Roon search sucking... Please provide examples

Let’s not do that in this thread.

I should have also shown this screenshot from scrolling down to compositions in the search results:

I am confused by your post. When I suggest that Roon might offer suggestions to help people find stuff you say:

and then you offer a suggestion to help people find stuff!

Whatever. I suggest that @mvrlogins might have appreciated that feedback when they posted about their problems trying to find Der Fliegende Hollander over two weeks ago. And can you see how their results are different from yours? They got terrible results under albums. Your video doesn’t show what results you got under albums. Did you get direct hits, or similarly vaguely related ones? Sure they could have gone in under composition if it came up in their search drop down, but then they would have had to scroll down and down and gone into focus and select out Qobuz or whatever to get the recordings they knew they had. It isn’t unreasonable to expect the results for Albums to be better. Or is the point of your video that you disagree, and that we should be doing such searches via a different path? In which case it would help some of us to know that.

Hi @danny, I have 2 concerns:

  1. customer experience: seems like we, paying users, are treated as testers. I did not apply to any testing program, and I expect that what was working is not being broken by a new release;
  2. Roon methodology: seems like you do not consider that any new developments / features shall replicate older and more basic functionalities by design. Whatever you do new, if does not reproduce the old behavior as a limit case, is broken. It is completely pointless to build fancy and complex models if they do not converge, in their limit case, to the simpler ones. Now using all our complaints to train an AI algorithm is by far the opposite of the right approach - which goes back to point 1 above.

Therefore, I wish that the team devises a more timely and sensible approach to restore the basics. Including eventually rolling back.

Thanks,
A frustrated user.

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I also know the Flying Dutchman as a composition, so for my personal usage, I tend to go to the composer or composition page and then view performances.

We’ve acknowledged that there is an issue with local library results and how they are prioritized and merged in with results across the larger body of works on streaming services.

You keep asking the same thing over and over, and the answer is the same every time:

We are working on this, and when we are done, you will see the improvement. In the meanwhile, you can provide us with examples that fail to meet expectations and why.

If you’d like to have some more success in the meanwhile, I would treat the results as “there are some library results and some streaming results. both are not bad if considered independently, but totally messed up in the order they are displayed” – if that means you can skip ahead to the search results from the streaming services, great. If the results are truncated before that, well, then there is no workaround.

My personal strategy for dealing with this is a bit different. I don’t have the Flying Dutchman in my library, and my “album results” are filled with nonsense local library results, then followed by great results from TIDAL and Qobuz.

Anyway, if you are interested in strategies, that’s not for this topic. Yes, it’s being discussed here, but it’ll get moved out to its own thread soon enough. Creating noise here will only make future developers miss test cases they should be testing once they have new algorithms.

It should be noted that we are not going to improve the above mentioned strategies or make certain workarounds better. We are focused on fixing search problems at their core. While a few people here have successfully noted the issues, the majority are talking about things they don’t understand. These types of comments are just noise. Let us do what we need to do and please be patient.

Maybe this is the disconnect.

I don’t know how my others share this view, but when I do a search on “the flying dutchman” I am expecting to see in each section whether artist, album, title, etc. only hits, for the string “the flying dutchman” Maybe if the list is empty some would prefer to see a random list. I would prefer to see an empty list. I am certainly not expecting to see a hit for “The The” just because there are two “the’s” in The The.

So when I do a search in Qobuz for the “the flying dutchman” on artist I get a helpful:

In roon I get a confusing “flying burrito brother’s”, “monty python’s flying circus” and “the the”. There does not appear to be any prioritising of the most likely important word in simple phrases.

Also, for a personalised search I don’t see any reason why Wagner’s famous opera should be the top result if my listening habits are hip-hop or electronic or anything else really. Did that not raise a red flag? You don’t strike me as someone whose primary listening is Classical. Qobuz had no problems identifying “the flying dutchman” hip-hop and electronic bands and also the flying dutchman jazz label, all of which roon missed.

I then hearted several “the flying dutchman” hits directly in Qobuz and added them to my roon library when they showed up. The results are mixed.

  1. The flying dutchmen are still not showing up in the artists section

  2. A confusing mixture of albums by the flying dutchman artists as well as albums with the flying dutchman in the album title (what is expected) plus a lot of other noise.

  3. Mostly the flying dutchman in some opera tracks along with some random tracks with “the” and/or “flying” and/or “dutchman” in the track title.

  4. No “the flying dutchman” composers. More noise.

  5. A lot of genres probably related to other search criteria. If there is no “the flying dutchman” genre, I would prefer to see no genres.

  6. The jazz label “The Flying Dutchman” now shows up in labels along with a lot of unrelated labels with “flying” and “the” in their names.

I would have provided some screen shots but when I have a search open on “the flying dutchman” every time I press the “more” button in various sections roon crashed. I gave up after rebooting roon 3 times.

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You don’t have to test. You can just live with the product as is. The involvement here is purely optional.

I would argue that nothing was broken by any release. In fact, the backend for search results did not change between 1.7 and 1.8.

The search bar autocomplete feature was changed in the last build, but that’s the nature of a subscription service. The software will change over time. This is not something we plan to change.

However, what did change is that we eliminated the old poor matching autocomplete. It was eliminated because it was bad. The majority of feedback on the new autocomplete has been positive. These forums and your anecdotal experiences are valid, but they do not have a monopoly on the product design.

I argue that something went wrong indeed in the last build. Before I was able to find songs with the same title. Now I cannot any longer as my example demonstrates.

If you acknowledge that there is an issue with local libraries, why don’t you roll back to the prior solution until you devise a solution that works for all of us?

The previous solution had the same problem. However, before, it was all bad. Now that some parts of it are good, it’s notable in some cases that the order is messed up.

2 Likes

I have a problem with this statement as it suggests that for the past year or so I did not recognize an existing problem.

Very much possible of course. However, here’s my question: how come that before I was able to put in the search bar a part of a song’s title and being prompted all tracks close to that search string, once I clicked on “see all tracks”? Now, when I click on that option, I see totally unrelated outcomes.

My statement is conflicting with yours. We first need to agree on the facts and the fact is that I remember being able to search for tracks until very recently.

Now I only see 2 options:

  1. my memory deceives me,
  2. it’s not true that “the previous solution” had the same problem.

Cheers,
Enrico

One more example below.
Search for: “strange fruit”. iTunes returns exactly what I expect. Roon is merciless. Solution: have Roon return the same as iTunes.

//iTunes
Shows 1 album; shows songs; and then when I ask to see all songs, I see all songs with the named title + all the song from the homonymous album.


//Roon
Random results. :sweat_smile: :joy:

The more examples I see, the more I see the issue we already know about. For example, when I search for “strange fruit”, and go down to “tracks” (same as iTune’s “songs”), I see about 9 results that are stupid, all from my local library. After the 9 bad results, our results are very similar to what iTunes gave.

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As another data point that is not what I am seeing in my library.

  1. First I get 6 covers of strange fruit, all from Qobuz. They are in my library but not my local library. They are more contemporary artists like Cassanda Williams and Annie Lennox. I am surprised not to see Billie Holliday or Nina Simone, at or near the top.

  2. Then I get a random collection of 48 tracks with “strange” in the title like “Baby Strange” from T-Rex (but strangely, none with fruit in the title). As far as I can see, of those, 15 are in my local library. The rest are either Qobuz I haven’t added to my library or Qobuz that I have.

  3. Then at track 55 I finally get a Billie Holiday performance (my local library) and at track 58 a Nina Simone performance (Qobuz, not in my library). These tracks are in a final group of 37 tracks all of which (or at least most of which) I assume are the expected “strange fruit” but I didn’t check them. As far as I can see only one of this group is in my local library, the rest are Qobuz.

All these counts are by hand as I could see no other obvious way of doing it. So it is possible I have made small errors but the trends should be clear enough.

This morning I was searching for Stephen Cleobury albums in my library. He is a famous Choir Director and Organist in the UK. I couldn’t remember the spelling of his first name, Steven, Stefan, Stephen, Stephan etc. so I just put “Cleobury” in the search.

So Stephen Cleobury’s brother Nicholas comes up, as does his wife Emma. There is a clue, however, in the two “compound” nonsense artists that the “Stephen” I am probably looking for is “Stephen Cleobury” so I put that into the search.

Still no “Stephen Cleobury” in the artists section. But there is yet another clue. In the “Top result” Stephan Cleobury gets an “arranger” credit. It is not uncommon for Choir directors to arrange so maybe roon considers Stephen Cleobury a composer rather than an artist?

So I scroll down to the composer section and there he is:

I click on that and finally get to the list of albums I was looking for:

I have tried to describe as plainly as possible the steps involved in searching for these albums on roon so anyone reading this should be aware that none of the steps were obvious (to me at least) and involved a lot of secondary searching on wiki to try and un-pick what roon is doing so I could get the result I was looking for.

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Your mistake is using the Search box. It is currently a lost cause. I would now click on artists, stick “Cleo” in the filter box, pick Stephen Cleobury, click on Discograohy and then use Focus to narrow down to my own library (or whatever). This, although arguably tedious, should get you what you want. Of course it will only work if you have Stephen Cleobury discs in your library. And possibly may not get discs where he is credited as arranger or composer.

Actually that works if I am searching for Stephen Cleobury albums because I have local ones. However, it does not work if I am looking for Nicholas Cleobury albums because I don’t have local ones.

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Yep, I did say it would only work if Stephen Cleobury discs were in your library, but they were, and they were what you were looking for, so going in via Artist > Discography does the job. For Nicholas Cleobury the Search box is the better bet - I get offered him as the top Artist choice and that’s fine.

And I’ve just tried using the search box for “Cleobury” and am confused too. First off, the search box offers Nicholas Cleobury as an Artist and Stephen Cleobury as a Composer. No Stephen Cleobury as an artist.

But hey, ho!, let’s choose Stephen Cleobury in his Composer persona anyway and get his discography, and see what we get:

Stephen Cleobury wrote the Bach Mathew Passion? Really?! He would no doubt be pleased to have written it, but he didn’t.

Is it a mistake in the metadata? let’s look at the credits …

Nope, he doesn’t get a composer credit, just a conductor credit. Which raises the quite reasonable question of how would you find stuff he composed as opposed to conducted?

Um - use the Compositions tab? (although to be strictly correct, it appears that these are arrangements by him, even if the source metadata claims that he composed them)

I don’t think many would consider Stephen Cleobury a composer. That is reflected in his composition tab where he just gets a credit for a Christmas Carol and a few Organ pieces. He would be considered a much more significant Choir Director and Organist.

It seems if you are determined enough you can find the Stephen Cleobury output you are interested in using quite a variety of search methods. That is the point of my post. When did it become so hard? I would expect to use the magnifying glass to quickly find Stephen Cleobury’s output framed in a straightforward way in each of the sections. For example, I would expect to find his output as an artist in the artist section and his output as a composer in the composition section.