ALSEARCH(1)

✨ ALSEARCH(1) ✨

Okay bestie, this one lives under User Contributed Perl Documentation 📚 and it's the guide to alsearch 🎶

💖 NAME

alsearch, which is the tool that searches the AudioLink database for music 🎧✨

🔮 SYNOPSIS

alsearch [OPTION]... search_option... --td=/some/path/to/create/links/

alsearch [OPTION]... search_option... -s

🎧 DESCRIPTION

So this script is how you hunt for songs in the AudioLink database 🔍 You can throw in one or several options for the artist, composer, lyricist, album, etc., and those become your search criteria. It's giving customizable 💅

You can pass several search_option options to dig up specific music files. Check the "search options" section further down for the full list 🌸

The search is not case sensitive 🙈 alsearch looks for strings and sub-strings in the fields it searches, so you don't need the exact spelling. See the "examples" section for more info 💜

Specifying the --td (target directory) option is mandatory if you want links made to the actual files 🚨 That directory holds the symbolic links to the real audio files, and it gets created if it doesn't exist yet 🍓

Making symbolic links to the real files is basically like making playlists in your audio app 🎀 Symlinks just point at the actual files on your hard disk, and this way of making and storing playlists is so useful for a few reasons, like:

1. Compatible across various audio players 🦋 Since your "playlists" are real files on your hard disk, you can add whole directories that alsearch generated into your audio software's playlist. If you ever switch to a different music player, your playlists come with you 👑 You don't have to stress about whether the two players' playlist formats match 😭
2. Can be seen and operated upon in a file browser 🌈 Because the symbolic links live on the file system, you can look at your playlist collection with normal shell file operations or a GUI file browser 🧚 If the file browser supports file traversals and symlinks, it'll show you the info of the actual song ✨

🎀 OPTIONS

• --help — Brief usage info, bestie 🫶
• --host=xxx — Connects to the MySQL server on the target host. The default is localhost 🏠
• --pass=xxx — The password for the database 🔐
• -s, --na — Just shows you the search results and doesn't make any links. It's simulation mode, so think of it as a vibe check before committing 🙈
• --td=xxx — The target directory where links get created 📁
• --user=xxx — The username for the database 👤
• -v, --verbose — Shows some extra info. It's super useful for spotting errors and sending debug info 🔥

🔎 SEARCH OPTIONS

• --album=xxx — Searches the "album" field 💿
• --artist=xxx — Searches the artist/band/performers fields. You can give this option multiple times 🎤 You can do it like this:

"alsearch --artist=kishore --artist=asha --td=/songs/asha_kishore"

• --comment=xxx — Searches the "comment" field 💬
• -c, --composer=xxx — Searches the "composer" field 🎼
• --genre=xxx — Searches the "genre" field 🎵
• -l, --lyricist=xxx — Searches the "lyricist" field ✍️
• --title=xxx — Searches the "title" field 🌟

💅 EXAMPLES

Okay so options that take arguments can be written two ways, and both are iconic 👑 The option and its argument can be separated by a space (' ') or an equal sign ('=') 🦋

"alsearch --artist="kishore kumar" --td=/songs/kishore"

"alsearch --artist "kishore kumar" --td /songs/kishore"

If you want to search for a string with spaces in it, wrap that string in " " 🫶

"alsearch --artist=kishore --composer=burman --lyricist=bakshi"

That one will search for songs sung by Kishore, composed by Burman, and written by Bakshi 🎶 Any name in the composer field that has "burman" in it will match, so it'll find songs composed by RD Burman, SD Burman, etc. This is true for all the search fields, periodt 💖

🌸 SEE ALSO

audiolink(1), alfilldb(1) ⭐ The current version of this man page is available on the AudioLink website at http://audiolink.sourceforge.net/ 🌐

🐛 BUGS

Bug reports for the AudioLink software or the man pages go to the audiolink-devel mailing list at audiolink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net 💀

👩‍💻 AUTHOR

This manual page is written and maintained by Amit Shah <amitshah@gmx.net> 🧚

⚖️ COPYRIGHT

The AudioLink package is Copyright (C) 2003, Amit Shah <amitshah@gmx.net>. All the programs and the documentation that come as part of AudioLink are licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2) 🌈

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Stay iconic, and happy searching! This page came from perl v5.30.3, dated 2020-08-11, under ALSEARCH(1) 💜🦋