Hey, thanks for the reply. I am just using the Search function. My bad for thinking it would, y’know, work.
When I use Focus, and then search within that, I get the same drop-down identifying the Redding track as you do (but not the Aretha or Sam Cooke versions in my library). However, when I click “See all results,” at the bottom of the pop-up, I get the same 50 obviously wrong results.
It appears that Roon can do the filtering to populate the drop-down, at least partially, but “See all results” then returns nonsense. Since the drop-down doesn’t contain all three relevant responses, I’m not sure what to make of it. (I could click the Redding result from the drop-down and then click the “alternate versions” icon that would come up, but that seems like a crazy way to do it… when there’s a Search function in the first place.)
Absolutely agree. Like with many things in life, it’s a bit more complicated in practice though. We tend to find a lot of counterexamples that don’t fit within a given “rule”, so most solutions have to be somewhat nuanced.
In general, in search and NLP words like “a” and “is” are called stopwords. Because of their frequency and low value, they are indeed often completely omitted. In music we have titles like “You and me”, where all the words are stopwords, or “For A Few Dollars More”, where only “Dollars” isn’t a stopword. So we introduced some mechanisms to deal with both cases in the new solution, without polluting the results.
In this case where you have exclusively (lots of) library content, it’s indeed rarely useful. For people who have very small libraries + streaming it can still provide useful results. If you’re looking just “sam cooke”, or “aretha franklin”, it should still be faster than navigating through.
I’m by no means trying to be difficult…I just would like to understand the search too because sometimes it baffles me too. However, for “Change Gonna” I get exactly what I would expect.
I’m unclear on your statement above “when I use Focus, and then search with that…” It is sort of what my original question was to you.
Are you searching with something other than the magnifying glass in upper right corner? Maybe the app version matters as I know Rood displays differently one different sized and type of devices. On my Android Phone, Windows 10 PC and Kindle Fire 10 tablet there is a magnifying glass in upper right corner. I’m just typing in that search box. I’m not doing anything with Focus first or anything else for that matter.
I also see now that in my screen capture above, it is a composition. NOT a track…which is what you were trying to find, correct? Upon looking closer when I scroll down to “Tracks” I don’t get any of the 6 versions I have. Otis, Aretha, Sam, Neville Brothers, The Band or Tina Turner.
Thanks, Zenit, again. I get what you’re saying about trying to use NLP to suss out a user’s intent, but I wonder if the original search coders didn’t outsmart themselves. No matter — yes, it’s complicated, and yes, I appreciate all the attention. Carry on.
Hey, I didn’t think for a moment that you were trying to be difficult, and I apologize if my frustration sounded like I was irritated with you. Yeah, I’m just using the magnifying glass. You can search within a Focus (I think), which is how I did it in that example (I think — I’m getting all tangled up in this.)
My purpose was actually simple and now it’s blown into this craziness — my fault, obviously. My wife got a big award and I’m hosting a reception for her, and since she loves soul music I’m trying to put together a playlist with some modern greats and some classics… hence the search for that term. Needless to say I worked around it and put the playlist together… but finding that song took like three minutes, which made me nuts.
Thanks again for your input. I think I’ve said my piece here and reached the limits of my attention span. If you find a magic solution, by all means let us know!
That’s correct. The search function is far from perfect. But yesterday, I did about thirty searches for quite obscure new albums that were reviewed in a magazine I suscribe to, and I was able to find each and every album with just a single seach action.
