Getting rid of compositions "feature"

Roon Software
#1

Annoyed user here,
I’m a newish Roon user and cannot figure out a simple way to find tracks on Tidal. I’m completely baffled by the default “compositions” display that shows up after searching for an artist. For example, I want to listen to songs performed by Peter Gabriel, so I search for him and the results appear to be a list of song names. But clicking a composition shows me a list of OTHER ARTISTS that performed that song and I need to scroll around looking for the one that Peter Gabriel performed. I don’t care about the way Primus, Erasure or Pink or whoever covered a Peter Gabriel song. I’m searching for Peter Gabriel the artist.

I understand that some people want to search by the person who wrote the song, but that’s not always the artist is it? Is there a way I can simply see tracks for Peter Gabriel, as the performer, when I search for Peter Gabriel? Ideally, the search results would just show the most popular songs by that artist in the search results and I could just add tracks to a playlist directly from the search results (like every other music service on earth).

What feature do I need to disable to accomplish this?
Thank you for listing to my rant.

EDIT: I see now that some artists have a button to select the search results as Performer or Artist, but most of the ones i search for do not, like the aforementioned Peter Gabriel.

#2

You can’t disable as such. Composition is the wrong way to access , this will give you what Peter Gabriel Wrote not sang hence why you get all the covers

Roon has many ways of getting where you want to go

You could try 2 options

Go to artist o the main men > Filter funnel>Peter G you will see a picture
Click and goto Pater Gabriel Page
Go much lower on that page and the albums show, did you miss that ?

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Or

Go to tracks on the main menu and filter Peter Gabriel

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#3

Whether or not you see the “Performer” button may depend on if the artist you’re searching for is represented in your library (CD rips, downloads, or TIDAL/Qobuz favorites), as opposed to your streaming service only. If I understand your issue correctly, this has been the topic of recent discussion here and appears to be a bug that Roon will be addressing in a future update.

See here: Performer vs Composer View

#4

Thanks for the detailed reply and the suggestions.

I see all the albums, yes. But this is not a solution. I search for music by track and rarely know what album it appears on, especially when I’m searching Tidal for an artist I’m unfamiliar with.

That’s also not a solution since this only shows local files as far as I can tell. I’m searching Tidal.

It’s maddening that it’s easier for me to find the 465 cover versions of “Hey Jude” than it is to find The Beatles’ most popular songs. It’s anathema to discovering new music, which is Roon’s raison d’etre.
I’d love to see some telemetry on this feature. I’ll bet most users would turn it all off and choose to simply see tracks if that was possible.

#5

Unfortunately Roon is rather album biased,

Composition is just that and hence shows all the covers as you say

The tracks view is maybe your best option as you can actively filter by Artist or title or both

Other than that I have no suggestion,

Like any software there is a learning curve, Roon’s is admittedly steep in places

#6

One of the problems/features of Roon (depending on your point of view) is it is album oriented not track oriented. Thus, when you search for Peter Gabriel you can get a list of all the albums in Tidal but there’s no easy way to search for tracks by an artist in Tidal or Qobuz. Having said that, it seems whenever I search for a song by title the first track listed is usually the original artist.

#7

Why have any bias? The data can be presented in any way the Roon engineers prefer. Album-oriented, track-oriented, composition-oriented are all possible under different tabs. I’m not suggesting one is better than the other, but in the digital age, playlists are king and many new artists are only releasing single songs and eschewing the archaic album format (e.g. Billie Eilish has released half a dozen songs that are not on her one and only album).

So it seems I’ll need to have an album-oriented paradigm to find music in Roon, which I begrudgingly accept for navigating my ten thousand local tracks. But the album approach is not acceptable for discovering new music on streaming services, so I’ll need to use a different search engine for that.

Thanks everyone for helping me understand things.

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