The Melody Shop: search and browse

Only the first 100 matches are displayed. By examining the diagnostics of searches which produce more than 100 listings, you can determine the best approach for fine-tuning.

With the exception of the various artists category, which encompasses all of the music categories, category selections are cumulative: for example, choosing blues and cajun creates a pool of listings which match either blues or cajun categories. As categories are pooled, duplicate listings are winnowed, which is why the total number of pooled categories in diagnostics is sometimes less than the sum of the categories.

Keywords are words which occur in the artist or title you are seeking. When deciding what keywords to use, keep in mind the following:

• the search is not case sensitive: `Dolphy' is the same as `dolphy'.

• inexact searches look for initial substrings: searching for `diz' will retrieve dizzy gillespie, while a search for `izz' will find izzy chill.

• multiple keywords are combined with and automatically: the more words you use, the more specific (narrower) your search results will be. Searching for `simon garfunkel' will find simon and garfunkel; searching for `stones live' will find rolling stones (artist) and live (in the title).

• the search strips all punctuation prior to making its comparison in an attempt to normalize your keys with those in the index. If you specify `R.E.M.', your search string is submitted as `rem'. If you specify `r&b', your search string is submitted as `rb'.

• the following common words are weeded out of the search input: an, and, by, the, in, on, or, to and of.

Exact matches are handy for finding keywords that are also common prefixes. For example, looking for `R.E.M.' without the exact match option will also find remain, rembrandt, remember, remix, etc. -- whereas the same search with the exact matching will find only occurences of rem.

The search results are sorted by release date, newest-to-oldest. If the artist or title sort option is selected, the results are sorted first by the selected field, and then by the release date. Listings sorted by date or artist are displayed in `artist, title' order; listings sorted by title are displayed in `title, artist' order.