Roon Album Search Requires EXACT Match

I find its strange that Roon album search does not accept partial matches.

For example if I want to search for John Doe’s albums I will have to search for “john Doe” to get any result.

Just searching for “john” or “doe” usually results in lesser or no results.
This should not be the case,
I rather have more results to sieve through than none at all.

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What?
If I use the magnifying glass search, as I type the drop down list of suggested matches is populated, character by character. E.g. if I type “col” the list shows Cole Porter and Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane. I can pick what I wanted, if I don’t and just fire off the search with “col” the results show those artists (including King’s College Choir of Cambridge), and albums, and tracks, and genres.

If I use the funnel icon for filtering the album list, the albums are filtered as each character is typed, and John Coltrane’s albums show up after “joh” and “col”.

And it doesn’t have to be leading characters: “co” found “Rubicon”.

It works in the main search, but what I am referring to is when you are trying to identify albums and you do a manual search it clearly doesn’t work that way. There’s some other filter active that limits the results to a very narrow field.

Example:
When identifying an unknown album:

I type “Larry” I get a few miscellaneous results thats all.
Typing “Larry Carlton” gives a whole long list of results that didn’t even appear in the original search.

When trying to search for lesser known artists or foreign language albums this is an issue because I clearly don’t get any results unless I key in an exact match,

1 Like

Ah.

I would imagine this is because when searching your own library, Roon has built a rich index that supports that behavior. But in your case, when trying to identify an album, Roon has to search the entire universe of albums, and it can’t realistically build a powerful index of the universe. Such an index of the universe is what Google builds, and they have millions of computers.

Agree that search is poor (broken?). For example, a search for ‘West Side Story’ does NOT find ‘The Songs of West Side Story’, to cite but one example. Examples of each ARE in my library.

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