5.2 Selecting MP3s

After you have connected to the database you can use the selector tab to search for MP3s. You do this by typing any information about the track you want in fields. Which fields are availible depends on the options you choose on the `Search Fields' tab of the preferences 5.1 Configuring doodah. The fields will be matched as regular expressions. If you leave the field blank that field will match anything. The song field matches against a string containing the band and the track names with a dash inbetween. Eg, "queen" in the song field would match the songs "queen - flash" as well as "abba - dancing queen".

If don't want to know how to use regexps you can just enter a segment of whatever you want to match in the field and it will work as you would expect. However, learning regexps is a good idea because you perform more complicated searches. For example, suppose you had a library of CDs and you could only use one at a time, but you also had some MP3s stored on you hard disk. When you insert a CD, you might want to be able to play a random selection of the ones available. With a regexp you can select all the MP3s on both your inserted CD and your imaginary hard disk CD with a regexp like (sixtiescd)|(harddisk).

After you've filled in the forms you want to search for you can press the `Do search' button or press enter in any of the fields to perform the search. The list at the bottom will then fill with results, or the status bar will say `No results' if there aren't any or an error occurred.