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Rockit has numerous ways
of quickly locating the music you are looking for.
We will explore a few of the ways here. We will use
the default Dark Gray skin in these examples, and
other skins may or may not have these controls
available on them.
Using the built in Library
Routines:
The Library is the focal
point of Rockit's media finding capabilities. It is
designed to be much faster and easier to locate
tracks, then simply browsing through Rockit's My
Computer interface. The reason is simple: when you
add tracks to the library, Rockit takes care of
reading the track tags, and putting all the songs
into it's in-memory lists, and it only does it once,
when you add the songs. If you use the Explorer
browser, it has to read each songs tag, as it
displays them, hence slowing everything down.
So, it is fairly
obvious, that you will want your music added to the
library. Let's take a look at what is available (we
are assuming that you have used the Add Wizard, to
add all your music to the Library):
On the left, we have the
My Library, and My Computer navigation trees.
Directly above the My Library tree, you will see 5
buttons. These are the Library/Playlist button,
Artists, Albums, Genres and Year buttons. When you
click one of these buttons, you will see the My
Library tree change. For this example, I will click
the Artists button, since this is commonly used. The
Artist list, will immediately replace the My Library
tree, and in this case, I highlighted the first
Artist on the list, which is .38 Special. Here's
what we'll see with this test library:
As you can see, all
songs by .38 Special are now displayed in the main
track list, and I can now either double-click a
particular song to load to the first available deck,
or drag and drop it to a deck, a queue, the request
list, etc.
The same holds true for
the other option buttons for Album, Genre and Year
as well. That was easy, and much faster than
drilling down through the My Computer tree :)
Using the Library Search
Routines:
Rockit has two types of
searches available, and actually three ways to go
about them.
The first is the basic
library search, and as you can see below, is
available on this skin, and many others:
To use the library
search, simply click the left mouse button in the
search box, where it says Search Library, type in
what you want to search for, and hit the Enter key.
In this example, I will type in bruce, as I am
looking for Bruce Springsteen songs. Here are the
results after I hit Enter:
As you can see, we found
49 items, and in this case 2 different Artists.
Rockit searches all text fields within the library
using this search, so it would show matches under
Artist, Album, Genre, Title, etc. The search took
less than 20 milliseconds on the entire library!
At this point, we can
refine our results, by clicking whatever column
header we want to sort on, or just double-click to
load to the next available deck, or drag and drop to
wherever we want.
Please note: The search
is actually a find operation. What that means, is if
you type "rick" for example (my name), it will find
a match of Rick Springfield, and also a match with
Cheap Trick, as they both contain "rick". So,
it's sort of a fuzzy search, in that it doesn't have
to be an exact match, only contain what you are
looking for.
Using the Advanced (Hard
Drive) Search
The HDD search is a
different beast altogether. It searches for text in
the filenames only, of an entire hard drive. For
this example, I'll again use "rick", as it's a cool
name :)
I entered the text and
pressed the Enter key, and off it goes to do its
thing.
This search is highly
threaded, and runs in the background while you
continue to play. You can close the window, but it
is still running and searching, until you either
Cancel it, or it finishes searching every file on
the hard drive you chose.
Please remember, this
does not search the MP3 tags, but only the actual
text in the filename itself.
It can also take some
time, depending on the number of files you have on
your computer. For example, the computer I used to
do this tutorial, has over 500,000 files on it (not
all music, of course), and it took about 2 minutes
to search through the entire drive.
The results will stay in
the window, even when closed, until you start
another search, and can be dragged and dropped
anywhere you like.
Tip: Once a
complete drive has been searched, subsequent
searches of that drive will be much faster, as a
good portion of the drives folder hierarchy remains
in the Window's memory cache. |
