BUG: ML search doesn't search comment field

[MrSinatra]

technically speaking, this may not be a bug per se, however i do think it is not desired:

when you search your media library, winamp will not return results for search terms that only appear the the comment field of a tag.

this raises the question of what fields are in fact searched, and which ones are not?

[DJ Egg]

This is a feature, by design, not a bug.
A search for plain words will only return results from the Artist, Album & Title fields.
For other fields you would need to use the correct syntax, ie.

?comment has "awesome"
?comment = *****
?year => 2000 AND genre has rock AND comment has *****
etc etc

Refer to the Query Language Documentation in the Advanced view of the Smart View editor for more info.

[MrSinatra]

well actually, search works for the composer field as well, and i like that, (please don't change it!) i think it also does albumartist.

i don't understand why it wouldn't do the comment field tho. why not? how is it a feature that that field would be ignored by a search?

i realize smartviews could be made, but they aren't always appropriate for subbing the function of a search.

[osmosis]

artist, albumartist, album, title, filepath and composer are searched actually.. though I've always thought comment should be included in this as well to make it easier to group items.

[Batter Pudding]

The filepath search is very valuable to me...

I assume comments (and other fields) are not searched as there would be a big jump in the processing time of the search.

Remember how we used to use Steam Powered PCs back in the past... Using the search syntax means all options can be covered.

[MrSinatra]

thats only true if you have entries in the comment field. and i don't think adding one more field that is useful for putting terms you want to use to create search results lists that don't fit properly in the other fields, (like "mdw faves" or "cd 1990" or whatever), is outside the normal scope of what one would expect.

EDIT: also, my limited testing seems to indicate that the genre field IS included in search results

[Batter Pudding]

Many of my ripped CDs have details filled into the comments field from Gracenote. Sometimes these are useful, but other times I have seen huge reviews of the album plonked in there. I don't always bother to clean these out, but would not want them searched.

We are all different.

[MrSinatra]

BP, i agree with you on differences, but you could say that about other fields. the bottom line for winamp design shouldn't revolve around a given users tagging habits. winamp can't account for garbage in any tag field.

the real solution would be to include some prefs for search, and / or include an advanced search. imo, more anal users ...like me should have a way to simply include the comment field in searches.

[Batter Pudding]

First time I have seen it discussed, but what you are asking for is a dialog box in the preferences to choose what gets searched. This would then need to be translated to more complex search routines.

As an ex-programmer myself I can see the work involved there and how it will still slow down the main search. (The logic of the search will have to get filled up with "if" statements checking all the options that are in the dialog)


I also would assume that this search is not actually opening every single MP3 file, but using winamp's own media library database and searching that. If comments were to be added to that database, this could mean a huge leap in storage requirements. (And there are enough people who get upset when Winamp uses memory as it is )


Have you used the syntax DJ Egg has suggested? It looks to me like Winamp can already do what you are asking. Learning the syntax of searches is always extremely handy. Look at Google Search - that can be hopeless for many things if the advanced syntax is not used.

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

First time I have seen it discussed, but what you are asking for is a dialog box in the preferences to choose what gets searched. This would then need to be translated to more complex search routines.

As an ex-programmer myself I can see the work involved there and how it will still slow down the main search. (The logic of the search will have to get filled up with "if" statements checking all the options that are in the dialog)

i don't think its that complex. the pref would allow a user to simply specify which fields are searched, on/off. the data itself is already in the winamp DB. such a pref could lead to faster searches for users who don't need "Genre" or "Filepath" searched for example. as you said, to each his own. winamp right now searches at least 6 different items. all i'm asking is that the user be granted control over what gets searched in prefs.

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

I also would assume that this search is not actually opening every single MP3 file, but using winamp's own media library database and searching that.

thats my understanding.

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

If comments were to be added to that database, this could mean a huge leap in storage requirements. (And there are enough people who get upset when Winamp uses memory as it is )

and again, its why a pref would be appropriate.

afaik, comments and many other fields are in the DB. you can tell this b/c all the ML info is still there even when the music files aren't, (like when disconnecting a USB drive).

along the same lines, you could add prefs for what you want as a user scanned into the ML. i'm perfectly happy with it importing everything, but i would not begrudge a user who wouldn't want "Publisher" or "Category" imported for example.

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

Have you used the syntax DJ Egg has suggested? It looks to me like Winamp can already do what you are asking. Learning the syntax of searches is always extremely handy. Look at Google Search - that can be hopeless for many things if the advanced syntax is not used.

it can, but learning the syntax and/or having to use it does not interest me at all. i think its rather awkward and kinda silly. winamp has prefs for every little possible permutation on so many things, it seems like this is a rather obvious one.

[Batter Pudding]

The search syntax is there as it shows the true roots of this program. It's not silly and looks fairly standard to me. Unlike the limited GUI based programs like iTunes, the guts of Winamp are there for people to customise it to exactly suit their needs.

I'd whack your idea into the wishlist as it is not really a bug, but an extension of a feature. True, it shouldn't be too complex, but it would still eat up a lot of valuable programming time for the devs.

(Though I'd leave your import suggestion out as I think that adds a little too much complication for the potential gain. Especially for the pluggins that expect data in certain fields)

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

The search syntax is there as it shows the true roots of this program. It's not silly and looks fairly standard to me. Unlike the limited GUI based programs like iTunes, the guts of Winamp are there for people to customise it to exactly suit their needs.

i didn't mean search syntax is itself silly, i just find it silly for winamp users to be expected to learn it and use it to be able to search a universal (and useful!) field like "comments." i do LOTS of multiple searches on a 50k library. i want it to "just work," not make me work.

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

I'd whack your idea into the wishlist as it is not really a bug, but an extension of a feature. True, it shouldn't be too complex, but it would still eat up a lot of valuable programming time for the devs.

(Though I'd leave your import suggestion out as I think that adds a little too much complication for the potential gain. Especially for the pluggins that expect data in certain fields)

yeah, like i said to start it might not be a bug in the true sense of the word, but i def do think its bad behavior.

its still an open question, everything appears to be imported, but what actually is searched?

appears to be:
filepath
genre
artist
albumartist
title
album
composer

appears not to be:
year
comment

shouldn't:
disc #
track #

unknown:
publisher
category
director
producer

any others?

my main question is how and why was it determined that "comments" shouldn't be, while genre and filepath should be? seems arbitrary and inconsistent.

i agree with you, the devs have more pressing things to do, as per my sig. but i did want to document this. (and its pretty relevant, since smart view creation is currently broken)

[osmosis]

It is pretty arbitrary considering it's all saved in the ML DB as metadata anyway..

Publisher is searched.
Category, Director and Producer (ML Metadata) are not.
Orig. Artist, Copyright, Encoded, BPM (ID3v2) are also not.

(Check out the request/wish/suggestion in my sig. as well; it's a few ideas I had that would make the Smart View builder much better.)

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by DJ Egg

?comment has "awesome"

Every time I try this, Winamp crashes as soon as I type the first quotation mark. I only have one file with anything in the Comment field, as I'm testing the practicality of using this field for certain metadata. I type ?comment has " and a second later I'm looking at this:



I'm running Winamp 5.621 on Win7 Starter 32-bit.

ron

[MrSinatra]

no crash here. i suspect u have a 3rd party plugin causing it.

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

no crash here. i suspect u have a 3rd party plugin causing it.

The only plugins I had that didn't start with "Nullsoft" were a visualization and Jump To File Extra. I uninstalled the visualization and restarted Winamp, crash persisted. Uninstalled JTFE (which I don't remember installing, and I'm not even sure what it does), restarted Winamp, crash persists. There are now officially no 3rd-party plugins whatsoever.

ron

[ron2112]

This is interesting. I typed ?comment has "Okonomi" into Notepad, copied it, and pasted it into the search field. Worked perfectly. So I put my cursor at the end of the string and started backspacing. No problem until I got down to ?comment has " and it crashed.

ron

[MrSinatra]

i still can't reproduce it. try using 5.622

[ron2112]

Crash persists in 5.622.

Note: This is not a deal-breaker or anything. I don't have a pressing need to use this feature. But a crash is a crash, so... perhaps I should start a new bug thread for this, rather than continuing to post in this unrelated one?

Edit: I should also note that I've been very picky about which components I choose to install or not. Perhaps there's a combination of install options at play?

ron

[Batter Pudding]

Could the crash be coming from a track with corrupted comments? Interesting that your cut and paste experiment show the comment search working in general for you. Just failing on an "everything" search.

A boring test could be trying each letter in the alphabet in turn to see if only certain letters will fail.

?comment = "a
?comment = "b
?comment = "c

etc.

Do you have any Eastern languages in there? Japanese, Korean, etc? Maybe something breaking in unicode.

Also - have you ever tried showing Comments in the MediaLibrary view? If you turned on the comments column, does your winamp still work okay?

[MrSinatra]

BP,

those don't crash for me either.

Ron,

you should post your "one for nunz" list at this point. search the forums.

[Batter Pudding]

MrSinatra: Like you, I don't get any crashes here. Which is why I am thinking about corrupted Comments. (Have seen corrupted \ unexpected files cause problems in the past)

This seems very specific to Ron - but still something that should not crash Winamp. So a bug to be fixed.

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

A boring test could be trying each letter in the alphabet in turn to see if only certain letters will fail.

?comment = "a
?comment = "b
?comment = "c

I can't get that far. As soon as I type the first quotation mark, everything freezes. A second later, kaboom.

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

Do you have any Eastern languages in there? Japanese, Korean, etc? Maybe something breaking in unicode.

None that I am aware of.

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

Also - have you ever tried showing Comments in the MediaLibrary view? If you turned on the comments column, does your winamp still work okay?

I will try that tonight and report my results. Question: What if it crashes and I can't get back into that Smart View to remove the column? I guess I'd have to delete and re-create the Smart View? Think I'll do it on a dummy view just to be safe.

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

you should post your "one for nunz" list at this point

I will do that tonight as well.

The corrupted comment idea seems valid. One way to confirm would obviously be to select all the tracks in my library, CTRL-E, set the comment to empty, and let it all update. The only reason I might avoid that is because if it does fix the problem, we'll never know what caused it in the first place. But since this doesn't seem to be a widespread issue, maybe it's worth it just to nail it down and move on. I only have one file with a comment that I've entered myself; apart from that, I've tried to keep that field empty on all files. Still, you never know what might have snuck in.

thanks!
ron

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

Also - have you ever tried showing Comments in the MediaLibrary view? If you turned on the comments column, does your winamp still work okay?

Works fine.

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

you should post your "one for nunz" list at this point.

Installed Winamp plug-in list
Generated by 'One for Nunz v5.11' on 11/14/2011 at 8:27:03 PM

<< Winamp Information >>

Winamp.ini path is: C:\Users\Ron\AppData\Roaming\Winamp\Winamp.ini
Plug-in directory is: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins
Visualisation directory is: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins
DSP directory is: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins
Skin directory is: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Skins
Language Pack directory is: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Lang

Using Winamp version: 5.62 (Build 3189 FINAL_2011_1026_181741)
Winamp Elevator build: Build 3189 FINAL_2011_1026_181741

Current skin: Big Bento (Modern skin)
Sonic Burning Engine is not installed

<< OS Information >>

Running on: Windows 7 (Service Pack 1)
Memory available: 0.99 GB


<< Input plug-ins >>

Nullsoft CD Plug-in (MusicID 2.6) v3.92 [in_cdda.dll]
Nullsoft FLAC Decoder v2.4 [in_flac.dll]
Nullsoft MIDI Player v3.5 [in_midi.dll]
Nullsoft Module Decoder v2.87 [in_mod.dll]
Nullsoft MPEG Audio Decoder v4.97 [in_mp3.dll]
Nullsoft MP4 Demuxer v2.5 [in_mp4.dll]
Nullsoft Vorbis Decoder v1.59 [in_vorbis.dll]
Nullsoft Waveform Decoder v3.19 [in_wave.dll]
Nullsoft Windows Media Decoder v3.6 [in_wm.dll]

<< Output plug-ins >>

Nullsoft DirectSound Output v2.6 (d) [out_ds.dll] [active]

<< Visualisation plug-ins >>

No plug-ins of this type are installed

<< DSP plug-ins >>

No plug-ins of this type are installed

<< General Purpose plug-ins >>

Nullsoft Modern Skins Support v1.42 [gen_ff.dll]
Nullsoft Global Hotkeys v1.9 [gen_hotkeys.dll]
Jump To File Extra v1.2.4 (Build 1159) [gen_jumpex.dll]
Nullsoft Media Library v3.61 [gen_ml.dll]
One for Nunz v5.11 [gen_nunzio.dll]

<< Media Library plug-ins >>

Nullsoft Now Playing v3.9 [ml_nowplaying.dll]
Nullsoft Local Media v3.03 [ml_local.dll]
Nullsoft Playlists v1.2 [ml_playlists.dll]
Nullsoft Winamp Add-ons v1.1 [ml_addons.dll]
Nullsoft Online Services v1.67 [ml_online.dll]
Nullsoft Podcasts v1.29 [ml_wire.dll]
Nullsoft Device Manager v1.0 [ml_devices.dll]
Nullsoft Portable Music Player Support v1.31 [ml_pmp.dll]
Nullsoft Bookmarks v1.2 [ml_bookmarks.dll]
Nullsoft History v1.9 [ml_history.dll]
Nullsoft Downloads v1.01 [ml_downloads.dll]
Nullsoft Playlist Generator v1.7 [ml_plg.dll]

<< Portable Media Player plug-ins >>

Nullsoft Creative NJB Plug-in v0.54 [pmp_njb.dll]
Nullsoft PlaysForSure Plug-in v0.95 [pmp_p4s.dll]
Nullsoft USB Device Plug-in v1.4 [pmp_usb.dll]

<< Encoder plug-ins >>

No plug-ins of this type are installed

<< Summary of system components (*.w5s) >>
(These are not included in the plug-in counts below)
aacdec.w5s (1063kb)
adpcm.w5s (15kb)
albumart.w5s (22kb)
auth.w5s (170kb)
bmp.w5s (19kb)
devices.w5s (43kb)
dlmgr.w5s (16kb)
filereader.w5s (14kb)
gif.w5s (19kb)
gracenote.w5s (16kb)
h264.w5s (641kb)
jnetlib.w5s (609kb)
jpeg.w5s (151kb)
mp4v.w5s (197kb)
ombrowser.w5s (294kb)
pcm.w5s (12kb)
playlist.w5s (82kb)
png.w5s (101kb)
tagz.w5s (21kb)
theora.w5s (52kb)
timer.w5s (34kb)
vlb.w5s (121kb)
vp6.w5s (177kb)
vp8.w5s (139kb)
xml.w5s (88kb)

<< Summary of all dlls in the root winamp folder (*.dll) >>
(These are not included in the plug-in counts below)
elevatorps.dll (45kb) [not loaded]
ijl10.dll (134kb) [not loaded]
libFLAC.dll (133kb) [not loaded]
libmp4v2.dll (176kb) [not loaded]
libsndfile.dll (247kb) [loaded]
nde.dll (77kb) [loaded]
nsutil.dll (401kb) [loaded]
tataki.dll (82kb) [loaded]
zlib.dll (46kb) [loaded]

<< Summary of all dlls in the plugins\gracenote folder (*.dll) >>
(These are not included in the plug-in counts below)
CDDBControlWinamp.dll (1577kb) [not loaded]
CddbMusicIDWinamp.dll (905kb) [not loaded]
CddbPlaylist2Winamp.dll (1101kb) [not loaded]

<< Summary of installed plug-ins >>

9 Input plug-ins installed
1 Output plug-in installed
0 Visualisation plug-in installed
0 DSP plug-in installed
5 General Purpose plug-ins installed
12 Media Library plug-ins installed
3 Portable Media Player plug-ins installed
0 Encoder plug-in installed

Total: 30 plug-ins installed

[MrSinatra]

if just typing a question mark crashes your winamp, it has nothing to do with the comment field imo.

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

if just typing a question mark crashes your winamp, it has nothing to do with the comment field imo.

Typing a question mark does not crash Winamp. Typing this does:

?comment has "

FYI, I posted my One-For-Nunz list in this thread but the post has not shown up yet (it said it needed to be approved by a mod). Hopefully the post will appear in the near future, otherwise I'll try to repost it.

ron

[MrSinatra]

what about when u try "artist" or "album" instead of "comment"?

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

what about when u try "artist" or "album" instead of "comment"?

?artist and ?album work perfectly.

I'm still not seeing that post, so here's my One For Nunz list:

http://www.the-mosi.net/my_plugin_list.txt

thanks!
ron

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by Batter Pudding

Also - have you ever tried showing Comments in the MediaLibrary view? If you turned on the comments column, does your winamp still work okay?

Ron?

also, its important to note that winamp doesn't show multiple frames. itunes for example, will "hide" soundcheck info into the comments frame, it hacks it.

if u do want to find what is causing this, and i hope you do, you might need to do your ML in chunks and check files with www.mp3tag.de/en

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by MrSinatra

if u do want to find what is causing this, and i hope you do, you might need to do your ML in chunks and check files with www.mp3tag.de/en

Indeed I do! I already use mp3tag for all my tagging needs, so no learning curve there.

Now... in the spirit of not just fixing, but identifying the cause of, the problem... I'm thinking of the best way to proceed. Perhaps I'll start by simply reading the files in chunks, and see if any of them turn up with a comment field. I've tried to be diligent about keeping that field empty, but things do sneak in. I'll make a list of those that have comments; hopefully it will be a short list. Then I'll backup those files, and start removing the comments one by one. With any luck, I'll find one that makes the problem go away. Then I'll post a link to it here for confirmation.

Sound like a plan?

ron

[ron2112]

Originally Posted by ron2112

Now... in the spirit of not just fixing, but identifying the cause of, the problem... I'm thinking of the best way to proceed.

I re-thought my earlier plan a bit, and did the following instead.

First I cleared my media library entirely. Then I started adding artist folders to the library in batches. During this process, I discovered that this feature (highlight multiple folders > right-click > Add To Winamp's Media Library) is rather buggy. Sometimes folders would add to the library, other times not. Sometimes they would enqueue, other times not. Not wanting to miss any folders, I cleared the media library and started over.

I started adding folders to my Watch Folders list, doing re-scans each time. Then I would try ?comment = ". Each time it worked fine, until I had the entire drive loaded back into the media library.

So I cleared the library again, and did a full re-scan of the entire drive. Once everything was loaded back in, I tried the comment search again... worked like a charm.

So the good news is, I'm not crashing anymore. The bad news is, I'm unable to report what might have caused it in the first place. I didn't change any files, so I'm at a loss to explain it.

ron