I’m not at Frank’s level of indignation about search by any measure. But search does act unexpectedly/oddly at times. It appears to be some sort of interaction between Roon and Tidal:
(1) Seeking refuge from the flood of Trump news, we decided to watch the Andy Griffith show. They had a fantastic bluegrass band on which triggered a discussion that we never listen to bluegrass and it is an interesting form of music to explore.
(2) I first searched “bluegrass” - not having any “real” bluegrass in my library, the only hits from the library were some album and song titles using all or part of the term. Not real bluegrass - just a few songs from compilations that referred to the term.
(3) Trying something different, I went to genres. Tidal doesn’t have a bluegrass genre - so no joy there – and Roon’s bluegrass genre only showed me the few artists from V/A compilations in my library that happened to be classified within bluegrass. Can’t get to Tidal via the Roon genres unless the albums are already in your collection, so the Roon genre didn’t dig deep to find bluegrass within Tidal for me.
(4) So I had to go to Google. Searching “top 10 bluegrass albums” the first recommendation was Bill Monroe, apparently the father of modern bluegrass. Sounds like a reasonable place to start.
(5) Back to Roon Search, type in “Bill Monroe.” No hits for artists or albums. I only see one hit, way down in the tracks list - one song by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. This is the father of modern bluegrass and there is one hit with one track.
(6) Click on that track. Then the album. Oh wow, this whole album is Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass boys, from the Country Music Hall of Fame.
(7) Add that album to library. Oh wow, whole bio of Bill Monroe pops up. Now that he’s in my library, Roon shows 29 - 29!!! more albums by Bill Monroe. 29.
Looking back - original search for Bill Monroe, before adding anything to the library, had literally almost no hits - just that one track. That was luckily enough of a thread to pull to get to more Bill Monroe. But WTF? How does a search for Bill Monroe yield a single track only when the guy has 30 total albums (that I have found) in Tidal?
(8) Now that I have Bill Monroe in my library (still just that first album), a search now yields lots of Bill Monroe hits - his name solo, him with his Bluegrass Boys, other collaborations.
I don’t get it. It’s almost like you have to prime the pump for search. Hold search’s hand and encourage it that there are hits to be found and find clues, add to library, and then it works.
Odd. Don’t know if that’s Roon’s fault. Tidal is a huge collection. All I can say is that Roon Search doesn’t apparently work perfectly with Tidal stuff not in your library. The other possibility is that Roon was working very slowly last night, and maybe eventually it was going to pop search results I didn’t wait for. I didn’t see the munching Roon icon indicating it was still processing, but maybe if I’d have waited a while more search results would have popped.
Still, very weird, and I had noticed similar things in the past. This one just stuck out.
This is still better than anything I had before Roon. In 15 minutes I was listening to whole albums by the best of bluegrass artists. So not really complaining, just wondering how this happens.