(my background is in database work - 35 years of design/programming)
This is a request to really start using the database. There’s so much that could be available, and I hope you’ll consider it. While I can’t provide a comprehensive wish list, it could start with searching by record label, audio qualities (DSD, MQA, quality levels), date ranges, recording engineer, etc. - and providing sort options while there aren’t apparently any. I’m figuring that since you’re able to display these fields in the first place, it could be available through the interface.
I’m streaming Qobuz through Roon and recently wanted to see the albums from a certain record label. They’re doing albums featuring some nice MQA classical music, and someone at a forum recommended the label. I searched for the label in Roon in the Qobuz heading and it didn’t return any results. I brought up the Qobuz program in Win10, searched and found what I was looking for.
Or I look at my artists list. I can’t sort them alphabetically in the Qobuz section within Roon - to me it doesn’t make sense that you can’t take that data from Qobuz and sort it (unless it’s a much more involved process to access and play anything from Qobuz).
I see other applications that have lots of sort/selection options, and sometimes I struggle to find what I’m looking for.
I hope you can consider a project to explore, enhance and expand what’s offered in the interface.
Indeed it’s not possible to do these things for albums that are not in the library. There is a chasm in Roon between library and non-library items that is unfortunate. However, it’s been much discussed and there are lots of existing feature request for this - it does not seem easy in the current architecture.
I am making an educated guess that doing all this not just for the local library but for 100 million albums in Qobuz and Tidal is simply not possible on a local NUC. In the long-running search thread there is a description by Roonlabs for why they moved search in the cloud and the massive infrastructure that would be necessary to run a local search engine instead. And cloud search in Roon is far from where it should be - they are still building it. I’d bet that all the neat library features for the whole streaming database will need a similar cloud investment - and time.
And the Qobuz section in Roon is just based on the Qobuz API, which I bet is severely limited and not at all suited to doing these things.
Thanks for your response. Yes, I had become aware of those features (outside of Roon, recently on an Audioholics YT with Enno), and when I think of it I realize that it would have to be taking place on Roon’s own servers for it to be inclusive of the user’s services - and that’s most likely beyond its capability (Enno did mention that Roon downloads each provider’s entire catalog every day, but it would definitely take a lot more resources to provide those features).
