Combined search over artists and albums

I have a tag “Mediterranean”. I apply it to some artists who play in that style entirely (Anouar Brahem’s). But some artists have done a few albums in that style ( Dave Holland “Hands”), so there I tag the album. How can I see all the albums with that tag?

If I look at Artists I don’t see Hollands “Hands”. If I look at Albums I don’t see Brahem’s albums. And I can’t find a way to Focus on Tags (unlike Sooloos).

I love Roon, big improvement. But I wrote a piece about how Sooloos suffers from excessive rigor, in the relational mold. A strongly typed graph, with specific navigations allowed for specific types. I think this is an example: only the navigations you have prepared for work. Looseness works well: never mind what type it is, just show me Mediterranean. Likewise, ECM is of course a label, plus I have some compilation albums with ECM in the title, I can focus on the label. But when I search, I don’t get a hit on the label.

It was worse in Sooloos, where a search on “blues” found some jazz tracks with “blues” in the title but didn’t find any of the blues genre, because search didn’t include genre. Fixed in Roon.

But how about a general search? I search for Miles Davis and find all those artists influenced by Miles according to the review text?

Ok, I went far afield. These are related issues, coming from the desire for untyped search. But the first issue about Artist and Album tags is directly practical.

Funny, about the tags… we’ve tried to make it super easy, and it seems everyone misses it:

These are great ideas… @mike, can you distill these into a work item for the team?

@AndersVinberg – keep the feedback coming!

Yes, I did find the tag button, but it is still type specific.
Maybe I can focus on an artist, select all albums, and tag them all? But that is not as useful as the artist tag, for future album imports.

I expressed my point about untyped search as “it is easier to find an album to buy at Amazon than to find an album to play in my own library”. Rude, but true.

I see… our search show search genres and tags and everything else too already though, are you not seeing that? or is it that the search is not hitting what you need? Maybe show me an example of a failed search?

Also, do you know about the text filter? I gave this example before, but if you are on the album browser, and you want to quickly get to AC/DC’s Back in Black, you can just hit the slash key ( / ) and itll pop up focus, with your input already focused. Then you can type “back in black”, or even a substring, and itll very quickly filter you down your list.

On album browser, it will only search for the strings you see on the screen: performers and titles, and on track browser, itll do a bit more. So it doesn’t get you everything. We have been thinking about an autocomplete type of search results, that let’s you see every data element type we search in realtime as you type. That might be what you really need here.

this is a big fault in the application right now. We had a lot of internal debate over a tag browser type screen, and it was deemed that we would wait to see how people wanted to use tags.

Right now the only way you can do it is to go the item with the tag, and then click on the tag. You will see all the data with that tag.

I know, a step in the right direction, but woefully incomplete.

I have now experimented a bit more, and the results are reasonable.
If I do a search, I see one item being the Mediterranean tag, and clicking on that gives me both artists and albums; this works from most starting points.
As you point out, there is no obvious way to focus on a tag from the focus dialog, that’s a minor UX flaw, not a structural issue.
The behavior I was complaining about is this: if I am in the album view and click on the little tag button and select Mediterranean, I see those albums that are explicitly tagged, but I don’t see the albums that are created by an artist who is tagged: in my case, I tagged Anouar Brahem so that not only all his current albums but his future albums will be part of the Mediterranean tag. But those don’t show up when I do a tag filter under albums. So the albums don’t inherit the tag from the artist. I understand your reasoning, such inheritance is a little iffy; in which cases should they inherit? From the main album artist only, or from “appearances”?

I think this is another example of the problem I have mentioned before, about excessive rigor. The behavior is rigorous and consistent, but the interaction between the user interface gestures and the data structures sometimes lead to unpredictable outcomes. In this case, clicking on the tag button does not show Anouar’s albums, but doing a search on the text string “Mediterranean” does.

These are tricky issues.

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