How do you search using the duration of a recording?

MusicBrainz
1

Could somebody maybe explain how the search field ‘duration’ is supposed to work?

I am guessing it’s intention is to allow for searching for a track that e.g. has a duration of somewhere between 3:30 and 3:40.
But I haven’t been able to find or figure out how that would work.
I read somewhere it may be using exact milliseconds? That can’t be true?

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When you do a “lookup in browser” from Picard I believe it is populated in milliseconds

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That corroborates my experience with this form field, too. It requires an integer, so if you want to search for a time of 2:46 (2 minutes, 46 seconds), that’s 166000 milliseconds.

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Thanx. So if it requires milliseconds, and it doesn’t allow for a certain span of duration, I am guessing hardly anybody ever makes use of this ‘search’ field.
That’s a pity, it could be handy sometimes if it had entry fields for minutes and seconds that the average human understands and would expect.
It also would help if it was either fuzzy (so it would return approximate durations too), or have two fields for longer than/shorter than.

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I am looking for a 2:30 recording in my (release) collection, to pad the end of a compilation cassette tape (K7) side A.

Here is the syntax to find recordings with duration between 2:20 and 2:40: dur:[140000 TO 154000].
It’s a bit of a pity that we can’t directly use mm:ss, we have to use milliseconds.

But of course it’s not enough, it’s way too many, in fact.
I would like to limit this search to the recordings I own in my release collection…

There are tickets for edit search but not yet for entity searches.
It’s slightly related to collection item marker.

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