Search for songs in your computeur with the Karaboss search engine
As its name suggests, the search engine lets you search through your music files located in your ‘music library’.
This is essentially useful if you have a large number of files and you don’t want to spend long minutes digging through your directory trees to launch the famous karaoke song that you’re sure you’ve seen recently and that has been requested by an assembly of raving lunatics.
The search engine, then, but even then “library” must not be an empty word.
Tidy up your room
We all agree that sorting and renaming thousands of files is nothing to get excited about and, above all, it’s totally pointless if the result is not used.
So the existence of this utility is in no way a praise of laziness 🙂
On the contrary, it’s THE justification and THE reward for all your efforts to do a minimum of sorting and naming your files correctly.
The music file library
That’s a big word for simply the place where you store your music files.
What does it involve?
The idea is that they should all be in the same tree structure and not scattered all over your computer.
The other equally important requirement is that they have meaningful names, i.e. with a minimum of information: the artist and the title of the song.
Without these two prerequisites, using the search engine is pointless.
By default, Karaboss considers that your music files are in the ‘My Music’ library (logical).
It is of course possible (and even desirable) to change this location to specify a sub-directory of ‘My Music’ or another location altogether.
Avoid network drives or any other ‘slow’ device, as the search engine will have great difficulty in responding as quickly as you would like.
As a general rule, it is advisable to collect them in the same place, to avoid scanning your entire hard disk.
I’m not saying in bulk in the same directory, but that your directories have the same root.
This root will become the location of your library.
How does it work?
MIDI files don’t have tags like MP3 files. This technique cannot be used to classify them.
The search engine will go through your entire library tree and create a file containing the names of the files and their locations. It will consult this file to respond quickly to your queries.
This is where file naming comes into its own ….
Restriction:
The search engine does not index words.
Example: search for the word « home »
File naming
There are many schools of thought when it comes to naming formats. The subject is therefore a delicate one…
Basically, name your files as you like, but for pity’s sake, rename them to something intelligible!
We’re sick and tired of seeing all these MIDI files circulating on the Internet, each with a more improbable name than the last, from ‘1234.mid’ to ‘love.mid’, or even worse. Good luck ….
Admittedly, there was a time when we were only allowed 8 characters, but trying to guess that ‘walkwild.mid’ is Walk On The Wild Side doesn’t amuse me much any more (and who’s the singer?)
Occasionally, some files contain ‘tags’ in the lyrics, but this is very rare. Otherwise, you could still get away with tinkering a naming program…
Regarding Karaboss, to keep things simple, I had to make a choice. The optimal naming is as follows (note that the order is important):
The author separated by a dash then the name of the song, with a blank on either side of the dash, i.e.:
{author} – {song}.mid (or .kar)
Example: Adele – Hometown Glory.kar
Admittedly, it’s minimalist, but this way you can search by author and song name. That’s already a lot, believe me.
You can add information on the right-hand side, such as the year or the record:
Example: Adele – Hometown Glory (2008).kar
In this way, the search engine is able to return results sorted by author. This is only possible because the author is extracted to the left of the ‘author – song’ file name.
Notes
It’s also a good idea to scan your library regularly to check for new music files (click on the scan button).
The HOME button points to the root of your library and will allow you to return to it quickly at any time (another good reason to follow this advice 🙂 ).