Roon Search Overhauled [2022-12] Update

I get expected results.

1 Like

As it seems, the biggest challenge search has to take is to guess, wheter the user is searching for an artist/band, album title or track title and present the most relevant results on top of the list.

Just a thought, why not make life easier and add some options for the user to specify what he is searching for, for example using a prefix in the search field like:
#art: John” limits the search results to artists
#atit: Pepper” limits the search to album titles (and should show St. Pepper at the top of the list :slight_smile:
and so on.

The same thing could also be achieved by a filter icon next to the search field, opening a drop down list with the most common categories and allow to filter search to several categories at once.

Maybe this has already been suggested elsewhere and should be better placed in “Feature suggestions”?

5 Likes

Strangely, I don’t, although the results do contain artists and albums played recently:-

A few weeks back no matter what I search, the expected results never showed while it seemed to work for everyone else. Hopefully this gets sorted out better.

It seems like they’re putting a lot of work into their search results but still coming up short to what the streaming service can do in their own. And that’s not good if asking to pay more on top of the streaming service and have worse performance.

2 Likes

@brian Many thanks for the update on the developments underway. Along with the openness & transparency of how the implementation is operating, its direction and the influences being grappled with.
This level of functionality is not straightforward and the implementation to provide the ‘best’ results is not easy, as there are many different takes on ‘best’.

Roon folks, this level of insight into this process and the technology attributes at play is rarely exposed. We are lucky to be able to have this type of update and at the same time, be part of the input and design considerations of these feature/functionality elements of this product.

2 Likes

I’ve said t many times that you need filters to help search look at the right criteria such as album, artist track not bung it all under one roof
it just makes it work better and I am sure we would get less frustrated customers. I don’t imo why this isn’t addd to search as simple tabs like all the streaming apps do, they work really well.

4 Likes

As mentioned above, we are not yet tailoring results to users so this isn’t taken into account. Or, another way to think about it, we are more or less tailoring results to the entire user base collectively. In that context, John Coltrane is the 15th most listened artist. John Lennon isn’t even in the top 250.

What that says to me is that John Lennon is a notable artist but not particularly important outside of his work with The Beatles. Most of the time people are searching for The Beatles when they want to hear him, and not focusing on his solo content, which was less successful.

Nonetheless, I think once we are tailoring results to individuals, he might move up higher in the list for you. The gradient boosting stuff that I mentioned above may also help with this–if a lot of people searching for John end up navigating to John Lennon, the algorithm would learn from that and boost him.

4 Likes

Thanks for the update.
Any chance of implementing Discogs website’s Release ID to find ‘Unidentified’ albums on Roon?
I have many Roon library albums as ‘Unidentified’ that could be placed in my library this way.

3 Likes

Discogs is not partnered with Roon so you can’t use their metadata but would great if they where. If disc rippers can not sure why Roon can’t.

1 Like

@CrystalGipsy See here for the Feature Request for Discogs integration

1 Like

Unfortunately, they don’t even show up as versions of each other. The only way they do is if I use the Album Editor feature to group them together.

Anyway, we can continue the discussion of my case in my support thread if you wish (no response from Roon, btw).

The bottom line for me is that too many times Roon Search sometimes doesn’t work that well, whatever the reason. For comparison, I don’t have these issues searching in the Qobuz app.

I hope your efforts to improve Search are successful.

Did roon consider assuming single name searches to be second/family names instead of mixing up first and second names as in the John example? That is Elton John or Dr. John or whatever would be further up the list. I would have thought that most people searching on common first names wouldn’t expect very much unless they qualified the name with a second name.

I am finding the present approach can be quite difficult. For example, “Casey” is a common first name in the US but in my part of the world it is a family name (my family name). I was searching for “Al Casey” the guitarist but I couldn’t remember his first name and wasn’t getting anywhere with a search on “Casey”. Eventually I got there with a combination of Wiki and a search on the band Exotic Guitars. It is not an isolated example. I also listen to a lot of international music and find it difficult for example with Chinese and Asian composers to parse first and second names in searches especially as the db’s seem to randomly reverse the naming conventions.

1 Like

I’ve just tried again to find something I posted on the old thread namely searching for Saturday Night by the Eagles.

Why did I search for it?
well I have common ground an Eagles cover album but none of the recordings linked for Saturday night were on an original Eagles album (hits and live but no original album showed up in the 8 linked recordings)

So I searched Saturday Night and it did not show up in the drop down list, I hit return and got the main search screen, navigated to tracks and filtered for “eag” and there was no result.

image

The main thing I want Roon search to be is thorough, only I knew the results must be wrong I would have presumed from Roon that Saturday Night was on no Eagles original album. I can only presume that the term “all track search results for x” doesn’t actually mean what is says, that it is in fact a subset of tracks named Saturday night.

In fairness it’s a long way down the Tidal list but it is there

And searching like this gets me there straight away

I find currently that if Roon cannot find something I am searching for I have to check Spotify to be sure that the Roon non result is correct. The search above was for a track from a 2 million selling album in the States alone.

.sjb

I’ve got 7 Stereolab albums, an EP or two and several tracks on various artists albums. All local, I don’t stream anything.

This is the best Roon can do? Yes I know it is Stereolab not stereo lab. I think space removal (or added) when necessary should not be an unreasonable expectation.

Way slower than it used to be too.

That is correct, what it means is top N tracks based on the search query you entered. There are about 30k tracks matching saturday night. At the moment, unfortunately, the UI doesn’t reflect that fact in any meaningful way. It’s certainly something to improve.

It’s not unreasonable, and we will certainly add that functionality in the (not so distant) future. Until then, you know how to find it :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Ha, no I actually don’t. I’d typically be typing on my keyboard using the windows edition of Roon client. This time around I was using my phone and voice to text. So my phone added the space. It took me a good bit to figure out why I didn’t have any results. A while back Roon was losing all my files several times a day. My initial thought was now it’s just lost all my Stereolab.

1 Like

Yep, same here (Qobuz).

This may explain why I’m getting zero hits. For example “King” returned nothing this morning for a minute or so.

That would depress more than anything. Life without the lab is no life.

1 Like

Hear Hear! Exactly. Allow a few simple operators - quotes and a couple of Booleans. In the exact string case, the leading double-quote tells the search engine to calm down and wait for the rest of the search rather than diving into a string-matching rabbit hole before it’s heard the whole query. Considering how many stop words are legit search terms in the world of music, it seems worth the (not trivial, I realize) bother.

“The Who” being the classic case for both teaching beginning searchers and kicking the tires of asset management systems.

I guess I’m saying let the people who know how to search for tricky stuff do it.

4 Likes