What’s slowing the team down is creating a domestically acceptable version of the new interface.
https://goo.gl/images/rZqqXh
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LOL. I thought it meant Mature or something similar. 
These would be lyrics without F bombs, but with plenty of innuendo and double entendres. 
Millennials are always complaining about how hard everything is…we didn’t have anything as nice as this and we managed. They are a disconnected audience that grew up getting anything they wanted and not appreciating how music is created. Let them learn or teach them what your parents should have taught you about music!!
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In demo’ing my system, Roon is the weakest link because Search is by far its greatest weakness. Many songs are unfindable and it makes me look stupid in front of people. I pray people don’t request a song.
Often I go to the artist and open up every album in Tidal to find the song…
It’s hard for me to believe that this isn’t the Highest Priority in product development. It is a Tidal issue to some extent also.
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I don’t use Tidal. Just have my own collection in Roon. I find the search feature brilliant. It is so quick and accurate. But… from the comments, I guess it does not scale very well to a Tidal-sized library.
I fully agree that Roon or Tidal’s search capabilities are hopeless at best. Especially searching for classical music is a tedious experience at best. I do hope Roon soon will offer fuzzy logic, the use of Boolean expressions, putting sentences in quotes etc.
As far as my experiences go it is not possible to do a search for say: Beethovens 5th performed by orchestra X with conductor Y.
To end with a positive note: because the search capabilities are so hopeless I sometimes find new things (serendipity).
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Another vote here for improvements to the search functionality, I find searching in Roon pretty dreadful.
As others have said, given that Roons primary purpose is curation of music files, accurate search should be a major priority.
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I have been complaining about the lack of a search function worthy of the name since I subscribed (granted this was “only” ten months ago). I have added this to the feature requests (without any reaction), so I’m glad this thread has appeared.
Please guys, put some welly in it.
It has always baffled me that on the one hand Roon uses a noSQL database structure and on the other hand uses metadata which is your typical tabular style data.
The lack of a decent search function is what makes my wife avoid Roon like the plague. Not really conducive to marital bliss…
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+1 Totally agree with what’s been said earlier; impractical, embarrassing to not functioning. Unfortunate I must say; it’s keeping me from both extending after the demo and buying new hardware, a roon end point. Aa long as this is not resolved, I wont be using Roon.
I think you are overestimating the difficulty of a decent search function. What I - and as far as I can tell all the other posters - want is simply a parametrized search function, i.e. a search window of sorts where you can input stuff like ‘artist = Alice Cooper’ + ‘track = Elected’.
Since Roon has to categorize this data in one way or another, because playlists contain both artist and track as well as album data, it should be quite simple to set up an ‘advanced’ search function.
Well… I say advanced, but in database terms it’s not even advanced, it’s basic.
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Yes, of course.
“Advanced” is the thing @John_V talked about, where Tidal knew that John Sheeran is the most relevant answer at the moment to “Castle” out of thousands of possibles:
That kind of thing requires vast data volumes — and it needs data beyond your own experience, to address the specific scenario.
When it comes to a database metadata search as you mention, it is of course basic. Roon is actually more advanced than that because it doesn’t require that you specify the field. You can type “Tutu” or “Miles Davis” in the search field and Roon figures out which is relevant and finds it.
In general, I prefer the un-categorized search. For example, “Bags” is Milt Jackson’s nickname, and there are albums (e.g. “Bags & Trane”) and tracks (“Bags’ Groove”). In fact, “Bags’ Groove is a track and an album (by Miles Davis, named for the tune, in turn named for Jackson), and a composition, and if I search for “Bags”, Roon presents the albums and tracks and composition, and even albums that contain that composition.
And similarly, if I search for Marcus Miller I get albums where he is a performer, or composer, or producer. I don’t need to know the difference.
But there are certainly cases where you want to do a very specific search, just like there are cases that benefit from Boolean logic. Probably mostly classical…?
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It actually doesn’t work like that at all. It does - sort of, with a lot of omissions and mistakes - for the local library. When it comes to Tidal, it returns the most ludicrous results.
Don’t believe me? Do me a favour and do a search on The Great Gig in the Sky and see what comes up. You’d think Pink Floyd would come up first, wouldn’t you? After all, Roon advertises that it knows about music…
Well… It doesn’t. There is no AI or MI present in the software and this is annoying and as the OP and others repeatedly stated very embarrassing.
All this frustration can be solved with the most basic of queries. It baffles me why something as ludicrously simple and basic is still missing from Roon.
It really doesn’t impress me that whenever I think of a track I haven’t heard in years and of which I can’t remember the album, I have to go to any random search engine - even Yahoo Search - and just type in the name of the song and presto… there it is.
So why not add a useful, easy to implement, parametric search. I sincerely believe you might hear a chorus of cheers around the world from Roon subscribers. It will probably sound something like this: Fiiiiiiiiiiiinaaaaaaaallyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
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I believe you.
Haven’t found this myself because I never search for tracks.
One more vote here. I wonder if the weakness of the search engine comes from the fact that it doesn’t know which part of the search string is the title of a song, and which part the artist. This feature is more of a hassle than a help at the present time. I would rather have a search by artist window, and another search by title window.
If all else fails, behind the scenes, the sever could conduct a youtube or google search, and use the result to figure out what result should be at the top of the list.
Another approach could be to keep track of which song people click on when they’ve searched “The Great Gig in the Sky”. After a while the Roon server should learn that people are usually looking for Pink Floyd. Or maybe the sorting could be done by highest score achieved on billboard charts (|Pink Floyd will higher than some obscure band or remix).
You’re absolutely right in stating that Roon doesn’t know which part of the search string is title or album or track or composer or whatever.
It would be a fun feature to get a return on a search that references music charts or number of worldwide clicks, but that would be a lot of work and I fear the results would still be wonky.
What’s strange to me is that Roon retrieves search results in a way that permits the software to display the results in tabular form: you get a grid with albums, you get a grid with artists, you even get a grid in a table layout with tracks, artist and album.
If you look at the search results from your local library, you see that everything is neatly laid out (for the most part, some obscure stuff won’t show up right until you’ve edited the information yourself, but that’s understandable).
The results from Tidal are unsorted and completely random, which is understandable as well because Roon retrieves a lot of information from what is essentially a data lake, which is to say that the data is unstructured and instead of being stored in neat tables, it is stored with identifiers. Think of it as the difference between an Excel table for your local library with everything in rows and columns and for Tidal a list with a reference number followed by an artist on the first line, a reference number for an album title on the following line (not necessarily for the same artist) and so on.
Such a list style database is a noSQL database which is used for big data (I’m oversimplifying here, but this is the gist of it).
Still, Roon manages to organize the query result into tabular data (artists in a grid, albums in a grid, tracks in a grid…) but the organization ends there. You get a data dump instead of an organized result.
But… somewhere in the software, the query result must be organized in an object of some kind, maybe an in-memory data array, maybe in a temporary table.
This object must contain artist information, album information, track information, composer information and so on, because otherwise the information would never appear on your display.
And now we come to the root of the matter: in data retrieval, once you have the nature of the data (this string is the artist’s name, that string is the album title…) it’s very much doable to generate a table object on which you can apply sorting and filtering.
Hence my repeated suggestion of a parametrized search: give us a search field for artist, a search field for album title, a search field for track name…
Will the result be perfect? Probably not because of the fluency of Tidal’s content and the fact that there are albums out there with very little information on the content (no composer data, no performer data) but it would yield the bulk of the results and I for one would be very happy with that.
Failing that, a number of separate searches as you suggest would be a liveable alternative.
So please, dear Roon developers, implement this simple parametrized search. If you want to dazzle us in the far future with a truly intelligent non parametrized search, by all means do (or don’t, it’s up to you), but the simple, directed search must surely be in the cards…
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I totaly agree in this matter, and I have also adressed this in another post. I love Roon, and use it almost every day. But search engine…
When I have party my friends always have big problems to find what they want - and they often give up. Easy with Tidal app or Youtube. They laugh when I tell them what I paid for this «App».
This need to be better, and I also want an option for advanced search. Where I can choose to search for «title», artist and more
What about a listening tool, like «Shazam»? A friend can play something from his/her phone or something. Roon listen and find it in your library. Supercool
OK… better search engine is good👍
I tried to get my kids into Roon but the search inadequacys drove them away. They would ask “You PAY for this daddy?” This would come back to bite me when I lectured them on frivolous spending.
I often use YouTube/Google to find what I want, then plunk the specifics into Roon. This harks back to the rituals and limitations of my analog days (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
It’s almost as if Roon tossed the search functionality development at a couple of high schoolers and said “Have at it kids, do your worst” and unfortunately…
Yes! I’ve found myself more often than not opening Tidal and finding the song there, ending up either playing it form Tidal directly and quitting Roon, or marking it as favorite and then plying it from Roon. Horrible solution, and not very user friendly. Hope this is a part of the 1.6 update!
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Just noticed Tidal has added more intelligence to their IPhone app. They are creating subject matter mixes - My Mix 1, …based on your previous music.
This is way cool. It’s my go to for steaming mixes in the car now.
This is way cool. It’s my go to for steaming mixes in the car now.
Sad thing is Tidal was the absolute worse music software and I felt like Roon was a step up, but given the $$ cost of Roon and it’s poor performance/search Tidal in some ways is better now. Hoping Roons next update is of real value and not cosmetic touches or fixes that never seem to fix the bugs I continue to see.
Is Roon composed of creative designers with vision or coders? The next update will provide that answer.
This is the worst thing about Roon, and the issue that might make me not renew.
I won’t even give any examples of how bad and embarrassing it is, the search function is so obviously not fit for purpose.
Not living up to “Roon turns this… …into this” I can live with (for a while) and the just-about adequate Squeezebox integration (for a while), but the junior coders idea of a search function?
Please.