Ok, thanks for clarifying. I thought maybe roon gave unpredictable results with small libraries but that is clearly not relevant in your case.
Perhaps it’s the opposite. The large library is throwing it off. But as said, I’ve never listened or even heard of those other Peters it’s suggesting. Just in general, I get bad results. When looking up Kraftwerk, it gives me a bunch of their albums but would expect them to show at top as Artist. But it’s just albums and tracks. And then when hit enter, they are actually 2nd in the Artist section. And if you spell it wrong like Kraftwork, they don’t come up at all but in Qobuz it’s still the top choice.
Roon
Qobuz
The popular choice is probably So.
But I like either Us or Plays Live.
Enjoy.
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As you have noticed, Roon does not have good fuzzy spelling logic to handle such misspellings.
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Though the ordering of search results is surprisingly “fuzzy”/non-deterministic across different users.and even searches. It feels like a Jenga game of tweaks from the devs where changes in one area have unintended consequences elsewhere.
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It’s using Valence to some degree isn’t it? So it’s likely basing results on a what you have in your library that’s most popular with those strings, what’s most popular in the Roon community with those strings. As like all Valence related features their isn’t enough users to make it work efficiently so top results are easily skewed. Streaming services have millions of users compared to Roon most of which are more a reflection on the greater population than a bunch of middle aged to retired audiophools. They also likely use other more accurate data to determine most popular.
But then my theory is thrown out of the window with this one, full album title yet still not top. Top is something else completely that uses the words. It does defy an search logic I have used in any app.
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If I searched for Kraftwork on purpose and it only showed me Kraftwerk like Qobuz, although a Kraftwork result exists like Roon shows, I’d be unhappy as well
I have a large library. I’m not saying I get perfect results. Far from it but I find that unusable search results are the exception for me not the norm as seems to be your case. When I search on “Peter Gab” I get Peter Gabriel at the top of this list with a nice mix of "Peter Gab"s I might have been looking for:
I have several Peter Gabriel albums with several plays so that is the result I would expect.
It is odd that everyone is getting different results so there must be some kind of personalization going on. I am just guessing, but roon may be taking into account local library tags and not just local content and play history as everyone is different on that dimension as well.
I get maybe a bit too many of the Peter Gabriel in the preview for “Peter Gab”, as I get only him, but this may be fine as I am not aware of anyone else in my library by that or similar names. I have two Peter Gabriel albums in my library, So and Melt. Neither the albums nor the artist are hearted, but I did add tags to all three.
It’s not unreasonable in All Results:
I like that it found the Robert Wyatt version of Biko, it’s the only non-PG Biko in my library.
Though this in More compositions is weird, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with a PG composition. It’s a cover of the German band Mittagspause’s Militürk, lyrics by Gabi Delgado-Lopez of DAF (Gabi - Gabriel?), played by Fehlfarben.
(I am on earlyaccess)
As you can see there are no bands called Kraftwork. Qobuz seems to give me the expected results while for the most part Roon does not. I usually have to dig deeper to find the artist I need. That fact that others are getting better results does change the inconsistencies amongst all users.
I’m also a horrible speller, so if I have then use Google to find what I’m looking for better searching in Roon, that defeats the point.
One last example and I’ll move on until we get feedback from Roon. Was searching for Rammstein but of course didn’t remember it had 2 Ms. But look at Qobuz with partial results.
Qobuz
Roon
And here’s typing the whole thing out correctly. Would be nice to have search preferences. For most part I’m usually looking for Artist. These results make me click on random album and then grab the artist.
My last comments. Should roon expect users to pay an increased fee on top of their streaming service for worse results than the native streaming app? I believe all streaming apps have better search engines than roon. I’m a lifetime member, so I can wait things out. But I’m still willing to jump ship if Spotify ever came out with their lossless plan or Apple ever updated their wireless streaming to lossless. Search is a big part of the app and for me it’s clearly broken.
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You will get no arguements from me here.
But there are tracks and compositions called that and similar, none of which Qobuz shows although you searched for them - with a typo, but nevertheless you typed kraftwork, search hits exist, but Qobuz is not showing them because it apparently “knows better”.
I am just pointing out how difficult a problem search really is. Kraftwerk may be the expected result for you in this specific situation, but if I search for Kraftwork, I expect to have what I searched for in the results, if it exists. And you probably do as well, in certain contexts.
Nevertheless, including Kraftwerk would also make sense. It is incredibly situation-dependent though. How is any search engine to know if I really want “ryan adams” like I typed, or “bryan adams” because I made a typo. Both exist and are valid results.
If agree that given the pervasiveness of Rammstein, it should be included in the search results, even more so if you interacted with them.
However, like in the above examples, if I search for Ramstein I may actually have searched for Ramstein, most of which Qobuz decided to not show. This would be just as annoying for me as the omission of Rammstein in Roon is for you.
Interestingly and for whatever reason (I never did anything with Rammstein expect maybe once to check how stupid their artist picture would be, and definitely never anything with Ramstein), my Roon search preview is full of actual Ramstein that is missing from yours. Possibly weighted higher because I am in Germany and most of these seem German tracks.
And despite all this, I do get Rammstein high up for the verbatim search:
I agree with preferences. Settings may help, but also the usual modifiers from search engines, like “in quotes” for literal search, artist:, album:, etc. to limit the search space, maybe AND, OR, and similar
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Just to go back to Kraftwork. If you notice Qobuz is set to look under artist and there are no other artists with that name. But look when I click album and tracks. Expected results. I really wish roon had this type of search or at least a setting to display it.
And yes, Rammstein has some bad artwork. I was just looking up some German songs for my son who’s studying German. So played some Kraftwerk, Peter Schilling, Rammstein, and Peter Gabriel has full albums in German. So this might explain my recent searches. Didn’t get to Falco and Nena yet. He has pointed out 99 luftballons is just 99 ballons, not red ballons. Didn’t realize the lyrics were changed for English rhyming and not direct translation.
Last thing. Searching for Falco was even worse. Brought up several other artists named Falco and the real one buried deep in the search. Only knew right one because others didn’t have photos. For most part can only get to what I’m looking for going into an album first.
Right, I forgot about the tabs in the Qobuz search, and agree that some way to limit the search space is a good thing.
Falco is an interesting case. Maybe Roon knows that I am actually Austrian 
And Tav Falco has close links into my library or is in it.
Maybe your son has fun with a few German-language artist picks from my collection in no particular order:
Tocotronic, Blumfeld, Die Sterne, Element of Crime, 2Raumwohnung, Jens Friebe, Ludwig Hirsch, Attwenger, AUF (hard to search - album: Getimed), Mutter, “Neigungsgruppe Sex, Gewalt & gute Laune”, Wanda, “Ja, Panik”, Die Lassie Singers, F.S.K. (also: Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle), Die Heiterkeit, Slime, Swiss + Die Andern, Der Nino aus Wien, Wolfgang Ambros, Isolation Berlin, Frittenbude, Gerard (album: Blausicht), Feine Sahne Fischfilet, Candelilla, Friends of Gas, Kante, Britta, Doctorella, Deichkind, Jan Delay, …But Alive, Can (album: Ege Bamyasi), Die Goldenen Zitronen, Karies, Die Nerven
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I have talked about Roon needing search filter tabs till the cow comes home on this thread. All platforms use this method you need to narrow the search down in a way they suits what the user is looking for not a general catch all that Roon currently is. Its why the work so much better as it’s focusing on the criteria you choose, and filtering the relevant from non relevant. e.g track with Rammstein or albums or artists. It’s really not rocket science for Roon to see this surely? Why change what works well to something that’s a dogs dinner.
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