Roon search is continuing to fail for me. An example from today, Qobuz has an extended version of Gary Numan’s album “Exile”. I have the regular version in my library, and first point to note is that the extended version does not show as an alternate version via the album view (and the review notes mistakenly describe the extended version, i.e. the review is linked to the wrong version).
I noted something the other day, reproduced it now.
I wanted to play some song with Patricia Barber and figured it’d be enough to just type “Patricia B” into the search field. I obviously had too high expectations…
It’s not that these results are wrong, it’s just that they are very wrong for me, with over a dozen albums and releases with Patricia Barber, in my library and locally stored.
Just by adding the next letter of Patricias full name gave relevant results:
Wouldn’t it be great if search could read your mind? If all your results had been for Patricia Barber, the post would have been “but I searched for Patricia B and there are many artists by that name”
If i had dozens of albums in my library by other artists with a name that matched, possibly.
But you are wasting bandwidht here, with insinuation…
What i’m saying is that the “weight” of local library content must rate much higher, but also that the “context-less” search of Roon needs more options. Since the way to find stuff in a reasonably large library in Roon is through search (or filter/focus, yes…) there has to be ways for each user to customise results…
I primarily search for artists as an example, and i would like to put the absolute majority of “weight” towards local library artists. Another user might be searching for track names and have only a limited library where “weight” should be placed on streaming content and tracks.
I am just pointing out, as I have before also for my own search results, that it’s not entirely simple. There is a lot of expectation bias involved. When I perform a search and, e.g., make a typo leading to search term XZ instead of the intended XY, I think that Roon should have corrected it to XY. But if I actually did mean XZ and Roon always corrected it to XY, I’d be unhappy. Problem is, Roon does not know if I made a typo or typed what I meant, but I do.
In certain cases for sure, in others I don’t know. What if you really had wanted to find different Patricia B’s although you have much Patricia Barber in your library?
By adding the “a” to “B” and created “Ba”, you ruled out a lot of results that are Patricia B’s that are not followed by an “a”, so the search then did the right thing.
There is already the button for limiting the search to your library, but you didn’t click it. If Roon concludes from this that you don’t want to emphasize your library, I don’t find this completely unreasonable. You say that “there has to be ways for each user to customise results…” and I agree, but you did not use this one option that’s there.
That’s not a criticism of you. It seems to me that this button is generally much under-used by those wanting to search within their library. I suppose this indicates that the UI design is not ideal. Maybe it should show both the in-library and non-library search results and use a different method to separate them, like two separate tabs. Or, conversely, it should maybe make the user choose before searching. Don’t know what would help but clearly there are challenges that must be solved.
I do agree that it may by trying too much automatically. A selection of artist/album/track/genre/… to limit the search may be helpful.
But basically, you are correct. We all expect Roon to be psychic and beforehand know what we want to find.
It’s not an easy task, there is no doubt about that!
I just want options like this really to narrow it down to track. Album, artist, etc this works and you still get a long scrollable list if not top option not scroll
Down click more filter and oh it’s not there.
Mentioned elsewhere also, but trying to find Kate Bush’s “Aerial” should not crash the Roon Remote?
Just hold your typing a fraction of a second after “Aeri”…
Here’s a strange result – searching for “london calling” gets the track and composition to appear first in the preview (good), but the Clash album is no where in the preview (bad). It gets stranger: when you click through to “all results,” the Clash album appears at the top of the Albums category. So Roon gets it right in the full display, but wrong in the preview.
Let’s say, for sake of discussion, as a lifetime Roon user, I continue to build my personal library of music. I become content with the personal library and no longer stream Tidal etc. Roon will then become a wonderful playback tool using the internet as a resource for music history, etc. Imagine my surprise when yesterday I wanted to “identify” an album I had just added to my personal library in Roon: The Joshua Tree 30th Anniversary edition by U2. Also known as the Super Deluxe edition. A very popular album worldwide which was released in 1987. The 30th Anniversary edition was released in 2017. And for whatever reason, Roon was not able to identify it, even when using various title renditions to help the software identify it. Big fail. This has occurred with multiple albums. Especially disappointing with Roon pressuring users to adapt to the latest internet-only version of Roon. If this continues I foresee Roon receiving continued backlash, more then what is now happening. Somewhat of a shame when Roon is meant to enhance the enjoyment of music.
If all your results had been for Patricia Barber, the post would have been “but I searched for Patricia B and there are many artists by that name”
