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.