I am constantly embarrassed by Roons search ability. When friends are over and can never find what they are looking for. But one simple search on YouTube or google and there it is. They always give me the look like what’s the deal?
Plus it’s buggy on iPad. Really a good try but really not what I had hoped Roon could or would be.
Perhaps an example of one of your searches might help people have an idea of the problem?
An advanced search option would be very helpful. I find when the search fails for me it’s when I’m combining a song title and artist together. Separate fields to search a specific metadata category would provide an additional option when the initial blunt “search everything” option fails to parse the query.
I share your sentiments. I always brag about Roon to one of my sons and twice he asked me to play a specific song and it took several attempts to find it. There is no way he would ever consider paying for Roon. On the other hand, I really like Roon and hope that some day soon they improve the search.
I read this thread just after my granddaughter wanted to listen to “Castle on the Hill” (new to me). Since she didn’t know how to spell the OA’s name (Ed Sheeran) I first searched in Roon for “Castle on the Hill”. Here’s what I got:
The list goes on, and Ed’s original version finally appeared as the 50th song on the list. BTW, it was the only one that had dynamic lyrics attached to it. (Isn’t it the same song?)
Then I opened up TIDAL, typed “Castle” (didn’t get to type “on the Hill”) and here is its search result:
Since both searches were just within TIDAL (I had no performances in my library), the comparisons are at least reasonable, if not fair.
I can only hope that the integration with TIDAL is shored up before another “integration” is attempted. This is one of those WTFs that has remained unfixed for far too long, IMO.
I agree. It reminds me of “Ask Jeeves” and dial up modems. OK that’s a bit harsh but we had some folk visit and after dinner the phone was passed around for people to search up and play a track with an objective for the others to correctly identify the name and artist. The performance of Roon search and our friends’ music knowledge was lamentable.
Time for improvement.
Search algorithms are definitely weak. I’ve had similar issues where Roon needs multiple searches and serious digging to find what should have come up as a first page result. I often compare in Tidal direct or Spotify just to see if I’m going mad and I get what I expect.
Definitely room for improvement.
I agree. I’ve had the same embarrassment when searching for songs when friends are over. When it’s just myself looking for random things I don’t seem to mind. But when “put on the spot” it’s embarrassing. I hope Roon improves their search engine in my library.
I have to agree it’s not the best and you have to make sure every word is spelt correctly it won’t do any intelligent matching.
Roons search capability is difficult to defend even for the moderators that do a 
job on this site.
Google’s worth is its search ability of course.
In the spirit of Christmas, I am thankful I don’t have to get up every 20 minutes to flip the album, smell discwasher while trying to regain refocus on the next side as I search the album layout for the lyrics. Oh wait, that’s why I got into audio many years ago. 
Merry Christmas to One and All. 
This is a great example that makes the issue painfully obvious. I’ve had similar problems with Roon search and I will add my vote for improvements.
Agree the search results in Roon aren’t very helpful here. But one point of order, if by parental rating you are referring to the M next to Castle on the Hill then that means MQA. E means explicit.
Should we post this in feature requests?
Agreed with above, especially for spelling issues.
I would just temperate a bit because when I search an Artist or an album, the search bar often suggests it before I am finished with typing.
You are quite right, @Judelow. On my particular search, there were no “Castles” in my library. I don’t think the autofill feature pertains to TIDAL info. So once I typed in Castles, Roon had no immediate suggestions.
True but this is challenging. Search is unusual in that it becomes better when you have a vast data volume to process. Google and Amazon process petabytes, probably hundreds of them, and we begin to sniff at exabytes. Spotify and even Tidal have a lot more data to analyze than Roon does.
It has long been observed that it is easier to find things on the internet than on your own computer, and “easier” includes the quality of the answer or recommendation, e.g. knowing that Ed Sheeran is trending now, not two years ago and maybe not two years in the future.
If Tidal exposed their intelligent search capability to Roon through an API, Roon could exploit that, but it would still be tricky to do seamless integration between local content, Tidal, and future services.
Of course we want it. And there has been a lot of discussion of cloud-based extensions to Roon that would allow learning from all the users, and maybe from Google and Amazon too.
Just saying it’s neither easy nor cheap, and big projects have to be weighed against others.
(Personally, I rate this low, based on my usage habits, I mostly explore relationships in my known library. But there are others who rate all intelligence low and just want folder browsing. It’s a tricky balancing act for the team.)
Roon and Tidal are/would be collectimg data for a very focused category.
Based on Google’s/You Tube advertising domination most consumers initial web access, even when they know the exact name of the site, navigate websites through google. I expect Roon users would as well. How many actually use the Roon Discovery page? Not many I would expect. I have +100,000 tracks, 3.5 tb of music and I don’t find it useful.
If I could google search through Roon library it would be a much different experience. For me the best launch interface would be a single text box with Roon written on top of the page. If I were new business development at Google I would accept metadata from others and allow them to access with a restricted api. Win/Win.
Search is under active development. Some dynamic lifting and one day we may no longer have the sand kicked in our face at the beach by other software !
Love these little hints at development, it’s the next best thing to an actual update 
@AndersVinberg, perhaps you are right about needing more contextual data. Maybe TIDAL was able to detect trends, or maybe they pulled the original artist, or maybe they pulled the most popular. Hard to know. Roon is missing a Relevance filter.
Google has spoiled me, I admit. All that fuzzy logic for misspellings, extraneous words, and paraphrasing. An amazing service. BUT, to your point, I have seen Google search applied to smaller corporate websites, and the results aren’t nearly as satisfying.
A peripheral issue/worry: with all the buzz over Qobuz and other possible Roon partners, I wonder how willing TIDAL is becoming to undertake deeper integration projects.
