Duration search is used to search the database for certain track durations: -

Find all tracks with a certain play time (duration)

Find all tracks with a play-time above a specified time.

Find all tracks with a play-time below a specified time.

Find all tracks between two play times .EG. Find all tracks with a play-time between 4 and 5 minutes.

The Duration Search screen is displayed by clicking on the Duration button on the Main Menu screen, or by clicking on the Search drop-down menu at the top of the Database Search screen and selecting Duration Search.

The play-time of each track is entered using the Track Information form. The duration of each track is stored as seconds in the database, although you can enter and search for the information by entering the total seconds or minutes and seconds.

You select which type of search you require by clicking on one of the option buttons. You then enter either the amount of seconds, or minutes and seconds, you want to search for. You will notice that when entering the information as seconds or minutes the other box will convert and display the conversion automatically. EG entering a 1 in the minutes box will automatically put a 60 in the seconds box and vice versa.

Selecting ‘Duration Between’ will display two sets of boxes to enter the information, the first box is the lower limit for the track play time and the other is the upper limit for the track play-time.

EG To search for all tracks between 3 and 4 minutes long put a 3 in the first ‘Mins’ box and 4 in the second Mins box. Now click on the Search button. The Program will search the database to find any matches, for a large database this will take a few seconds. A progress bar below the grid will show you the progress of the search.

Any matches found during the search will be displayed in the grid. There are four columns, Artist, Album, Track and Duration. The duration column displays the play-time of the track in seconds.

You can change the order in which the information is displayed by clicking on the ‘Order By’ drop-down menu at the top, and selecting which column you want to order by. The default is ‘Order By Artist, Ascending’.

EG. If you want to change the way the search information is displayed in the search grid so the results are ordered by duration, select Duration from the ‘Order By’ drop-down menu and then click on the Search button again. The same tracks will be displayed but this time the tracks with the shortest play time will appear at the top, and the tracks with longest play time will appear at the bottom. You can change the order so the longest tracks appear at the top by selecting Descending from the ‘Order By’ drop-down menu.

NOTE: clicking on a line in the grid will display the artist, title and track. The duration of the track will also be displayed converted from seconds to minutes and seconds.