Roon Search Overhauled [2022-12] Update

That was not the request

@Tim_Lawrence was requesting the new cloud based code to run locally hence the HP requirement. Unless I misread this.

Depending on the db design indexing etc and the processor power of your PC yes 500k tracks is feasible… However Roon is developing a one size fits all solution that hopefully runs well on their minimum spec PC as defined in the KB. (PS I am a SQL Server C# Developer of old)

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I am not technical enough to judge. But does that scale to 90 million tracks?

https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/music/streaming/offerso

I probably have a largish local library by most peoples standards but as a whole in terms of my hybrid local/Qobuz library I am now about 70% Qobuz and I expect searches and other functionalities to search and integrate across that universe of choices.

I have probably answered my own question in that at the moment roon is not scaling very well but I keep an open mind and hope that roon can get on top of its present performance issues.

Here’s a suggestion to improve search even more (or to tell me what perhaps I don’t know). Yesterday I tied to search for songs (in my personal library) that have the word “baby”. Roon found many that matched but also provided suggestions that had words line lullaby - seems it focused on the last three letters. I have had many similar experiences. Would be nice to be able to put “parentheses “ around a name

I have the same experience, even when I’ve added a trailing space, which I would think should indicate to Roon that I’m searching for a whole word, not a partial match …

Weirdly, if I do a numeric date search (common if you are looking for anthologies or live albums) then in the magnifying glass only the complete date “1982” is returned:

However, in the filter, any old combination of numbers will do:

Isn’t that 10x10x10x10 searches? I guess there is some kind of limits going on. Not much point in searching for plus 2023 or minus 1900 I would have thought.

Edit; comment removed for verification.

That was my thought. I was searching for Industrial Disease (Dire Straits) and got this as I was typing it out:

Finish typing and it finds it:

However these search results are truly abysmal:

Radio stations only? Not even a genre much less artists, albums or tracks.

Aside from the odd search result for “industrial,” the main point here is that Roon’s mid-typing response of “Can’t connect to Roon Search” is simply not the text to display. It should say “No results” or “Working on it!” or almost anything but “cannot connect” which makes it look like a Roon function is off-line.

In general, Roon’s error messages are misleading to the point of being counter-productive in trouble shooting. The “Metadata improver is paused” message is another ridiculously terrible one. I’ve noted quite a few over time that just send me in the wrong direction on understanding what the issue is.


*Footer: I love Roon; use it all the time every day. Sometimes I find the Roon team’s development decisions befuddling.

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I have a tendency to go other routes where I can

In this example I would go Artist > Filter “Dire” > Get Dire Straits > Discography > Love Over Gold

Because I know which album its on , even before the search difficulties I would not have used it

Each to his own, it don’t excuse the PP Performance of Search

That looks like a bug. I’ll have a look. Thanks for reporting it.

The filtering function is a completely separate feature. The team has been notified about the issue.

Which roon version are you running?

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The latest earlyaccess build (1180).

I have just realised I cannot do a search on any edited artist names in my library. I either have to remember what the native language original name was or search indirectly or by other means. For example, I cannot remember that the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra is natively “Česká filharmonie”. But if I want to choose from the drop down that is what I have to type:

On the other hand where I did not edit the artist name roon will accept common equivalences. So this one works as long as I know that Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Berliner Philharmoniker are equivalent. Unfortunately in most other cases it is not so obvious:

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So this will be fixed next?

Me too. I used to avoid searching because the resource overhead would crash Roon after a few searches. That seems fixed now, for maybe a year, so I’ve gotten a bit lazy. May have to go back to your method…

I’m not requesting it run on a Roon Core, I am requesting a completely different, and separate proposition. All current infrastructure, devices, and services would run the same, the difference would be, if I want to use Roon on my boat without any available internet, would it be possible to run a higher end server to host the Roon cloud services locally. The idea would be to basically run a dedicated server that runs the exact same code that they are running in the cloud. It could be provided for an additional fee, they could even provide a security key, or make it only available to lifetime members, etc. So no matter what the hardware requirements, just make that known. “to run this server, will require X system requirements” This is the same kind of service you get with products like Kaleidescape Strato or Trinnov Altitude.

Roon is already running 2 hardware platforms in their current model now, there is the Roon Core, and there is the cloud server, I’m just asking if they could provide a way for certain customers to run both pieces of hardware locally, while not having to write new code as most customers would not do so.

I thought Roon returned quality first (ie. high res recordings) inclusive of tracks in Tidal. I searched “Beethoven piano concerto 4” and received 149 recordings sorted by ‘popularity’ with the most popular item being from Tidal and a lossy sample rate of 22.05khz (not a very good example). . I then looked at the “focus” settings and it said there were 4 Hi Res items. When selected it only showed 2. Bit of a learning curve but lots of fun.

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I thought that’s what I said ?

How many users have access or want access to a server butch enough to do this. Roon moved it to the cloud because they thought it not possible on normal PC’s

What you suggest would require me to buy new and possibly expensive hardware. It’s probably not tenable for the few

But let’s see if Roon responds

I mean I am all for lower system requirements, but this is the direction they’ve decided to go to better enable their software development workflow. The way I see it, even in this current workflow, I’d rather have at least 1 local option versus none. This wouldn’t be something that would expected of most customers, but it could be a service provided to customers that are interested, if the customers could make it make financial sense for Roon.

While the target market would be small, I think it would be lucrative, and it wouldn’t require them to fracture their current software development strategy.

At the end of the day a computer is a computer, no matter if it’s in a rack in a server farm, or in a rack in someone’s garage, closet, or basement.

Currently, to get starlink maritime internet for a boat, there is an up front cost of $10,000 USD, plus a $5,000 per month operating cost. I feel like you could order and install a server that could host Roon web services on a boat for much less than that. There is an opportunity here.

I’ve answered the “why can’t we run the servers at home” question before, so I’ll paste it here–

I very much doubt that any significant number of people have the infrastructure to run this stuff at home. We’re talking about roughly 100 CPUs and a few terabytes of RAM just to spin everything up and serve the first request.

The most costly part would be the elasticsearch cluster, as that scales with the size of TIDAL/Qobuz catalogs, so you would need about as infrastructure as we are running even for a very light request load.

We’d be shipping 500GiB of data to you each day to update the streaming catalogs + machine learning models. The cost of that data transfer alone would be around $1200/mo. Even if we could somehow pay that once for all users using this mechanism, we would still need hundreds of users doing this just to offset the bandwidth cost.

And then…we’re talking about managing 50-100 backend services and about that number of deployments per day across the team. You can’t just spin it up and hope it stays running. To keep stuff like that going requires cluster management, monitoring tools, etc.

And then we would have to figure out what to do with all of the “Secrets” required to make our stuff work. We can’t publish private keys to third parties. Not our own, and not those of our partners/vendors which live on our infrastructure.

And then we would have to figure out a way for you to replicate certain resources that can only be cloud-based, like object stores, pub-sub queues, load balancers, and more, since there are many aspects of our infrastructure that are provided by GCP.

Replicating and maintaining our our infrastructure elsewhere would be a full time job, and that person would require a team on our side to productize it, document it, and support it for that kind of use. And then everything we do from now on would be slowed down by the need to support this use case.

Also, I’m certain that we would have to substantially reorganize some things to be able to do this without running into privacy laws, as many of those are quite strict about transferring data to third parties.

This project is so expensive and impractical, that to justify it we would need to think that it would double our user base. Realistically, if we released it, I doubt that anyone would actually go through the costs and trouble to successfully operate it, given the complexity.

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Joining this thread because I don’t want to take away from the legitimate issues some people are facing, but I thought I could balance those issues with some love for the Roon team.
I recently received the list of 100 recommended albums by Ted Gioia, and I decided to add them all to a tag in Roon (whether that is a reasonable thing to do or not I will leave out for now). It is a mix of pretty strange stuff from all around the world so pretty interesting as stress testing some corner cases.
I’m happy to say I could find all the ones that are on Qobuz, the search was very fast and the right result was almost inevitably within the first 1-2 results returned.
Granted, I pride myself in being pretty good at googling stuff so maybe some of that skills applied here :slight_smile: and of course I cannot know how it would have been before the latest changes to search, but it does look like the new search is working great in that scenario, well done!

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A post was split to a new topic: Local library tracks not found in search, streaming version is visible