Hey, still getting my ropes when trying to find stuff through Roon…
I wanted to find Sofia Gubaidulina’s Piano sonata. It is not in my local libaries, but should be in the Tidal catalog.
Native as I am I tried the top bar serach and typed
Gubaidulina piano sonata
thinking this shoudl get me somewhere. (I guess there are not that many Gubaidulina’s who composed a piano sonata…) However what “top result” did I get?:
I guess that Beethoven Piano sonata No. 14 in C sharp Major is just the most popular sonata? And Igor Levitt performance is the most popular for “Moonlight” Sonata
Welcome to one of the more dysfunctional parts of Roon. In truth, Roon search is pretty poor, and most users have their tricks and workarounds. Artists and titles are munged together in the search pool, and there’s no “intelligent” support for mis-spellings and typos. Unless it’s already in your library, good luck finding anything with Roon, search is why I still log into Qobuz.
The more generic you make the search string the worse things get .
Gubaidulina on it’s own is “pretty unique” and likely to get a hit as it does with her showing as an artist and low in the screen a composition
Adding Piano Sonata simply makes the search so general as to be useless .
@Traian_Boldea method works fine , I tend to use the Filter funnel more than search ,
Search is till a bit “work in progress” but using it where a small result set is likely like your “Gubaidulina” is a better bet than “Piano Sonata No.5” as it will likely return a load of Piano Sonatas .
The Igor Legit recording is worth a listen , maybe its a secret plug
As with a lot of software there are many ways to skin a cat , I rarely use search unless it’s a specific “name” , the Artist view , composer view , etc get you there much quicker.
One other tip is to add one album of a Artist or Composer to your library that forces the Artist view and Composer view to show your chosen artist so Filter works double quick. This avoids having to use Search
One album doesn’t clutter stuff up but gets you instantly to the appropriate Discography.
Now that you spell this I realise a do the same. Usually I read about an album and search the performer (faster finds) or the composer (better, if I know the name is easier to spell) after that apply the filters in discography. And to avoid “nothing” I try to copy paste.
One thing I do not like in tidal app, it does not group the versions and some times they have the same stuff one with just one performer name and another one with added performers. Or one RBK and another one with MQA. Makes it hard to browse.
Classical search is still a nightmare and the reason I still access my physical CD stacks. Take Peter Lieberson for example in ARC. I type Lieberson in search, and his wife is the first selection. Fair enough, she has performed a lot of material. So I select Peter Lieberson in the bubble below her and get his page, which only shows one Top Album featuring Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax. Okay, they are popular performers, but I know I have three albums of Lieberson’s work so I click on the collection icon. Only one album shows up even with “Show More” selected:
So I go to “Composed by” and click “show more” and scroll down and they show up. Both show as in my collection. So if they are in my collection and also on the Lieberson Composed by page, why aren’t they showing as in my library? I have lots of local classical, and things get lost rather quickly.
I think one of Roon’s issues is scale as in a small team and millions of “items” and we all have expectations set by the big hitters.
Certainly my supermarket app is just as bad as roon and that has far fewer line items and a much bigger company. You have to find the exact phrase they use to describe their goods. Lactose free is a minefield.
I was reading an article about TikTok not doing enough to filter bullying and the like and they have 4000 moderators. A different land of scale.
I’m a terrible typist so do get frustrated by Roon and the slight mispelling failures especially. On the other hand it is surprising what you find in the “wrong” results
I’ve seen it at least hinted on a few occasions that Roon uses Elasticsearch. Whether they do or not, it’s fair to say that there are open-source tools that can do better:
