Trawl

Trawl is Nokkvi’s mix builder. You fill a crate with seeds — any mix of artists, albums, songs, genres, and playlists — and Trawl blends them into a play queue. It’s the fast way to say “an hour of these three artists and this one album, nothing under a minute,” without hand-building a playlist.

The crate is a workspace, not a saved playlist. It lives for the session: it survives closing and reopening the modal and accrues seeds while it’s shut, but it isn’t written to disk — logging out, switching servers, or restarting Nokkvi clears it.

Opening Trawl

Entry point	Where
The t hotkey	Any view except Settings
The anchor row at the top of Harbour	Leads the shelf list; its subtitle shows the crate’s current size and blend
The anchor button in the Queue header	Next to the other header controls
Right-click → Add to Mix	On rows in Albums, Artists, Songs, Genres, Playlists, the Similar tab, and the Queue

Add to Mix drops the focused row (or a whole selection) straight into the crate without opening the modal — a toast confirms Added N seed(s) to the mix (or Already in the mix if it’s a duplicate). It’s how you accrue a crate while browsing; open the modal later to blend and play.

Filling the crate

Inside the modal, the search bar at the top searches your whole library at once — artists, albums, songs, genres, and playlists together (the same search that powers Harbour). Type at least two characters; results come back grouped by type, each row with a + to add it to the crate (and a checkmark once it’s in).

Added seeds show as chips in the crate tray at the bottom of the modal, each with a type glyph, its name, and a remove button. The count in the title bar tracks the crate size.

Seed weights

When the blend is set to Weighted (see below), each chip grows ‹ n › steppers. The weight runs from 1 to 5 and decides how many tracks that seed contributes per pass — a weight-3 seed lands three tracks for every one from a weight-1 seed. Weights are stored but hidden and ignored under the other two blend modes.

Blending

The blend pills in the controls row decide how the seeds’ tracks are woven together:

Blend	What it does
Interleave (default)	One track per seed, round-robin, then around again until every seed is spent
Weighted	Same round-robin, but each seed contributes its weight in tracks per pass (1–5)
Shuffle all	Every seed’s tracks are pooled together and shuffled evenly

Across overlapping seeds — say an album seed and that album’s artist — a track never appears twice. Trawl skips a duplicate without spending the seed’s turn, so it keeps pulling until it lands a fresh track. That keeps the weighted ratios honest instead of letting overlap quietly eat a seed’s share.

Filters and caps

Album, artist, genre, and playlist seeds expand into all their songs, and four pickers in the controls row narrow what survives before blending:

Picker	Options	Default
Minimum length	No minimum · 0:30 · 1:00 · 1:30 · 2:00 or longer	1:00 or longer
Maximum length	No maximum · Under 6:00 · 8:00 · 10:00 · 15:00 · 20:00	No maximum
Rating	Any rating · Unrated only · 1 star and up … 5 stars only	Any rating
Max tracks	No limit · 25 · 50 · 100 · 200 tracks	No limit

A few rules make the filters behave the way you’d want:

• Songs you add by hand always play. A song seed — whether picked from the modal search or dropped in with Add to Mix — skips every filter. The filters only ever prune songs pulled in through a larger seed.
• The length filters ignore unknown durations. A track whose length Nokkvi doesn’t know (a stream, bad metadata) is never dropped by the minimum or maximum length filter.
• A star threshold drops unrated songs; Unrated only keeps just them. Set the rating filter to a star rating and anything you haven’t rated is excluded — unrated counts as below the bar, not exempt. Unrated only inverts that: the mix pulls only songs without a rating yet — never-rated or cleared back to zero — for a listen-and-judge queue.
• Big seeds are sampled to 50 tracks. Artist and genre seeds are trimmed to a random 50 songs each so one sprawling artist or genre can’t swamp the mix. Albums, playlists, and hand-picked songs go in whole.
• Max tracks is applied last. The cap truncates after blending, so the blend’s character (the round-robin or shuffle) survives the cut rather than the mix being trimmed seed-by-seed first.

If the filters remove everything, Trawl won’t play an empty mix — it tells you which filter emptied it (e.g. every song was under 1:00 — lower the minimum length) when a single filter is to blame, or asks you to loosen them when several are active together.

Playing the mix

Four buttons finish the job:

Button	Keyboard	What it does
Clear	—	Empties the crate but keeps your blend and filter choices
Add to Queue	Shift + A	Blends the crate and appends it to the current queue; the modal stays open
Play Mix	Ctrl + Enter	Blends the crate, replaces the queue with it, starts from the first track, and jumps to the Queue view
Save as Playlist	Shift + P	Resolves the mix to concrete songs, then opens a Save Mix as Playlist name dialog

The crate isn’t consumed by playing it — Play Mix keeps every seed so you can tweak a filter and replay. Think of it as a scratch pad you keep refining, not a one-shot.

Save as Playlist freezes the mix: it resolves the blend to a fixed list of songs and saves them as an ordinary playlist that won’t re-evaluate (the dialog says as much — Saves these N songs as an ordinary playlist — it won’t update). That’s the difference from a smart playlist, which stays live. It’s not a way to save the crate itself — the crate is a scratch pad and still clears on logout.

Keyboard

The modal is built to run from the keyboard. It opens with the cursor in the search field, so you can start typing seeds straight away.

Search and list

Key	Action
Enter	Add or remove the centered search result
Tab	Move down the list (also drops focus from the search field)
Backspace	Move up the list (keeps search focus, so it keeps deleting text)
/	Return focus to the search field
Shift + A	Add the whole mix to the queue — the keyboard twin of the Add to Queue button (append)
Ctrl + Enter	Play the mix — the keyboard twin of Play Mix (replaces the queue)
Shift + P	Save the mix as a playlist — the keyboard twin of Save as Playlist
Escape	Close the modal (the crate survives)

Tab leaves the search field while Backspace stays in it — the same asymmetry as the library views, where Backspace has to keep erasing your query.

Shift + A, Ctrl + Enter, and Shift + P are the mix actions in key form — append, replace, and save. Press any of them with an empty crate and Trawl says The crate is empty — add seeds first instead of doing nothing.

Editing the controls from the keyboard

The blend and the four filters — everything in the controls row — can be set without the mouse. Shift + Tab and Shift + Backspace walk a focus ring across that row, and Left / Right cycle the focused control’s value.

Key	Action
Shift + Tab	Step the ring forward — Blend → Minimum length → Maximum length → Rating → Max tracks, then back to nothing focused
Shift + Backspace	Step the ring backward through the same controls
Left	Step the focused control to its previous value (wraps around)
Right	Step the focused control to its next value (wraps around)

The ring has a resting slot — nothing focused — that every lap passes back through. That slot is how you let go of the arrow keys without leaving the modal: Escape is reserved for closing it, so stepping the ring back to nothing is what releases Left / Right. While nothing is focused, Left / Right do nothing.

Typing in the search field or pressing / also clears the ring — a focused search field owns the arrow keys, so the ring never fights it over Left / Right.