Try These New Techniques to Find the Music You’re Looking For Faster Than Ever

Fast and accurate searching is absolutely core to any music library, and with a catalog the size of Alpha’s it’s more important than ever. With that in mind we are always working on innovating and making our platform more powerful than ever. We have just launched a handful of new search capabilities that you can begin using immediately. This gives everyone 7 different, powerful, and easy-to-use search methods to use when finding tracks on the Alpha Music Library site. Here they are:

1. “AND” searches (default): By default when you type in more than 1 term you’re running an “AND” search. The terms are additive and you’ll get more precise results as you add more terms.

2. “OR” searches: To run an “OR” search, simply include “OR” between multiple terms like this: “upbeat OR happy”.

3. Negative searches: To exclude a specific term from your search results set include a hyphen (“-“)  before that term in your query. For example, if you want to look for something upbeat without drums, you’d type this: “upbeat -drums”.

4. Active browsing: We know metadata keywords are often subjective. Something you consistently call “upbeat” could be referred to consistently as “happy” by another person. To solve this we created our new active browsing feature. Now when you scan any search results page you’ll notice that all of the keywords are clickable. As you click the terms you’d like to explore further they instantly appear in your search field above, slowly building a new “AND” query as you add more search words. Try clicking on some keywords in the description field, it’s great!

5. Column/field searches: This one is great. To narrow your search to within a single column (field) simply type the column/field name followed by a colon and the keyword you’re looking for. For example if you want to find all tracks that have a mood of “upbeat”, you would type this into your search field: “mood: upbeat”. This works for all fields too so if you need to quickly find a specific track or artist it works great for that as well.

6. Phrase searching: If you need to find a specific phrase or string of keywords in a particular order just include quotes around your search terms. For example, if you’re looking for the song “Happy Birthday” you could search for “happy birthday to you” and you’ll only see results that have that exact string of keywords in their metadata.

7. Sonic Search: This one isn’t new but it’s worth mentioning as part of an overall search update. Find music with music with our proprietary signal processing search technology. Whether you need to find an exact match on a file or you’re looking for something that sounds similar to a song you have in mind, Sonic Search can handle it all for you.

We know you all have your go-to methods for searching and hopefully these new enhancements will give you more tools to help you find what you’re looking for faster!

And remember, you can save your searches with “Save Search” feature to run them as often as you need!