But it looks from your screenshot like With a Little Help From My Friends is in your library?
Pardon me, you know your library and I don’t.
Interesting. To me it seems the algorithm isn’t too well tuned yet and the results are mediocre and / or incomplete. Therefore my conclusion Search isn’t very trustworthy. Another example for this - a search for the term “liszt” (a bach top result, as I’ve learnt 
):
The Top Result is an artist this time. Again, I would have expected the composer, having Howard Shelleys complete Liszt piano recordings from Hyperion in my local library.
A note here: if the Top Result already has the only Artist Result listed, the Artist Result row is redundant and could get suppressed.
Things get - well, limited - when I look into composition results:
What’s missing is an indication on how many results I got but scrolling down I’m convinced something’s missing here. Cmd + a helps a little:
So 50 results were returned. That’s just some arbitrary selection out of what’s in the library:
I’ve checked this with bach now, too - obviously 50 results are the hard limit here. Now I would want to know the reasoning behind it. If such a limit gets imposed shouldn’t there be a direct way to bring me to “more” too?
Another, this time positive mention: that’s what I got with the search term “list”:
Good one. 
Absolutely no need for apologies. It’s a relevant question/observation.
So apparently the search function puts library entries first. Not sure what the point is in that.
It would be useful to include a switch to specify if library tracks (or albums, artists, composers, whatever) should be given preference, just like there is a switch for limiting the search to the library itself.
Turning around in circles here. Still a lot of work to do for the developers…
ROTFL!
I haven’t even dared to search for classical music yet. Who knows what a search for “planets” might yield?
See the screenshot of the composer view: yes.
Of course. Silly me.
So it has preferred Liszt Ferenc Chamber Orchestra over Franz. Oh well, can’t win them all.
Yep that’s the case. I just think it’s a poor choice.
Let’s say you want to listen to this Miles Davis fella people have been talking about all these years. How does Roon help you figure out that “Kind of Blue” would be a good place to start? It doesn’t.
So if you want to check out an artist’s “top tracks” to get a feel for who they are, you have to go to Wikipedia, or TIDAL, or Spotify, or some source outside of Roon.
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Good point. Consider starting a feature request.
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I completely agree with everything you mention. The search function is terrible. It’s so frustrating just trying to find a track on Tidal by track name. I’ve given up on this as it usually takes me about 5mins and the track I’m currently listening to has finished!
I hope this gets fixed. If Spotify hifi tier comes along I’ll probably jump ship and use Spotify connect and the client to replace my roon end points.
For what it’s worth I’ve found that, while slower than before, Search in 1.6 has gotten smarter about finding tracks with titles that contain commonly used words if you throw in hints from both the title and the artist.
For example, if I’m searching for You Know How To Love Me by Phyllis Hyman and I type “You Know” because I’m lazy or I don’t remember the exact title, I see this. Not what I want.
But if instead, I type “you know Hyman”, I get these results. Succes!
Once upon a time, a time so long ago that most of you weren’t even born, there was a thing called a record shop, where they sold things called records, with analogues of concerts on them … too difficult to explain to young people nowadays … but anyhow, you’d go into one of the record shops, and behind the counter there’d be a guy probably called Steve, and he’d be wearing a jumper probably with leather elbow patches, and you’d say “Hi Steve, have you got Kleiber’s Beethoven 5” and he’d say “Eric or Carlos?”.
And that’s what I expect from a search. A Steve. Steve knew that Beethoven was a composer, that he composed symphonies, that 5 was one of them, and that two great conductors, Carlos and Eric Kleiber had recorded versions of them.
roon has a way to go!
To be fair, if I search for “Beethoven 5 Kleiber”, roon does get the Carlos Kleiber version, but thinks I want a track not the whole work, and I also get offered the Jackson 5, Claudio Abbado’s beethoven 3 (for no obviously good reason), and if I scroll down to compositions roon does offer me 397 performances, and I can sort those by conductor, and stab about and finally find the Kleibers in the 101-150 range. Steve was better though.
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Yeah, I remember those days. Only where I live the guy was more often than not called Rudy.
Steve and Rudy not only knew what you were after, they also knew exactly in which bin the record sat.( for the youngsters: bins were big wooden containers for those big black discs in cardboard sleeves)
I have no idea what the developers were thinking when they crancked out this … erm… ehhh… crap shoot, for lack of a better word.
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Rudy was Steve’s brother. They used to work together, but fell out over how to spell Shostakovich and so went separate ways.
Thing is, if you think to the future, and towards a “Hey Siri” or “Hey Alexa” (or even “Hey Steve”) world then straight phrase based search is where it is going to need to be.
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I get what you mean but the search function is still aeons away from that.
Besides, natural language queries on touchscreen devices are cumbersome. I much prefer a regular keyboard instead of all that thumb fiddling.
And voice control? Oohboy…
Very annoying for music software. Imagine the scene…
Me: Roon, find Die Ritt der Walküren
Roon: no result for Dirrit they’re well ooren
Me: Ritt der Walküren, you stupid machine
Roon: no result for Stupid Machine
Me: the flight of the Valkyries, don’t you understand German
Roon: did you mean Jermaine Jackson?
Good lord, I wonder what chaos voice control would cause.
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I’m happy enough with typing, I’m just saying as a new user my expectation for a search for “Beethoven Piano Concerto 5 Barenboim” would be that roon would nail it. But roon gives me a track called Beethoven’s 5 secrets on an album called “The Piano Guys”. This is pretty poor. Steve, Rudy, and dare I say J River would have nailed it. Where is the best place on this forum to post such that my views get noticed by someone with the power to respond to them or tell me what I am doing wrong?
Whilst I definitely agree that the new Search function in Roon is not always intuitive, it usually gets what you want if you know how and where to look. With your search string, it showed Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto under compositions. I chose that, and then filtered on Barenboim to give me:
Yes, it would be better if it had ranked these five performances by Barenboim top of the 277 performances of the 5th concerto, rather than me having to filter them, but I did get there in the end.
As I say, definitely room for improvement. I’m sure that the Roon team read these posts and will take account of your experience, so all is not lost.
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