Easier matching songs trick

[Phil Smith]

I see what you're saying if we get a lot more feedback on this we'll consider enhancing it. Currently a work around would be to use the Single Index System when possible(New Real Books being the exception) meaning one index for Bb, C, Eb, and bass clef books.

[dbrewer42]

I see what you're saying if we get a lot more feedback on this we'll consider enhancing it. Currently a work around would be to use the Single Index System when possible(New Real Books being the exception) meaning one index for Bb, C, Eb, and bass clef books.

Consider this a vote for an enhanced version of this feature. I imagine that if you just changed the song title you are searching for to the title of the song in the index, less any combination of punctuation and "Eb" or "Bb" from the end of the title, that would go a long way toward making this match cleanly.

Something like this applied to the title before it is used for matching should do the trick. Regular expressions for the win!

Code: Select all

s/\W*(Eb|Bb)\W*$//

[Phil Smith]

Having thought a great deal about this and the original reason for adding this feature, filtering out characters isn't a great idea primarily because it makes the feature less flexible. There could exist users that require those characters to be there so that they can pull up the (Eb), -Bb, -Rev01 or whatever version of the song they have in their music player. I know you'd counter that argument by saying one could add a setting to turn that feature on or off.

[dbrewer42]

As a programmer myself, I know that avoiding settings bloat is also a valuable goal if you want to focus limited development time on more widely used features. Thanks to your help yesterday I was able to get the single index system working with my own set of books, and as a result the song matching is also working for me most of the time too.

The main problem I see is that there is some percentage of songs that are just never going to match up unless you explicitly rename songs or mess with the titles in the index. A good example of this is songs where part of the title has been moved to the end to make it show up in the right order in the index. In the Classic Real Book, for instance, we have "Night Has A Thousand Eyes (The)". The MP3s I have for this song are titled "The Night Has A Thousand Eyes". As a result they don't match up.

I'm wondering if there might be some kind of solution that could fix both the issue I just mentioned and the removal of the key postfix text. Maybe if the song matching feature did some kind of more flexible matching rather than an exact string match? I'm not an iOS developer myself so I don't know what kinds of search options are available on that platform, but it occurs to me that it might be neat if the first time you used the matching it did a search (which would return more results than it does not because it would be less precise), and then you could pick which track would be the default one for future playback. That would also deal with the case where you have 3 or 4 songs with the same title but you want to set it up so that one of them is the one that always gets played...

At this point I'm more or less just throwing ideas out there, though. I've gotten past the main thing that I was struggling with and I'm already a happy user of your software. Thanks!