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   Explaining the Hits and Misses in iTunes 11 Searching

   Michael E. Cohen

   Back in the days before iTunes 11, the search box at the top right of
   the main iTunes window would search only the list at which you were
   looking. For example, if the search field in my iTunes window were set
   to search All metadata (a click of the magnifying glass let me set
   that) and I were to begin typing 'fel,' iTunes would immediately filter
   the song list to show me only the songs that had those characters, in
   that order, somewhere in the song metadata: name, artist, composer, and
   so on. If I were to keep typing so the field contained 'fell,' the list
   would continue to be filtered, showing, in my songs list, all the songs
   from Howard Shore's 'Fellowship of the Ring' soundtrack, 'If I Fell' by
   the Beatles, and 'Fell in Love with a Girl' by the White Stripes. If I
   continued typing so the field contained 'fell ring,' only songs from
   the Howard Shore album appeared.

   The search could also start from anywhere within a word: if I were to
   type 'ellow' I'd find the Howard Shore songs and others that had
   'ellow' in their metadata, like 'Yellow Submarine.'

   Three things were happening. First, the search was dynamic: each
   character entered into the field was immediately added to the search
   string and the results appeared (almost) immediately. Secondly, iTunes
   treated separate words as separate search terms with an implicit AND
   between them. Thus, typing 'fell ring' meant 'show me only the songs
   with both 'fell' AND 'ring' in their metadata.' Third, the search
   looked anywhere within the metadata text, not just starting on word
   boundaries.

   In iTunes 11, however, a new capability has been added to the search
   field: Search Entire Library. With that option chosen, as it is by
   default, not only is the currently displayed list searched but all the
   other collections in the library are as well. Of course, that means
   that the results can't appear as a subset of the list shown in the main
   window, since that list doesn't show the entire library's contents.
   Instead, the results appear in a popover below the search field.

   [1]Image

   Hooray! What an advance! Except for one subtle difference that can be
   very confusing: an entire library search does not treat separate words
   as separate search terms with an implicit AND between them. Instead, it
   treats the contents of the field as a single matching string.
   Furthermore, that single matching string has to match starting from the
   beginning of a word.

   What does that mean? Three things, in fact:
     * In my example, if I search the entire library for 'fell ring' or
       for 'ellowship,' the popover displays the following discouraging
       message: 'No Results.'
     * The popover offers to let me search the iTunes Store via a
       prominent button at the bottom of the popover.
     * It offers to let me search just the list displayed in the main
       window via a pale blue header at the top of the popover ' a header
       that doesn't look much like a button at all and is easy to miss.

   If I click that header button or press the Return key, iTunes filters
   the currently displayed list just as it did in previous versions of
   iTunes: 'fell ring' or 'ellow ring' would both show me the songs from
   the Howard Shore album in my song list, if that's where I was
   searching.

   [2][tn_ellow-ring.jpg]

   To see results for any occurrences of 'Fellowship of the Ring' and only
   those in the popover, though, I have to type the exact string,
   'Fellowship of the Ring.' When I do that, the popover displays the
   songs from Shore's album, and the Peter Jackson movie in my Movies
   collection.

   So, even though you can now search the entire library in iTunes 11, you
   can't search it in the same way as you can individual lists, and the
   difference is subtle enough to baffle the average user.

   In a discussion with my TidBITS colleague Matt Neuburg, Matt pointed
   out that the new search interface in iTunes 11 did match how search
   works in the revamped Remote app for the iPad. That is, the search
   field in the Remote app does search the entire library, and the results
   do appear in a pop-over instead of in a filtered list in the main
   display. However, as we both then discovered, unlike iTunes on a Mac or
   PC, a search using the Remote app still treats each word in the field
   as a separate term, searches within words, and treats spaces between
   words as an implicit AND.

   Bottom line: if you want to search your entire iTunes library, and you
   want to use an implicit AND in your search or to match any part of a
   word, the only way to do that right now is to search your iTunes
   library with the Remote app. If you don't want to search your entire
   iTunes library, it might be easiest to click the search field's
   magnifying glass and deselect Search Entire Library. If you do that,
   iTunes 11 will search just as iTunes 10 did.

   Maybe iTunes 11.1 will bring the two search methods in line. Users
   shouldn't have to know the difference between an implicit AND search
   and a literal string search that starts on word boundaries depending on
   what part of the library they are searching. It should all just work.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-12/fellowship-pop-over.png
   2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-12/ellow-ring.png

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