I find the new “funnel” icon for filtering to be most useful, because it does the filtering character by character. So I’m in the Album view, and I click the funnel and start typing Moz and I see my Mozart albums. If instead I type Munc I see my Munch albums, plus the Keith Jarrett Bergen/München concert. This is as we would expect, just important to note that the funnel filter can look at both the composer or artist (conductor).
HOWEVER it doesn’t look at both at the same time, something I hadn’t realized. So if I type Mozart Munch I get nothing, because there is no text field that contains both. There are albums that contain both, but not in the same text field (tag).
The more explicit search that @Geoff_Coupe suggested gets around this.
On the other hand, the immediate visual feedback of the funnel-filter is a very simple way of addressing the issue,inmost cases. If you have a reasonable number of Munch albums, you’ll probably see the one you want right away. Mozart is less selective,you might have a lot of those. And if you start typing “The Beatles” the first four characters are not very selective, skip them.
And I think this field-agnostic filtering is important. I have written at length about how I don’t want to be a librarian or curator, managing metadata. Ok, we know the roles played by Mozart and Munch, but what if i search for Boulez? I have albums where Boulez is a conductor, a composer, or both. But with this informal search I don’t have to worry about it, I can just search for Boulez. Just as I can in Amazon, or Google.
Roon handles the Boulez case “correctly” (in my judgment), but is overly rigorous in the Mozart Munch case. @Danny ?