Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?
Local and Qobuz
Screenshot of import settings
Description of the issue
I listen to an artist that is primarily live recordings via local files and Qobuz.
The local files are unidentified since there is no match.
For both local and Qobuz the album title has the date of the performance. For Qobuz the original and release date does not align with the date of the show (I.e a 1997 show can have original and release date of 2002). Qobuz may also have the album title formatted as yy-mm-dd or yyyy-mm-dd or mm-dd-yy.
Let’s use 1997 as an example.
If I go to the artist page > discography > search “1997” I get:
Album titles with 1997 in it but also albums that just have 19 97 in it (I.e. 1999-07-31).
Is there anyway to do an exact match when searching?
Is there a solution aside from going into 2000 albums and adding release dates to allow for focusing on release date?
If these albums are in your library, the closest approximation would be to navigate to the Albums page and use the Focus “Performer” filtering to narrow down the desired artist.
From there, sort by Album Title. If these albums largely conform to YY-MM or YYYY-MM, then the alphabetical sort should function loosely as a release timeline.
This doesn’t address two key concerns from your original post:
numeric strings in search will still be interpreted as positional wildcards, ie. “1997” can return “19” and"97". This is inherent to search autocorrect and spelling sensitivity - perhaps @zenit can comment in more detail, but I’m not positive there is a precise workaround.
This workaround will not help with albums formatted MM-YY-DD if they are in the minority compared to the YY-MM-DD and YYYY-MM-DD format, for purely alphabetical reasons.
Outside of that, this would likely be a popular feature request if you posted it to Feature Suggestions for voting.
If you don’t mind, what is the name of the artist in question?
Thanks yeah the alphabetical just doesn’t cut it since the year can be in the beginning or end and if numbers can’t be searched then everything is jumbled in.
Phish is the artist. They do a lot of current releases, i.e. shows the next day and then archival releases, i.e. 90s, 2000s concerts released today.
The best you can do is what you’re trying - switching the Discography view to Recordings → further Sort by Recording Date, then using the Focus search to refine a search for any specific year. This won’t give an album-level result, but it’s perhaps a more granular search than the Album view offers. The search will still match to fields matching the input string, including album title.
Hi @Tim_Coppola. FWIW, I think that you’d get better and more immediate results (and better “workflow”) using the filter box on the Discography page rather than search:
Thanks, I wasn’t sure what you meant by filter, but yes usually I go there and then search. Please see how it works when local files are included. Is there anyway to do an “exact” search similar to google search functionality of adding quotes around the search term to get exact string?
Hey @Tim_Coppola, thanks for bringing this up. For local content, we’ve had a few issues with fuzzy search that might have impeded finding content based on your exact query, in particular if there’s lots of similar matches. We have pushed a few fixes that should improve on that in the upcoming release(s). The search engine won’t treat content in quotes as “exact” matches, but it might improve the result if your content contains quotes as well.
I’ll open another ticket for a bit more sensitive treatment of numbers, as they are being corrected currently as well → if you search for 2005 you might also get 2015. The only thing that can help at the moment when using the search box itself is to add some more info about the album in the search query.
EDIT: just to be clear I’m talking here about the main search box behavior on the top right, not the discography filter
