Search and the command palette

Listen has two ways to search: the command palette, a quick window you open from anywhere, and the search page, a full page with tabs. The palette can also jump to any page, switch servers and start a new playlist.

Both search the server you are currently browsing. With a local folder source they search that folder. If you want to search another server, switch to it first.

The command palette

Open the palette with Ctrl+K, with the Search box at the top of the sidebar, or with Open command palette in the app menu. Press Ctrl+K again to close it. You can change the shortcut under Settings → Hotkeys (the action is called Global search); see Hotkeys.

Start typing. After a short pause (about 0.4 seconds) Listen searches the server and shows up to five results per type under these headings:

Each heading shows how many results it has. Click the heading to fold or unfold it. View all opens the search page on that tab with your text, so you can see more than five.

Under the results is a Search group with these commands, which you can also reach with an empty box:

• Search for “your text” opens the search page with the same text.
• Create playlist… opens the new playlist dialog. Only offered when the server can create playlists.
• Go to page… opens a second page of the palette. The entries are Home, Search, Settings, Favorites, Recently played, Statistics, Mixes, Radio, Downloads under Pages, and Albums, Tracks, Album artists, Artists, Genres, Folders, Playlists under Library. Pages the current server does not have are left out. Typing narrows the list.
• Server commands… lists your servers under Select server (choose one to switch to it) and Manage servers…, which opens Settings → General.

Keys

The footer shows a breadcrumb of the pages you opened (click a part to go back) and the keys. The cross in the text box clears your text.

The search page

The search page is hidden in the sidebar by default. Show it with Settings → General → Sidebar (tick Search), or open it from the palette: Go to page… → Search, Search for “…” or View all.

Type in the box at the top. Listen searches while you type, after a short pause, and Enter searches at once. The results are in tabs:

• Tracks,
• Albums,
• Artists,
• Playlists, which appears when the server found some.

Once you have typed something, each tab shows its number of results, for example Albums (12). Listen asks the server for up to 100 results of each type. The box says “Type to search your library.” while it is empty, and the list says “No results.” when nothing matched.

Each tab is an ordinary list: you can switch between table and grid with the buttons at the right (albums and artists), change columns in the list options, select, drag and right-click exactly as described in Lists, selection and menus. Ctrl+F puts the cursor back into the search box (Local search in the hotkey list).

Describe it

With Merge with other devices set up (a listen-server address and token, see Continue on another device), the search page has a Describe it button next to the tabs. Turned on, the box takes a description instead of a title: “slow 90s Korean ballad”, “Brazilian samba with acoustic guitar”, “트로트”, “girl crush K-pop with heavy beats”, “dreamy lo-fi 80 bpm”. Press Enter to search (Listen does not search while you type in this mode). The results are songs only, best match first, up to 100.

Your listen-server ranks every song it has an embedding for by three things added together:

• how the music sounds: a 30-second clip of each song, compared with your words by the CLaMP 3 music-and-text model,
• what is known about the song: search tags (genre, decade, country, who sings, instruments, mood, scene names such as “city pop” or “1st-generation K-pop”) written once per song by Gemini from its artist and title, compared with your words by the same model,
• the words themselves: words of your description found in those tags or in the title.

A tempo in the description (“120 bpm”) becomes a filter: only songs within 6 bpm of it (or at half or double speed) are shown, using the tempo from the analysis store.

The embeddings come from listen-embed, a job that runs on a computer with a graphics card (tools/listen-embed in the source, see its README) and writes to Listen/embeddings next to the analysis store. Songs it has not reached yet are not found by Describe it; the server lists them at /v1/search/missing and counts them in /v1/status. Results play from the server they belong to: YouTube Music songs on your YouTube Music account, Navidrome songs on the Navidrome server whose address matches; songs of servers you have not added are left out.

The first search after a while takes a few seconds longer while the server loads its text model; turning Describe it on starts that loading.

What gets searched

What the search matches depends on the server:

• Navidrome, OpenSubsonic and Jellyfin search their library for song titles, albums, artists and, where supported, playlists.
• YouTube Music searches YouTube Music’s catalogue, not only your own library. Results from it are played through the unofficial YouTube Music support described in YouTube Music.
• Local folders search the files Listen found in the folder.

Filtering the lists on the Albums and Tracks pages is separate and works on your library only; see Sorting, searching and filtering.