Well, find the result of the search might be a good start. I apologize beforehand because this post will be rant-like. Roon’s reaction to requests for a decent search have been frustratingly beside the point, hence my irritation.
The original search was virtually useless when it came to finding tracks and albums. Even with artists it was hit and miss.
A search function for a music curation application should be able to:
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Find the exact artist the user specifies;
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Find the exact album the user specifies (with or without specification of the artist);
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Find the exact track title the user specifies (with or without… You get the picture)
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Find the composer the user specifies (you guessed it, with or without…)
Now, instead of getting exact matches, we get unrelated results, we get randomly sorted tracks. I can’t even make up my mind which is worse: the old or the new search.
I don’t want “context related search results” because there is no way Roon can deduce in which context I am searching.
I might be looking up tracks to build a playlist. I might have visitors over who want to listen to something I rarely listen to (which renders both the content of my library and my listening habits irrelevant).
Whatever the reason for the search, I want this to be as fast and accurate as possible. No unsorted lists on which I have to apply a filter. If I want to find Help by the Beatles, I want to be able to tell Roon: track = Help (exact match) + artist = Beatles (exact match). I don’t want to see With a little help from my friends by the Beatles in the results list unless I specifically asked for tracks containing the word help.
Same for albums, same for classical works: composer = Chopin + artist = Barenboim + composition = Nocturnes. This should get me what I want to find.
I might be looking for something I can’t quite remember, in which case a partial match should yield results that are relevant enough to get me to the desired result, possibly by narrowing down the results (follow up screen).
I can’t seem to get this point across. Brian just dismisses this kind of search as - and I quote him here - obsolete.
The current search function is an absolute waste of effort in my book. It can have it’s uses in the “browsing parts” of Roon, but a search should be a search. The user tells the program what to look for, specifies one or more criteria, specifies if one or more of the search terms should be an exact match or not and that’s it.
Nothing revolutionary, just something that has been around for decades and that every man and his donkey have incorporated in all kinds of lexicon type applications.
Roon acts as a music library doesn’t it? And when connected to Tidal and Qobuz it acts as a library joined with a catalog, right?
Well, libraries and catalogs have one thing in common: an index. A cross referenced index even.
It absolutely baffles me that over a hundred years ago people managed to do this with astounding accuracy using nothing but index cards and Roon tries to reinvent the wheel and manages to produce an almost random smorgasbord of scattershot results.
So please, please, please, give us a search with criteria: artist, album, track or work, composer. Yes, I know this has to be done with several criteria fields.
Yes, I know you can browse Roon for artists and albums but that is not the point. The point is getting an accurate result without surplus garbage.
End of frustrated post 
