Tidal's search engine chokes on long queries with multiple qualifier
words (remix credits, edit labels, bonus-disc markers). User reported
case: "maduk transformations remixed fire away fred v remix" returns 0,
but shortening to "maduk transformations remixed fire away" works.
Behaviour change:
- On a 0-result search, retry with progressively-shortened variants
(capped at 5 total attempts, 100ms pause between).
- Variants (in priority order):
1. strip trailing "(...)" / "[...]"
2. strip all parentheticals/brackets
3-5. drop last 1 / 2 / 3 tokens
6. keep first half of tokens (rounded up)
- Dedupes so identical variants don't re-query.
Safety — qualifier-aware filter:
- Variant keywords (Live / Remix / Acoustic / Extended / Unplugged /
Instrumental / Karaoke / etc.) are extracted from the original query
using word-boundary match so "edit" doesn't match "edition" and
"mix" doesn't match "remixed".
- If the original query carries any qualifiers, fallback results MUST
contain those qualifiers in their track names — otherwise a shortened
query could silently downgrade "Song (Live)" to the studio "Song".
- Tracks that fail the filter are dropped. If no variant produces
qualifier-matching tracks, returns ([], []) — the same outcome as the
original code, so no regression.
Contract preservation:
- Never raises to caller (outer try/except catches orchestration errors).
- Returns ([], []) on any failure path, same as original.
- Original-query successes take the same code path as before — no
behavioural change for queries that already work.
- Defensive guards for None/empty/non-string query (early return).
Logging:
- Preserves original warning/error/info messages for back-compat log
scraping.
- Adds fallback-success INFO log ("Tidal fallback query succeeded: ...")
so successful retries are visible in production logs.
- Adds qualifier-filter INFO/DEBUG logs with kept/total counts.
- Per-attempt exception logs at DEBUG (not ERROR) to avoid noise when
retries succeed.
- Traceback preserved on final failure.
Tests (16 regression tests in tests/test_tidal_search_shortening.py):
- Skowl's reported query reaches his working variant within the cap.
- Paren/bracket stripping priority.
- Short queries produce no variants.
- All variants unique (dedup guard).
- Progressive token drops present for long queries.
- Qualifier extraction is word-bounded (no "edit" in "edition").
- Qualifier extraction is case-insensitive.
- Track name filter requires ALL qualifiers.
- Empty-qualifier list passes every track (original-query behaviour).
All 292 tests pass.
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