We do not. From your screenshot you clearly have a diferent Gieseking. Your Gieseking has no artist art, no biography and no discogrpahy. No amount of editing of your “bad” Walter Gieseking as you are trying to do is going to fix this. You need to delete it and add a “good” version. This happens all the time in roon. Duplicate artists are created which are not necessarily related in any way to the database records and discographies that roon is using internally to build all its links between different database items. In effect these artists are not database “objects” just meaningless strings of text from roon’s perspective that cannot be used to relate to other database items.
By far the easiest thing is to identify the album. I do not know why I can but you cannot. But if you are unable for whatever reason to identify the album then it can all start getting very messy. In this particular case you may have to change your artist edits in 3 different screens in order to get sensible results from roon. In all cases the objective is to deselect the “bad” Walter Gieseking you have and replace it with the “good” version that you will recognise because it has artist art.
Primary Artist Link
three dots (album page) → Edit → Edit Album → Add Primary Artist → “Walter Gieseking”
You will come to this page. Select the Walter Giesking with the artist art
three dots (album page) → Edit → Edit Album → Scroll down → Edit Credits
You will come to this screen. You need to uncheck your bad Walter Gieseking credits and add the ones in roon’s database that you will recognise because of the artist art.
Strange that you would have so many unidentified albums and artists. That’s not normal. I would open up a separate support ticket as although your configuration issues are probably effecting your search, the purpose of this thread is to identify search issues in working roon configurations.
Finally, a few more examples. Despite annotations in (), the albums are also assigned. I have an infinite number of unidentified albums, with or without (). The ID tags are always processed and stored with the same program according to the same pattern (Mp3Tag).
I will probably (with Roon) have to live with the fact that I don’t always find everything again.
Not sure if this is the case for you, but this happens if no album with the “real” Gieseking is in your library. I see this all the time with indie music.
I import an album and Roon does identify it but it has missing credits.
Then I edit the credits and in the process create an artist playing on the album, because Roon does not find this artist, neither in search or when editing credits.
Roon creates an entry with the name, but like @Tony_Casey wrote, if a “real” (i.e., having cross-referenced metadata from Roon’s metadata provider) version of this artist is not yet in the library, this is just a text string of the name, with no picture, bio, or any other metadata.
If there is no other work that references this artist, this is where it has to end (you can then pimp it up a bit by adding a picture, birth/death information, whether it is a person or a group, etc., in the artist editor, but you cannot add a bio).
However, sometimes the “real” artist exists, but Roon does not find it if no album containing this credit is yet in the library, which is why it creates the “fake” text string artist. Then you can actually add such an album and suddenly Roon finds two artists by that name, the “real” and the “fake” one.
Now you have two options: Exchange the artist everywhere, like @Tony_Casey wrote above. Or you can select both artists and merge the fake one into the real one. Then the real one will appear in your credits with much less work, but it is a bit less tidy behind the scenes (there will be a merged artist entry in the library settings)
After being bitten by this much too often, I now go through the list of artists that performed on an album that I am going to import. Then I search for each artist and ensure that a proper entry is found (if the artist already appears on an album in my library). For every artist that is not found, I find an album that references the artist in the credits, and add that to the library. Only after this do I import and edit the album that I really wanted to add. If I edit the credits now, the real artist is found by Roon. (You can then even remove these other albums from the library that you just added so that Roon can find the artist, if you don’t want them. This does not affect the real artist anymore)
It’s frankly a giant pain in the behind and together with “what makes a composition a composition” (@Tony_Casey knows too well what I mean) is the area in Roon that makes me pray most for improvements
I tried point 6. It will give me the cover artist from @Tony_Casey
not offered, otherwise I would have exchanged.
Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to a solution. But it was just an example. I can’t and don’t want to go through all that effort.
I understand Roon, the logic and the data source. But it doesn’t help me when listening to music. The search or the results are often rubbish. In addition, the tags required for a search have all been edited and actually entered.
I don’t have enough time to search and re-edit my local library just for Roon.
At the end of the day, after work, I just want to listen to music.
The only thing that keeps me with Roon is the multiroom and that I have geared all my devices and infrastructure to it. Otherwise, things have not always gone forward in the last updates and development or some things have only been half thought through.
Just from the simple point of view of an end user and user.
Yeah had that a few times myself. Thankfully not a lot Most of my more obscure stuff is on vinyl and never made it to streaming or digital release at all in a lot of cases.
Yeah, I recently searched for the artist Nighttime. They were found easy enough, but not their new album. Then I searched the album title and it came up, with the correct artist link (and they are the only band named that). Very strange.
I have a track in my library called game. I type game in the search bar, track not on the short list, go to the search page turn on library only, go to tracks and tap more, still doesn’t appear.
This is a complete failure right?
I have learnt to go to tracks and use the funnel which is a direct textual search but really Roon devs how can you have a search function that doesn’t return a direct match even when I make the effort to dive into the results.
I really like a the record Label ACT. They have great artists and the recoding quality is superb. When I search the ACT Label in Qobuz or Tidal, I get over 400 titles. When I select Qobuz or Tidal inside Roon I only get the 18 Titles saved in my Library. ???
This is indeed the case with Roon. You can’t search for labels outside your library. In the feature suggestions part of the website, you may vote for this to happen (some day).
Hey, on the awesome side… I just was searching for “rocksteady” and got the subgenre of reggae in the suggested replies below the search box… that is fantastic. Not yet prioritized, but surfacing categories to narrow is a big thing. Never seen that before… maybe it’s not new, but that’s one pathway to make search really much better - to find ways into “category pages” that are useful.
Any one speculate on when the changes are going to happen that significantly improve search as I am loosing hope. We have been promised a better search engine for the best part of 2 years now and it’s still not made a great leap forward over the older one. It’s been 5 months since the controversial switch to 2.0 and internet only to allow more flexible changes and if anything it’s taken a backwards step rather than forwards as quick jump menu doesn’t populate quickly anymore, and results are even more hit and miss. Am I asking too much?
It’s a tiny development team using some seriously ambitious tooling. Small teams can do amazing things. I’m heartened to spot a few things in the wild that I think are harbingers of good things to come (like the one I posted above). But… I think many people feel like they pay a lot and impatience is justified. You’re probably one of those folks. Totally get it. I’m happy with the way things are (how many hours a day am I listening via Roon?!? in how many places!?!) and I’m happy knowing that they’re now working with the right big kid tooling and it’s on its way. Part of it is glass half full vs glass half empty, part of it is that search is only one of my pathways to the music I love. If search gets better I’ll end up using it more. I’m pretty accomodating tho.
I don’t take the cost to me into account I just want the product to do what it should be able to do properly and accurately as it can. I should be able to search and find my music or nee music easily based on my input parameters of which it still lacks as we have no search parameters to help.
If as you say they are a small team then they should clearly be not biting off more than they can chew and perhaps use tried tested search data engines and the options to filter by what you actually wanted easily rather than reinventing the wheel for every thing, which is often what seems to happen in Roon and not always resulting in a better feature.
I use Roon on average 4.5 hours a day it’s my life after work and family. I love it but it’s broke in places where it really should not be and is breaking the basic principles of why we choose music management software in the first place rather than navigate folders.
Unfortunately, this isn’t really a thing to just “use a search engine”. You couldn’t “point a white label Google at it”. Every data set is structured and every universe of text has different patterns. They are now using industry standard backbone (which are not coincidentally cloud only, or at least couldn’t be run on a core), but search isn’t just “use the right tools”, it’s “start with the right tools and then (a) do a metric cr*pton of manual work to make it usable and (b) another metric load of work on an ongoing basis to tune it”. They are in the midst of (a). I’m guessing that that is a whole bunch of person months, though I’ve only been involved in this in different domains than music.
