Ignoring accents in search strings

It would be a great feature to ignore accents when searching. For example, if you want to search for “André Previn” at the moment, you must type the accented letter ‘é’. In some other music software (e.g. Audirvana) this problem is handled by ignoring accents so you can just search for “Andre Previn”. This is also helpful because some tags have the accents removed and it is difficult to know whether each artist, album name or track name has the accents included. In some cases, the same artist name can be written with or without accents depending on the album, etc.

I try and avoid special characters where I can (I guess it’s easier with the English language), they are hard to type/find on a standard US keyboard, and can vary between operating systems and character sets. It doesn’t look as good with the plain characters, but it’s easier to manage.

This issue seems like a very simple one to fix and is still a daily annoyance if you listen to any of the thousands of artists with accented characters in their names, e.g. Jérôme Hantaï or Elīna Garanča.

Several possible solutions are discussed here: string - Using JavaScript to perform text matches with/without accented characters - Stack Overflow in case that helps to speed things up.

Would be great to see this to a future release!

Yes, this is a continual annoyance. Search is no longer case sensitive, which is super. But it is still sensitive to diacritics, which, in my household, causes frustration. So entering ‘dvorak’ in the search box will not match music that is correctly tagged as ‘Dvořák’.

I’ve had a quick look at the source code, but it’s quite complex :slight_smile: and it’s going to take me a lot of time to understand it. :slight_smile:

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If I recall this correctly, the issue appears when album tags etc are created on a windows box. Linux doesn’t always decode the language set, or vise versa.

On my system the tags are created on Linux using Picard and the musicbrainz database, so that doesn’t seem to be the issue.

I create my tags using Kid3 on MacOS