How is the album identification search working

Anybody from @support able to explain to me how the manual album search during the identification process is supposed to work?

I am trying to identify Blomstedt’s recording of Sibelius 4 & 5. The artist field is filled with “Herbert Blomstedt”, the album field with “Sibelius: Symphonie Nr.4 & Nr.5”

How on earth is the list presented a potential hit list for these search criteria? I find 1 album containing the string “Sibelius” and not a single album containing the artist “Herbert Blomstedt”.

Are the strings for Artist and Album used for the search at all? If not, what is searched for?

It might be correct that there is no match, but why do I find Stokowski with Mendelssohn 4 in this list? Because of the “4”? There are plenty of Sibelius 4/5 recordings without Blomstedt as artist, so I would have expected some of them to show up on the list. for example.

I find it can be hit and miss sometimes, I had a real nightmare with some Mahler SACDs. Is it this album?

There don’t appear to be any track times on AllMusic. Musicbrainz doesn’t have it at all:

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/b9309a94-a333-4474-8b65-ad8761f26f2e

Sometimes I find adding the orchestra to the artist field can help, try “Blomstedt San Francisco” to see whether that helps. You can add the album to MusicBrainz yourself since they don’t have it. This is what I do with all my hard to identify albums, and the benefit of this approach is Roon should then find it just through matching your track times up.

@Klaus_Kammerer1 Try using “Sibelius: Symphonies 4 & 5” as your album title search term.

I had the same problem. It is because of using non-English (probably non-US English spelling in your search term).

It will work if you only had Symphonie (probably because it is almost the plural English spelling of Symphonies), but it failed once you put in Nr. instead of No. or Nos.

You will notice that the odd search return you got which makes no sense at all are all united by having Nr.

I would have thought that roon could fix searches like this by equivalencing No. with Nr. etc and other common abbreviations that pop up in title names.

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@joel

Thanks for coming back to me on this. Adapting the serach string might yield better results, for sure. However, my initial question was intended to get an understanding on what the identification tool uses to identify a potential match.

In case of my Sibelius recording that was maintained in german. This is what I get as initial results when I select “Identify Album”:

The album I want to identify is named “Sibelius: Symphonie Nr.4 & Nr.5” by primary artist “Herbert Blomstedt” and it has 7 tracks.

Roon offers me the complete Siblius recording by Blomstedt, which seems to be a match to Sibelius and Blomstedt (although it is a box-set with multiple discs and I am looking at a single album).

After that it offers me a recording by Marris Jansons of Sibelius 2 (funnily the album title is spelled in german…), then some Mahler by Jansons and Harding and at the end Beethoven 4 with Kleiber…

I find that selection of potential hits quite weird and to me, it looks rather random. Therefore I’d like to understand the search logic. I would have expected many more albums containing Sibelius and Blomstedt. The number of tracks also seems to be irrelevant at this stage.

So, since I did not find what I was looking for, I click “None of these look right” and I end up at the search result of my initial post.

Now, if I follow your adviceand replace the album string with “Sibelius: Symphonies 4 & 5” I get the result that I wanted

I still do not understand what was searched for in the first step of the identification process yielding totally different results than in the second (so Roon seems to use different criteria in the 1st round). And I’m not impressed by the sensitiveness of the search concerning the album title.
When I search for “Sibelius: Symphonies 4 & 5” I get tons of albums with Sibelius Symphonies 4 & 5, while when I search for “Sibelius: Symphonie Nr.4 & Nr.5” I get not a single one but Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Mendelssohn instead? That’s not what I would call a good user experience.

you are absolutely right, Tony. :wink:

However, if Roon is able to correctly identify the tag Wiener Philharmoniker to be mapped to Vienna Philharmonic, why can’t it understand that No. and Nr. are different ways of spelling the same thing? Same for Symphony and Symphonie. I mean, we are not talking about a Search function within MS Word, Excel or Access.

edit: I just saw, that you wrote the same, Tony

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This is super frustrating. I raised it several years ago. I find it particularly noticeable as my job took me all over Europe and I have CD’s ripped in many different languages.

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I had already uttered a word or two on this subject. the search functionality to match albums is really pretty bad. Super unpredictable and often totally random. This clearly does need some serious development attention.

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