Search Input

Provides access to the current path, and allows entering custom search terms.

Anatomy of the search input

The path is relative to the root of the current location, and ends with a forward slash.
The location determines the root path, no matter if you are browsing a library or a folder.

The search term is any text following the path. Once you enter anything, only the results whose name is a (partial or full) match of the term you’ve entered will be included.

Keywords are suggested search terms, extracted from the results (more info).

Wide vs. Narrow Search

When you enter more than one search term, you will only see results that contain all search terms. In other words, the following input foo bar will reveal any files that happen to contain both foo AND bar in their filename and/or metadata. This type of search is commonly referred to as a Narrow Search.

However, if you want to find files that contain EITHER search term, this is possible by placing the word OR between the search terms. Doing so will reveal files that have “foo” OR “bar” in their filename and/or metadata. This type of search is referred to as a Wide Search.

Exact Phrase Search

When you put quotation marks around search terms — like "school bus" instead of school bus — you’re instructing the search engine to look for that exact term, rather than finding files that merely contain the search terms.

Also, word boundaries apply in exact mode. Searching for "school" (with quotes) will look for files that contain the word “school”. Here, it’s important to understand how word boundaries are established by looking for certain characters, including the plus sign (+), underscore (_), dot (.) and of course regular whitespace.

For example:

• school bus (without quotes) might return files about “school” and “bus” anywhere in the filename/metadata. For example, the query would match a file called “Busy schoolmaster.mp3”, even though both search terms appear as part of other words, and in a different order.
• "school bus" (with quotes) returns only files matching that exact phrase. The phrase is required to be independant from the adjecent words and might match a file called “yellow school bus - onboard,kids.wav”.
• You are free to define multiple exact terms: "school" "bus" will match entries that contain the exact words “school” AND “bus”, but in an arbitrary order. For example, “bus_driving_past_school_playground.wav”

Wildcard search

When quoting a search term, the percentage sign (%) will act as a wildcard. You can use this for more flexible matching of files.

For example:

• "brass%" will match files in which a keyword begins with “brass”
• "%_take" will match files in which a keyword ends with “_take”
• "%cup%" will match files in which a keyword contains “cup”
• "deep%bass" will match files in which a keyword begins with “deep” and ends with “bass”

Excluded Terms

When entering search terms, you can also specify that a term should be used to exclude search results. It’s simple to use: simply prefix any word with a minus “-”, and the application will only return results that does not match that term.

For example, to search for sounds containing the term “hoo” without matching “hooray”, enter the following:

Of course, you can still search for a word that starts with a minus too - just surround the term with quotes to enforce a literal search:

Keywords

Keywords are terms that have been statistically extracted from the pool of names available in the current set of search results. As such, they are very dynamic and will (most likely) change as you switch between folders.

The suggestions are available as ‘floating’ buttons, in the right-hand side of the text input. Since there is only room for a few suggestions there (and there might be many), keywords are also used for providing suggestions while you are typing.

Suggestions

While you are typing in the search input, the software will show you matching paths or keywords:

You can apply those suggestions by hitting either TAB, or by pressing the Right Arrow key. You can also cycle between the available suggestions by pressing the Up/Down arrow keys.