Apologies if this has been asked before or is a simple option somewhere (I have looked). When I search my Windows 10 Core for eg. albums with the words “DMC Classic” and then select “View All” from the results, it only returns maybe 30-40 albums even though I know I have more than 100. The “missing” ones have been successfully indexed as they show up of I do a search for the exact album title which contains the phrase “DMC Classic”. Any ideas if/what I’m doing wrong and how to return all results (preferably sorted by my choice of sort)?
My guess is you are doing nothing wrong.
Roon search capabilities are not very satisfying if you are used to doing structured searches. While you are thinking “DMC Classic”, Roon is not as resolute and may try to cover its bases by factoring in things by Run-DMC and other possibilities (perhaps weighted by Roon user behaviors). So I would imagine the results you are getting aren’t just 30-40 DMC Classic albums, but a mish-mash of other somewhat related possibilities. Roon also has a limit on how many results it will return, so even if you filtered them, it will just filter the rather finite number it presents to you rather than filtering all possibilities contained by DMC Classics.
It is just frustrating when you know what you are looking for (in a structured way), and you can’t get that. To Roon’s credit, the search results have gotten a lot better in the past year. But it seems they have chosen to go in a direction that will almost always return something somewhat satisfactory to most users, rather than an absolutely structurally correct search that only a few users might want.
If you absolutely need to come up with something in a reproducible way, you really need to employ tags.
What field would “DMC Classic” fill? Is it a label, artist?
If they are in your library, then try using the filter funnel. In the album browser this will filter on title and album artist, and you can apply the usual browser sorting too.
Scott - I have about 150 albums from a DJ service. The album title starts with “DMC Classic Mixes” and then expands with, for example, “Cool Funky House” or “The Beatles” etc. My search only returns a tiny subsection of the full set and it’s always the same tiny subsection.
Brian - the filter only works if the full set of results is returned but, using the example above, if “DMC Classic Mixes The Beatles” is not one of the returned results in the first place (although it should be), no amount of filtering will retrieve it! If I however do a search on the full album title “DMC Classic Mixes The Beatles”, it is returned (proving presumably that it is correctly indexed in the library).
It is extremely frustrating that the search facility is still functionally broken, especially given that we are restricted from browsing by folder structure. Roon would be so much better with the following search tweaks:
Search returned all results (yes, even if you searched for “The” in artist field)
Search could be focused on a specific storage location
Search results could be sorted by user choice at the click of a column header (artist title, album title, bitrate etc.)
Boolean search was possible eg. Album Contains “ABBA” AND BitRate>320 AND Year<1990
So with all due respect, please, please, please Devs, focus on fixing this much needed but still deeply flawed basic functionality instead of tweaking font sizes and colours… (See JRiver for how a search should work )
Thanks for the tip - I did use it but of course you can’t filter within a filter, you can’t search within a filter and you can’t order the filter results (how are they ordered at the moment anyway?). It’s fine if you’re on a PC, but if you’re on a tablet or mobile phone you want to narrow any results down as the album title is truncated most of the time (and doesn’t even helpfully scroll across). The filter is a very basic workaround for a broken search function and still doesn’t explain why all 131 results for “DMC Classic Mixes” in album title don’t get returned after a search. How does Roon actually perform a search and decide what gets returned?
Apologies…forgot about the sort option on the screen (morning blindness!). The filter option is not present on the mobile GUI however so I am forced to use the search function when using my phone. Am I correct in assuming the filter works only for album or artist and not track? So when I filter for “Yesterday”, I only get the album titles so if I want a listing of all the tracks containing “Yesterday” and do a search, I will still only get a subsection of the full listing…and in a totally random sort…
If you go into track view there are filter funnels for track, album artist, album. A filter of tracks with ‘yesterday’ pulls up a bunch of hits.
Oh, and the filters work together. So you can filter Artists for Beatles and Tracks for ‘Yest’ and I get one hit.
Picky time…is it possible to include BitRate in one of the sort options in the Tracks Browser as my music ranges from low quality MP3s at 128 to high quality FLAC.
Hit the focus button and scroll over to format. Click away and remember once you have chosen a quality, you can click the green + to turn it red and make it an exclude.
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