Development has been slow on the Home Audio system lately.  Which isn’t to say that it’s not getting used; rather, I’ve been busy doing other things – some technology related, some not – and the system is quite mature at this stage after many years of development.

Nonetheless, ideas pop up every now and then and they’re compelling enough that it’s worth it to dust off the code and Make It Happen(tm).

Such is the case with “universal search”.  Regular followers of this blog will know that the search function is already quite powerful, so much so in fact that you can get lost in the features – and possibly become turned off from search completely if you’re trying to do something simple.

It dawned on me the other day that it would be really nice if I could simply search for a string without having to specify the field to search on.  So for example, I want to search for “lounge”, but I don’t necessarily want to give the system any more information than that.  With “universal search”, the system will search:

• artist
• title
• category
• genres
• year

… for your particular search text.  You enter your text once and the system searches all of these fields.

In hindsight – and from your perspective – this is one of those “well duh!” sort of things.  But again, it’s easy to get caught up in gee-whiz features and completely neglect the stuff that seems obvious.  So pardon moi, but at least the feature is there now <g>