Searching Melco with dCS Mosaic

[nickghough@gmail.com]

(23-07-2023 21:37)simoncn Wrote:  MinimServer is a UPnP server and it implements the UPnP specification for Search. This specification requires a search to return case-insensitive matches from the values being searched (artists, albums, etc.) that contain the search query string as specified by the user. There is no provision in this specification for ignoring punctuation, ignoring accents or treating 'and' and '&' as equivalent. Ignoring accents could return incorrect results (false positive matches) with some European languages that treat an accented version of a letter as different from the non-accented version.

Twonky is also a UPnP server. I have tested the version of Twonky installed on my Melco N1A. It implements Search in the same way as MinimServer (without ignoring punctuation or accents) but takes two or three times as long to return the search result.

MinimServer needs to run on low-powered NAS devices on a home network with limited computing power and memory and achieve good performance for search queries. Qobuz and Spotify are web-based services hosted in the cloud with access to large amounts of computing power. This is the reason why they are able to implement the kind of fuzzy matching you have described on very large databases with good response times.

Thank you for the explanation. Kind of you to reply and I appreciate you taking the time. The trouble is, what I need is a way of simply searching my music collection in a way that reveals and then allows me to play what I have stored there. I have to say I am actually totally uninterested in the technical reason for how or why it does what it does. I just want to listen to music and access it easily and this simply doesn’t work well for me. I’m sure you will tell me it’s the best there is but sadly I find it clunky and more than a bit annoying given it keeps suggesting I don’t have music I know is there but it doesn’t show it simply because I haven’t typed the exact name with all the correct punctuation. From my user perspective this just seems plain daft. Your point about it having to take note of punctuation and accents makes little sense to me - you say it would throw up false positives. Well, the way it works now continually throws up false negatives, which to me seems worse. I’d rather see a list with a few ‘errors’ in it (eg artists or albums with similar names or part names) than be told that no artist of that name can be found.