I guess articles are automatically stripped out of search terms to avoid a bunch of false hits, but that approach breaks down when you hit the edge case of a band whose name is nothing but articles.
I just tried looking up The The, and got nothing directly related. I tried putting quotes around the whole search, in case that might force the string to be treated literally, but it didn’t help.
In general, is there any notation accepted by the Roon search which forces the entered search string to be taken absolutely literally? That would be helpful in other cases I know I’ve encountered from time to time but can’t remember an example of right now.
Is there any other hint which would help with doing a lookup for a name like “The The”? Aside from remembering the name of an album or track of theirs, which is how I eventually got where I wanted to go in Roon.
[Apologies if this question duplicates somebody’s previous one. I tried to search for the topic but didn’t come up with anything – quite possibly stymied by the same sort of issue in search here as in Roon itself!]
Ah, thanks for finding that earlier thread for me.
And… prompted by seeing an example in that search thread where a search for precisely The The returned that band as the top hit, I just tried my search again – after having gotten to the band by roundabout means and then added a couple of their albums to my library.
Once they were in the library, they did indeed show up in search, right at the top when I typed The The!
But I believe it would still be really helpful to be able to indicate manually that one wants to do a literal, rather than heavily algorithm influenced, search – something which might be more important when searching over the entire universe of streaming-service-supplied stuff than when looking within one’s library. Punctuation like quoting the search string seems like a natural way to communicate this, although I hesitate to try to specify precise UI details to the Roon devs – they tend, once particular functionality makes it into their list of things to accomplish, to have a good think about user interface details and they usually come up with something good.
Just a thought, do you have any “The The” content in your library? I do and the quick search works fine, I don’t even need to click on “See all results”. Perhaps it would find it if you added an album to your library?
Of course, but with my user hat on, I don’t care too much. If I don’t have “the the” in my library but am interested in them, it should be possible to find them via search
Absolutely it should, but it isn’t. I was suggesting adding it with the hope that you might try and help narrow down where the issue might be - it would help give the QA team something to go on.
Roon seems to catalog ‘The The’ as ‘TheThe’ (i.e. with no space between The and The).
If you search on TheThe, it’ll return the band and its discography. Search on The The and it won’t.
Not sure ‘TheThe’ is really the correct form of the band’s name, but that seems to be how Roon applies it. It always pays to try a few variants of a name if you are having difficulty locating an artist or band.
Oh, interesting! There does indeed appear to exist a different band called “THeThE” (note also the capitalization, which is apparently their preferred way to render the band name:
Yes, adding the Hanky Panky album by The The to my library makes The The appear in a subsequent search result. Removed the album from the library again, and The The are nowhere to be found in a new search for The The
That may well be because the thread is a bit of a duplicate to the long-running search thread where they did engage and post occasional updates, and stuff like “the the” and many others where discussed long ago, the one I linked in the second post:
We appear to have established that this search works fine for the case when there’s at least one thing by the band in one’s library (whether local files on disk or found somehow on Tidal or Qobuz then added to the library), but a search for The The fails when one doesn’t yet have anything by the band in one’s library and it’s a search across all the music in the world (at least the world of the streaming services).
That second case is the one which needs to be improved somehow. My intuition is that adding optional syntax to search which can indicate that we want an exact match of some multi-word sequence would do the trick, but the Roon devs usually figure out good solutions once they put a problem on their list of things to solve.
I’m now very rarely disappointed by search when it’s for things in the library. My search frustrations (and the one written up here is a specific subset) come up most often when I’m looking for something across the streaming services which Roon has never before seen me express an interest in. Another scenario of frustration (which I can’t recall a specific enough example of to cite in detail now) is when I’m looking for a specific performance / recording of a classical piece I’ve heard or read about. I might have specific performer / composer / piece information, or I might have a literal text string which I know occurs in the official album title, but sometimes those aren’t enough to get the hit I want; I have the intuition that if I were able to search for “this particular literal string of words” or tag parts of my query to match specifically artist or composer or composition, I’d have a more effective tool for what I want.
