Search errors and oddities
 

I've been using LW for about 2 years, but within the past 6 months or so, I can't search for an artist and title without getting the following error message:

"Your search is too specific. Please make your search
smaller and start again."

Also, if I search for a specific title or artist or album, very often the results are close but no cigar. For example, an artist search for Edith Piaf brought results not only for her but also for male singers with whom she was associated. These files were not for duets with Edith; they were for singles by the men.

I recently switched from LW 9.30 to LW Pro 9.33 but the problems are equal opportunity.

FYI My computer uses Windows XP Home edition, JRE 1.5_03, Mozilla Firefox, has enough memory available, and uses a dial up modem.

I would really appreciate any help resolving these problems. Thanks

I have always found it useless to search for an artist AND a title. I have been using LW only about 9 months.

I only find other songs come up as you describe if the title says eg Edith Piaff Cover.

I find that the search function is by no means perfect, even after resigning myself to only filing in one field.
For instance a search for a two name artist will bring up many with the same first name but different second names.etc and search for a song title will often bring up artists or albums containing that name. I would welcome a method where you could search an exact phrase with quotation marks as in Google ... perhaps this is a Java thing ... I read recently that it has problems also with Chinese and Japanese characters.

So what help can be given I don't know. I think we need to work around the problems as best we can, and hope the Developers can find ways to make the search funcion more accurate.

the search string gets too long with all the audio tags for some java versions, IIRC.

An "any type" search with artist and title and extension, doesn't include all the audio tags, so see if that works better.

"Any type" search
 

Although Stief's search technique seemed counterintuitive, it worked amazingly well. It makes artist/title and artist/album searches easy. It also enables results that are limited to those types that a music player can handle, my player can't play .ogg or .m4a files.

The major limitation on this technique is the length of the allowable search string. For example, "Johnny C*sh American Recording .mp3" wouldn't fit. But with creativity and luck it's still possible to make the search length limit, it becomes a matter of guessing what words can be safely left out.

In the end, the "any type" search found results that the "audio" search never did. This didn't mean that any files downloaded successfully, of course - they all needed more sources which never materialized. It is comforting, nonetheless, to have some evidence that these files exist.

Many thanks for the help.

there has to be a way to edit the program for this, its SOOOOOOOOO annoying, i hate it. Its so easy to NOT look through a bunch of crap that it spits out at you because you can only type in title.

http://www.limewire.org/pipermail/li...st/000324.html

might help...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...+try+again.%22

as might that link above.

I am not good with programming, but this can't be that difficult of a fix with a hex editor and someone who knows what they are doing. I think a patch for this provided by someone would be very nice.

Hi shaba

not sure if your links point here too (I couldn't get them to work), but looks like there may be hope for the "search too long" problem. I noticed the following patch has been added to the code