Two things
1 - I'd like the 'find' toolbar to continue showing no matter what so that when I'm browsing the Media Library tree, the find toolbar is still there. Any search entered would then filter the list showing on the right which would be basically whatever I'd selected on the left. This would be extremely useful for times when I want to find a particular song or bunch of songs from within a selection. ie for 2 pac I have over 300 songs, sometimes finding one song out of all these can be quite a task. I know I could use the search field itself and enter artist=2 pac, then narrow it down more etc but I like using the tree and would love the contents of a search to narrow down the info shown.
I'm sure a lot of people would find this useful.
It might proove tricky however if the person then moved to the next item in the tree and the data was still being filtered by their search criteria and they didn't realise it.
To overcome this, it could be optional to keep the search criteria or to wipe it each time you moved to a tree node. To further simplify it and to stop users not realising this feature was there, the very first time a user uses find within a tree node and then changes trees, give them a prompt asking them how they wished to set the option: 'wipe search criteria' or 'keep search criteria'. And also inform them that this behaviour could be changed at any time from within Tools/Options.
Another thing I would LOVE to see is the way search criteria can be applied to tree views.
Right now it is a type of static linking where each view scheme can have search criteria added to it. I'd like to see it more dynamic so that there was a check box on the 'find' which dynamically linked it to all the view schemes. The find toolbar would always be visible also so as it changed, the tree would change to reflech the criteria added. I would then like to be able to save different searches criteria and load them instantly from it's own extra button (next to the wizard one) as I think searches are quite important and so should have their own button to make them faster accessible.
This just makes it a lot easier to re-use View schemes instead of having to make seperate ones for each set of search criteria.
I know this can be achieved right now by using smart lists but the smart lists are themselves in the same spot as the tree which makes them harder to access while using the tree and also, as the find dialog is not present all the time, the search criteria can not be changed as I go along.
This would help to give an alternate view of search results as well as they would then be displayed grouped which is VERY nice sometimes and this would mimic the winamp 3 method where search results data is grouped in two boxes at the top which can be modified.
I dont know how well I explained it because it's quite a tricky idea but one that would be soooo powerful.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks