You’re janking my chain now, Danny 
I think you know exactly what I mean. When I search for help by the Beatles I am not searching for With a little help from my friends. If I wanted that, I’d have typed in “little help Beatles”.
With a more general search, say I wanted to find all tracks called Help by anyone, I’d be wading through a mire because I can’t specify that I want just the one word title.
So here’s a general observation: I’m all for the application of context in the search. I’m opposed to Roon not letting me specify the context.
A solution could be to make the search more context aware: launch the search from artists, it’ll search for artists, launch the search from albums, search for albums, add a track overview and do the same, add a composer overview, rinse and repeat, launch the search from the general overview screen, search everything and bring back the kitchen sink.
This is my biggest issue with search. Often, I’m looking for a new release that I want to check out and search by album title never seems to find it. Instead, I have to search by Artist.
I think a plot has been lost. I just typed Help into my search box. Help! Was prompted and the album Help! Was top of the pile. Track 1? You guessed it, Help!
So in three click I’m playing what I searched for. The other stuff is not relevant now as I’m playing my song. It could however be of interest.
What’s the problem? No, don’t answer, life is too short…
Not at all… You searched for 1 word! Try searching for “love” or “black” – I’d much rather see my library’s results first, which is why we built the product this way!
It’s because you have that track in your library. They don’t.
Are you getting enough hits from your library that the albums section is filling up with library results so the TIDAL only results have to be on page 2 of “View All” ?
I just searched for an album I never heard of but saw that it was released a month ago. It showed up in a few seconds looking like this:
I picked 10 random albums not in my library released in the last month and all came back as the “Top Result”.
I don’t understand why I should be searching for something I already know all about. In the case of “Help!” by The Beatles, I go to Tracks and filter Track and Artist. I don’t need a search for that! I need a search for the case I don’t know the exact title, name etc. For this I want to get useful suggestions.
I think @Frank_Daman had a point. Maybe an Advanced Search option is needed, in addition to the Focus. Focus, to me, seems to be just that: a focus on your library. Search should be literally searching everything. Maybe a drop down like in Qobuz’s native app. Which has artists, albums, then tracks. Or - Did you mean? Like Google. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know what thats called in programmer speak. I will say it has improved but we’re not there yet. Regardless, kudos for the effort thus far guys.
There is already the option “only show my libary (yes/no)” in the search. Maybe it would be helpful to expand it to „my libary only / both / not in my libary“?
That may be part of the issue. I get a lot of partial matches (including titles not in my library), but the exact match, if it is there, is not easily seen.
Edit: Maybe it is fixed in 1.6. I just tried a few and they all worked perfectly.
That is not my experience. However, I’m generally searching for albums on the release day or within a few days of it. Maybe that makes the difference.
It actually seems to take a few days (> 5) to find them via the Roon search. This is also my experience.
I did a search on a bunch of albums released on the Feb 1 and all results were as expected.
Is it Roon or the metadata sources? You guys want to blame Roon for everything…
No one is “blaming” Roon; we are reporting issues we are having with Roon and suggesting improvements. This is a positive. And thanks to Danny and the Roon guys for listening, rather than just making it-works-for-me posts, like you.
Hi Anders. I know you are referring mostly to search but you’ve commented on Boolean logic and regular expressions in other threads, so I will just post this here.
Have you ever seen Foobar Columns UI? This is essentially Boolean logic for tags presented as a series of filters. It’s really powerful and useful.
I am NOT suggesting that Roon look like this. I do think this type of functionality would be useful to many. It’s not any less technical than Focus but allows for a lot more layers.
It‘s just a subjective impression. I picked out some unknown albums/tracks from Tidals „What‘s new“ and entered them into Roons search. But that doesn‘t have to be Roons fault and can have many reasons.
