

- Whether you are searching for track(s), album(s) or artist(s).

- Whether you want to search all tracks, albums or artists known to
  AMPlay, or to limit the search to just those items that pass through
  your current filter settings.

- What attribute of the track album or artist to include as part of the
  search. Some standard common ones are included here - the raw path to
  the file on disk, the track name, album name or artist name. The
  'complete name' is the track, album and artist name combined.
  Finally, for more advanced searches, you can specify a macro to be
  expanded to look in.

- Whether to apply the action to items that match your search term,
  those that don't match it, or just the first match.

- What action to perform on the items that match.


There are also options of;

- Performing a raw search. Raw in this case refers to whether to
  perform any text conversions before searching. E.g. if a track is on
  a lanman98 filesystem, and contains ;= as part of the filename,
  AMPlay will convert this to a @ character. These conversions take
  processing time, so by performing a raw search, performance is
  considerably improved. However, note that including characters such
  as @ in your search term will not find a match, unless you turn raw
  search off again. (Path to file is always raw, as conversions are
  never applied to this under any circumstance).

- Converting spaces in your search term to hardspaces before searching
  (ordinary space characters are not valid in RISC OS filenames, but
  are generally replaced with hard spaces by either the application or
  the OS. This means that hard spaces tend to show up in names derived
  from the path to the file).

- Making the search case sensitive.

Click Search to perform the search.

The remainder of the window may be used to define details about the
chosen action. It will be greyed out unless the relevant action is
chosen.

Actions:
~~~~~~~~

- Create Menu will create a goto menu style menu out of the items
  selected by the search. As with a goto menu, a select click on an
  item will play it now, an adjust click will queue it for later.

- Queue. This just puts the results straight into the queue, for
  playing later.

- Play. As above, but also starts playing them now.

- Remove from database. This removes the items entirely.

- Remove from history. This removes any references to the items from
  the track history.

- Refresh time. This causes AMPlay to refresh its idea of what the
  track duration is.

- Export. This will pop up a save box to save the results. See the help
  on the export window for various formats in which the results can be
  exported.

- Set filter. This requires further details to be set - the area below
  the action selector will allow you to select which filter to set, and
  what value to set it to.

- Change relative track volume. Again, more details required. You can
  select a relative track volume from -63 to +63. The 'set' tick box is
  used to indicate whether you wish to set the items to the value you
  specify, or whether you wish it to be added to the existing value.

- Change random weighting. As above, but for the random weighting.

- Set link to next. The details section allows you to specify what to
  set it to. i.e. this action can turn link to next off as well as on,
  depending on the tick box under details.

- Set ignore uniqueness. As above, but for the ignore uniqueness flag.


Notes;
~~~~~~

- The menu by the search text allows you to retrieve the 16 most recent
  searches.

- Although the search interface allows you to search for tracks, albums
  or artists, some of the actions apply to attributes that exist only
  at the track level. Relative track volume, for example, has no real
  meaning at the album or artist level - it just knows about the
  average of the tracks it contains.

  If you search for artists or albums, the action will apply to the
  artist or album if it is possible to do so, or to all the tracks
  within that artist or album if the action in question is one that can
  only be applied to tracks.

- Relative track volume on tracks is constrained between -63 and +63.
  Similarly, random weighting must be in the range -7 to +7. If, as a
  result of a search operation, the action would push the value outside
  that range, it will be silently kept within the allowed range. No
  error is reported.


* 3.2.1 Search Tips:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Performance varies depending on the amount of text processing
  involved, and how much work is involved in performing the action. A
  case sensitive search is significantly faster - in many cases if you
  wish to search on 'something', and do not know whether it has a
  leading capital letter, a case sensitive search with 'omething' as
  the search term will be faster (but be careful that it doesn't match
  additional items).

  Raw searches are a lot faster.

  Track, album and artist names are slower. 'Complete' is much slower
  still (because it involves three separate expansions). Entering your
  own macro will take as long as the complexity of that macro involves.
  There is no extra overhead just because it's a manually entered
  macro - entering %tn is exactly the same as selecting 'Track name'
  from the menu.

- Complete name is actually an expansion of "%an:%bn:%tn". You can
  therefore search for "some:text", which would match a track where the
  track name starts with "text" and the album name ends with "some".

- As an example of a custom macro, using %td, and searching for "10:"
  will find all tracks that are between 10:00 and 10:59 minutes long.

- The search looks for the search text anywhere in the expanded string.
  If, e.g. you're searching for 'cde', then a track called 'abcdef'
  will be counted as a match. If you want to ensure a match at the
  start or end of a name, use a custom macro, and prefix/suffix both it
  and your search term with a character that is unlikely to occur in
  real tracks. e.g. use a custom macro of "$%tn", and search for
  "$cde". This will cause the above example to no longer match.


* 3.2.2 Quick Goto:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If the search window is opened with an Adjust-click, the following
options are selected;

Look for: Set to tracks, albums or artists, based on the current
selection level.

Apply to: First Match only.

Action: Queue

This allows you to easily enter a search string to quickly queue
another item of the same type that is currently playing.

________________________________________________________________________
Copyright  2008 Mike Sandells, mike@mikejs.com
Last Modified: 30.05.2008