I was looking for a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto from 1962. Alfredo Campoli is accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under John Pritchard. as far as I can see there are three releases on Qobuz that contain this recording:
Counting soloist, orchestra and conductor the Beulah version contains six searchable performers in total: Alfredo Campoli, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, John Pritchard, plus Nathan Milstein, Philharmonia Orchestra, Leon Barzin (for the coupled Mendelssohn and Bruch Concertos).
Searching directly in Qobuz:
“Alfredo Campoli” returns the G.O.P. and Sunday Club Records releases but not the Beulah.
“Royal Philharmonic Orchestra” returns (among everything from Tubular Bells to Sleep Baby Sleep) the Beulah, but neither the G.O.P. nor the Sunday Club.
“John Pritchard” returns the G.O.P., the Sunday Club and the Beluah
Now there is no coupling on the Sunday club release and the G.O.P. couples the Beethoven Concerto with two Beethoven Romances played by Max Rostal (also accompanied by the RPO under Pritchard) so one would not expect “Milstein”, “Philharmonia” or “Barzin” to bring up either of these recordings. But they should both, in theory, find the Beulah.
“Nathan Milstein” does not.
“Philharmonia Orchestra” does.
“Leon Barzin” does (despite him not being a recognised tag in Qobuz, The Kings of Leon is their best suggestion).
However searching Qobuz via Roon, none of these search terms return the Beulah.
Unfortunately you are far from the first, and certainly not he last struggling with ‘search’ in Roon.
Personally, I search in Qobuz, and with the information found I try to ‘locate’ (using the Roon search field) what I have found in Qobuz.
This often means you have to provide more and exact info in Roon to come up with the desired album (/track)
Yes, I realise I am not the first. But as I say in this instance none of the searchable performer names return the recording I am looking for in Roon. Even when I know it is there and can find it in Qobuz I am unable to find it in Roon. Am I missing any tricks you are aware of?
Yes, seeing the three performers that are tagged according to your screenshot (Philharmonic Orchestra, John Pritchard, Philharmonia Orchestra) explains the search results I observed when searching in Qobuz. There I was able to find this recording using those search terms but of course not the other three (see my original post). However I was unable to find it using any of those same three search terms when searching via Roon.
Incomplete metadata is one problem, and certainly not one that is completely within Roon’s power to solve. My problem however is this inconsistency between Qobuz search and Roon search when applied to the same metadata. This looks like a bug.
Hi @benjamin Is there any way to tag this so that someone from Roon Support looks at it and considers filing a bug? This has been tagged as a metadata issue but although it is related to metadata the problem I am experiencing is that Roon and Qobuz return different albums when searching the same Qobuz metadata with identical search terms.
@Kevin Not trying to jump the queue here or inflate the severity of what is after all a non-critical issue. I would just like to know if there is a way to ensure that someone from Roon Support will eventually take a look at it and consider filing a bug before this thread gets auto-closed and forgotten.
I have a reproducible case where the same search terms entered in Qobuz directly vs via the Roon interface return completely different results, the latter returning nothing when there are three albums that meet the criteria. In the best case it may help engineering understand and fix a systemic problem with Roon search or in the Roon integration with Qobuz.
I am concerned that this thread has been tagged as “Metadata”-related whereas I believe it is a functional problem in the search functionality.
I am concerned as well with Qobuz integration. There often seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that it is somehow a “data” fault. I wounder how many issues are caused by a faulty rules base or interpretation of the data or its structure? That is, Qobuz and roon are looking at the same data but interpreting it in different ways using different rules?
Our apologies for the wait. If Roon search is failing to find an object that lives within Qobuz and/or your Roon library, and the search within the Qobuz app finds this object, then yes, there’s an issue with Roon search. However, it’s likely at this point one we’ve already ticketed and are in the process of working through.
I’m not certain if you saw other threads that coincided with your posts here, but there has been backend work going on with Search in sync with the timeline of this thread. Judging by your description, this is responsible for at least some of the discrepancies you’ve seen.
The complete picture here is ongoing work to improve search has resulted in a few recent temporary disruptions - these have appeared as broken windows in search and aren’t pretty to the user experience, but we’re aware of the issue and you should see more stable behavior soon.
It’s both. Roon is at the receiving end of a long and porous metadata pipeline extending backward to to level of the distributor or beyond. The margin for error within Qobuz metadata is often even outside of their control. We do what we can, as do they, to account for bad data, and static rules and gates can’t keep out all bad associations.
That said, Roon actively prods and improves the metadata associations that guide Roon’s own search process, which differs from that native to the Qobuz app (see here, for instance, where we are using reports to work on alias/main-name matching).
Many thanks for the feedback @connor . Then please flag this case for engineering to use to test any proposed fix. This is a simple reproducible case where Qobuz returns black and Roon white.
