Sorting question

[Sedge]

Another post from me tonight - wow, I'm feeling all inquisitive all of a sudden...

Is there a way to search for all songs that end in ", A" - as in songs that at one time began with "A ", but had the A moved to the end? I tried just searching using ", A", but it ignored the comma and whitespace and gave me the list of all songs, artists, and albums that had an "a" in them - which is almost all of them.

Perhaps a silly question, but asked all the same. The answer might come in handy with other annoyances, perhaps songs that at one time started with "I"... Songs and artists with The, I like having that at the end, but all the other ones I want them to display as they were originally titled.

>>Sedge

[dave]

quoted searching is on the list, not done yet. That will let you search ", a" and find them.

targeted (single column) searching is already done:
http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Searching

[Sedge]

Thanks for that, will keep an eye out for the new feature.

[Sedge]

Well, here's a temporary workaround, although it's a bit kludgy (OK, a lot kludgy)

To sort via specific phrases with whitespace and commas and such...
1. copy your library like you're going to make a song book (select all, Edit -> Copy)
2. paste into Numbers (or preferably something faster - Numbers worked really slow for this)
3. use whatever sort and filter tools your spreadsheet program of choice has available
4. flip back to kJams and search for the songs you find with the external program individually

I actually took this an extra step, and used Numbers to make a .csv file, then used a popular Windows song book creation tool to import the .csv file, then searched using its tools. As it converted the .csv to its database, it was a ton faster than trying to get Numbers to filter 20,000 rows of data down to about 150 results. However, this is completely cheating, as I used a windows terminal server on my network to get this done, and used a 3rd party Windows app - not very mac-centric for this, I'm afraid. However, it was an exercise in transferring kJams listings to a decent song book program that I paid for, prior to knowing about kJams - and which outputs nicely formatted pages. The transfer exercise worked, although I will do it differently next time, putting the SongID field into the .csv column that will be pulled as Track #, instead of putting it in the Disc ID field and setting all the Track # entries to 0 like I did in my first attempt. I also noticed that although exported the .csv in Windows (Roman) format, I think, it zonked all of my dashes (-) and made the into ?, i.e. 1-2-3 became 1?2?3. This is minor, I'm sure I can figure out how to square up this minor issue.

Still learning a lot - and not afraid to share as I go.

>>Sedge

[dave]