Can't filter by date format (. - or / separators)

macOS 10.14.4/iMac Late 2013 21.5"/Roon

I have thousands of live concerts, and I have the albums named by date… i.e. “2019.05.11 (Venue, City, State)”

I used to be able to search for these shows via the Filter bar. Now I can only filter to the year. i.e. I get results when I type “2019” but type “2019.05” and the filter loses the results. When searching by year this doesn’t really narrow it down if I have 300-400 albums starting with the year.

Can we get this fixed in the next release?

You might have better luck with a different delimiter.

I’ve got over 4K albums labeled this way. I wouldn’t change my delimiter because Roon stopped filtering correctly in the latest build. Worked fine for years. Works fine for the search function. Simply broke with filtering.

Hi @Matt_Simpson,

Can you please share a screenshot of the search you are performing + the results and upload a few examples of such albums so we can take a look from our end? You can share screenshots to this site by using these instructions and you can upload a few of these albums to a shared Dropbox / Google Drive / send.firefox.com link and private message it to me.

Thanks,
Noris

Here’s a few screenshots. These are mostly 24bit albums, but many are just freely available live recordings. In all cases I create the album name myself via iTunes. All files are ALAC imported from FLAC via XLD.

If I go into iTunes right now and rename any album with the date format, it now becomes unfilterable beyond the first four digits (yyyy). The album name format is yyyy.mm.dd. I usually have additional info in parentheses but that’s not necessary to hit this bug. This occurs with both my Roon libraries, one on a '18 Mac mini at home and the other on a '13 iMac in my office.

Please note, this also occurs with / as separators. Looks like maybe it’s not picking up anything, as evidenced by the Chris Robinson Brotherhood shows not being found when I search “2012/” which also returns nothing. See the 1973- and 1973/ string to filter concerts from 1973, which also doesn’t work.

Hi @Matt_Simpson,

Thanks for sending those screenshots over, I will put in a request for the QA team to review your findings here. Just to make sure that we are able to reproduce this behavior that you describe, can you please send us a few albums that exhibit this behavior as a shared Dropbox or Google Drive link?

Thanks,
Noris

Sorry, I can’t upload files from my office computer (can’t even run Roon on the network, dangit!). This is so easily reproducible by renaming any ALAC album in iTunes that I’m sure you could reproduce with any files. I just randomly selected 5 albums with regular names and changed them to a date format. Now none are filterable.

Hi @Matt_Simpson,

No worries. I have submitted a ticket to the QA team based on the info you have provided and I will be sure to let you know once I hear back.

– Noris

Hi @noris … I wonder if this is actually a variation of the issue:

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Thanks for hopefully bringing my original post under attention. I still haven’t seen any action on Roon’s part. Maybe now something will happen? In the form of repaired function, hopefully, but a proper answer on where they stand with this, would also be great, after all this time. I still can’t search for stuff the way I want to. Because of lack of (re)action from Roon’s part, I sort of lost interest in the software, but foremost in sharing thoughts about how this part of the software could be improved. Still use Roon to play music, but that’s only part of what I would want it to do.

Hi @anon47919701,

Thanks for bringing that post to my attention, I was unaware of this already being reported.

@A_dN - Our apologies for the issue. I just checked our internal ticket tracker and I do indeed see that a ticket was logged regarding the special characters you have mentioned and the ticket is currently in the dev teams queue.

Although I can’t quite say when exactly it will be addressed, it is being tracked and as soon as I have any updates to share with you, myself or another Roon staff member will be sure to let you know. Thank you in advance for your patience.

– Noris

any chance this will get fixed so I can search for over 2,000 albums? I can’t use Roon currently due to the terrible macOS core bug, but it’d nice if this reverted to functionality from the previous release

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Hi @Matt_Simpson,

I took a look at our internal tracker today, and I can see that your ticket is still in our development queue.

This means our developers are still planning to look at this, but we don’t yet have a timeframe for when that’s going to happen.

Once the ticket has been scheduled and work begins, I’ll have a better sense of timing here. Thanks in advance for your patience!

Is this issue ever going to be fixed? I have thousands of live concert recordings that have dates in the name and still can’t filter them. I’ve put up with it for over a year now. It seems like a simple break to get into a future build so paying users can easily access content in a large library.

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I’m new to Roon and still loading my music, to date I’ve only loaded a small portion of my music, so it’s good to find these probems before I get to far into my setup. I have a searies of CDs that I renamed using the YYYY.MM format, and I use the / to search, so once reading this I see that I can search for various CDs but as soon as I include a special character, it fails. For example
UNCUT: 2019.08 - A Real Good Time
hitting / and typing UNCUT: as soon as I type the : I get “Try removing some focus criteria”
Bummer as I liked this method.

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I’m going to bump this every month. I have over 5,000 albums with this format now that I can’t filter or easily find by the title (date). That’s 1/4 of my library and over 17,000 hours of music. How is this acceptable to break and not fix for a year and a half?

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Hi @Matt_Simpson,

I just checked your ticket status and it’s still in the development queue and it has not reached the devs just yet. Once I have any further details on the ticket’s progress, I’ll be sure to let you know!

How can you guys advertise search and still not fix a simple thing that can impact filtering thousands of albums in a user’s collection? It’s just baffling to me that you’re aware of issues like this and won’t fix them for literal years while marketing improvements. Please fix this finally and stop telling me you’re aware of this bug!

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Thanks once more @Matt_Simpson for bumping this. I am getting tired of the fact that the “little” things like this (mostly in the nooks and crannies of Roon) get hardly any attention at all. I don’t write down my thoughts on Roon very often - every other major update or so - because I don’t know what to do to get the attention or be taken serious by any member of the development team and really feel like a fool for still wanting this fixed. For me, the waiting around has really made me lose interest in and love for Roon. The recent 1.8 update hasn’t fixed that yet.

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I looked into this because it came to my attention in another topic.

The reason this changed (back in Roon 1.1 or 1.2) was due to performance reasons… this was an unbearably slow search and was transitioned to use a new way to do indexing. the non-alpha-numeric characters were thrown out in the index.

Theoretically, it could be brought back, but it may have unforeseen consequences with larger libraries, and since it’s been this way since 2016, this has been super low on the priority list. The ticket is indeed in our system, but no developer resources have been allocated to fixing this.

As a workaround, I suggest you use dashes. I realize this may or may not be easy, depending on how you did the rename. Using tags would be even better.