help - searching

Generally, wherever you see an album, artist, or song displayed, clicking on the album / artist / song will display more information. Likewise, clicking on a song will in most cases play that song.

There are many ways to find something with calliope. There are four primary frames on the request page - the navigation menu at the top, the sub-menu/artist/album frame on the left, the main details frame (this frame), and the queue at the bottom. Generally, clicking a link in the top, left or bottom frame will bring up a detailed page in this frame, from which you can select a song or songs for play. Albums, Artists, Dates, Genres, Links, Songs, and Types of artists are color coded for easy identification.

You can enter text in the search box on the upper left and hit return, and this will show artists, albums and songs with that word in their title. The top menu bar (the alphabet at the top) will show either all artists, all genres, or all artist types that start with that letter. Click on "by genre," "by artist," or "by type" to switch among the three modes. Then click on the artist ( or genre or type ) to see all the albums associated with that artist ( or genre or type ) in the frame on the left.

Clicking on an album, artist or genre on the left will show the individual album, or all the albums associated with that artist or genre, as well as the songs on the album. If the artist has more than one album, the number indicates how many albums with which the artist is associated. The artist list may be split in two, with artists that have albums appearing on top, and artists that only appear on compilations at the bottom of the list. In this case, the numbers associated with compilation artists indicate the number of songs that artist is associated with (and should be a different color).

Note that artists have two names with which they're associated - their actual name, and their fileunder name. For instance, the artist 'Hank Williams' could be filed under 'Willams, Hank.' Calliope knows about some artists (such as Hank Williams and Elvis Presley), and they should therefore appear correctly under their last names (i.e. under 'W' and 'P' respectively). Other artists may not be categorized correctly because they weren't detected when loaded into the database. To modify the way an artist is alphabetically listed, you must have editing permission. Turn on editing, click on an artist's name, and click on the edit button that appears next to the artist at the top of the page. More details are available here.
 

more info

Wherever you see the information icon (), clicking on it will display detailed information about that song, album, artist, etc. When a song appears on the queue, or in the history list (i.e. it's already been picked or played), clicking on that song will show the song details page.

Calliope tracks quite a bit of information about each song, and can use that information to create interesting display pages (under the show menu); to modify the random play (using smart random); even to adjust the volume of a song. To modify the information you see on the info page, turn editing on first. Note that you cannot edit everything.
 

show menu

The show menu will allow you to display the latest additions to the database, the recent play history, the most popularly chosen songs, and the distribution of genres in the database. Once the resulting lists are displayed in the main frame, you can click on album / artist / song to show more details.