Rockbox

Sorry, the patch contains an empty file. My system destroyed
the content, so I have to rewrite it

Now we have the new and right content…

that is one of the best thing since a long time … 5 days :)

Very nice! Been playing around with it, got a few ideas though

rather than using the file to launch the search why not have a
search item in the menu system which
uses /.rockbox/search.idx and saves the results
to /.rockbox/results.m3u, this I could do

then have the result either play automatically (couldn’t get
this working)

or display a list for the user to select (never even attempted
this one)

:D All in all very nice

— Stephen Ball
stephen@invisionfilemanager.com

Cool feature! I’ve been waiting for it for a veeeery long time.

Another idea would be to get rid of this .idx file
It would be better to look directly in the directories
(recursively), with a menu item

Moreover, we might be able to search into the ID3 tags (and
not only the file names). But that should be more difficult

Anyway, that’s a feature the Archos was missing a lot!
Thanks for the work, I hope this will be implemented in the
next version of RockBox

Boris Maras
maras@netcourrier.com

After disussing on IRC, searching into directories would be a
bit long. The best would be to be able to search into a
standard playlist : Rockbox can already create a root.m3u
with all the files.
Thus, the search feature can be used without any plugged
computer : you generate the m3u and then you can search
into it (with the On+play keys for example)

It seems like your feature almost already works on any
playlist. We would only have to skip commented lines
(beginning with #).
I tried a few modifications in your code but did not manage to
make it work (I’m a newby on Rockbox)

Another improvement we could make is to use a better
search algorithm. I was told to use the Boyer-Moore
algorithm
(http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~alison/ds98/node78.html)

I did not manage to have a debug mode on the Archos (or the
simulator) so I have difficulties to understand your code

Feel free to contact me if I can help.

Boris Maras
maras@netcourrier.com

Nice feature, but I feel it could be improved in a few ways:

1) Don’t search an .idx file, search ordinary .m3u files instead
(via the on+play menu). Then instead of making a special .idx
file, we can simply search using “allfiles.m3u”.

2) The search code is very complex. Why not just read_line(),
check_line(), fprintf()? (check_line() could be a simple stristr
at first, and then improved to use Boyer-Moore or similar)

I think having a fixed filename is fine. If you want to save
your result, it’s very simple to rename the file. Having to enter
a result name for every search would be too tedious.

I’d like to enhance this idea to search also “some” id3
tag information. This could be done by supporting the
winamp #EXTM3U playlist format for searching.

Create playlist could also be enhanced to optionally
create the #EXTINF comments. Yes, I know this could
be slow, but it’s only an option and the playlists could
also be created on the pc. A small perl script in the
rockbox distribution could do the trick.

I dislike polluting the clean and simple .m3u format with file
metadata. A real id3 search feature should scan and index
mp3 files, not use hacked .m3u files.

gives me an error every time, most of the time the
search_results.m3u is just an empty playlist. Got my hopes
up for nothing :(

Thanks Stefan!

I have (finally) made this into a viewer plugin and
committed it.