Search at roon is not just one system, it’s multiple that combine their results together into the results that are presented in the application, and they are being written from scratch one by one. The biggest culprit is the one for your local library, and that one is the hardest to test because each user has basically a different catalog and different requirements/preferences. This will inevitably lead to a solution that works in general cases, but will always have some special cases that don’t fit into that model.
In addition to all that, the search box search has been written from scratch (hence why it also differs from the main search page). However, even then it’s not something that is just written and forgotten - we’re working on improving all of them, but there’s only so many of us.
I just searched for “Beethoven Symphony 3 Abbado”, which I have in my library.
The search drop down gave me Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, Symphony No. 4, Symphony No. 8 and Symphony No. 7, all with Abbado, but no Symphony No. 3. But I did get offered Piano Concerto 20 by Mozart. All these results were tracks; no offers for composition.
but, if I scrolled down to the Albums section, there finally was the performance I was looking for. Though it was the third option for no obvious reason. And given that the drop down and the top result were poor matches, why would I scroll down at all?
I appreciate your post immensely and I don’t expect you to answer this post @zenit, but I’m a bit baffled by the bit about “different requirements/preferences”.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. The object of search is to find something. As far as I know, no one has any other preference or requirement than to find what they are looking for.
I don’t know about anybody else, but for myself I’d just like to see what I’m searching: if I want to find an artist, I just want to see the artist as a result.
I don’t want to see albums or tracks or record labels. Just the artist. This is what search is: looking for something specific.
Please allow me (or rather us) to do that. Let us do a specific search and don’t annoy us with garbage results like albums for an artist search, artists for a track search, tracks for an album search and so on… You get the picture, I hope.
The real problem is Roon wanting to do everything in one go. I think no one wants this.
I don’t accept that the two examples I have just posted are “special cases” or esoteric or complex in any way. To me they are straightforward, simple, ordinary, everyday searches. It takes some work, and uses up goodwill, to go to the trouble to make these posts, and one does so in the expectation that they are useful and that at some point there will be a beneficial outcome. To be told that the amply documented failures here are “special cases” is dismissive and ungrateful and verges on gaslighting. Nor is it always the case that the users library is relevant. The last woeful search failure I posted is an example of a cd not in my library that the search drop down said “No Results Found” for, and which then came up as the “Top Result” on the next screen. That is just absurd. I’ve been posting examples of bad search results for two years. I’ve asked several times for advice from Roon how I could better find CDs I know exist that Roon can’t find. Rarely have I had any helpful feedback. Now finally someone from Roon suggests that these are just “special cases”, with the implication that we shouldn’t be so picky, and really Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 is just the same as Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony … I give up.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a few things lost in translation here, I apologize for not clarifying.
The last example you posted with “Brandenburg Concertos Faust” is definitely a bug, and I’ll open a ticket for it. Most of the examples posted here aren’t special cases in any sense. What I meant about it is that for example, in general, we might push library results to the top a bit, and that might be fine in 99% of the cases, but there is 1% of cases where it’s not the preferred case. Let’s say you have an MP3 copy of the “White Album” in your local library but might prefer the FLAC version from Qobuz/Tidal instead.
Also, personally, I don’t find these requests “picky”. I’m just trying to clarify why things work they do right now, and to give some info about what we’re currently working on.
And the previous example I posted “Beethoven Symphony 3 Abbado” isn’t a bug? You think “Mozart Piano Concerto 20” should appear as the 3rd result in the search drop down for that query? Is that a bug in your view, or acceptable behaviour, or a “special case”?
When searching for something specific - completely agree, especially if you’ve entered a longer search query. There is rarely ambiguity there, and I don’t want to see that are very vaguely connected to what I wrote. The vast majority of changes we’re doing right now are exactly towards precision, to at least allow the user to find what they look for when they enter a precise query, regardless of how obscure the artist/track/composition might be.
However, often searches are vague, or just partially typed out. That means we have potentially hundreds of results and have to score one over the other. Here’s an example. When searching for something like “leyenda”, I personally prefer Segovia’s version over John Wiliams’ or Ana Vidović’s. As such, the search results for me is better if this version is shown when I enter “leyenda”, while someone else might mean the band “La Leyenda” by it. We have to be support both use cases in such a way that they don’t disturb each other.
“Mozart Piano Concerto 20” is definitely wrong, and it’s the result of the local search being very “tolerant” about what is a match. “Abbado”, or “Symphony” might be mentioned somewhere there. Either way, this won’t be the case soon.
There are actually multiple issues that make it hard to find. One of them being the same underlying issue as for “Brandenburg Concertos Faust”. For now, the only thing I can recommend, try entering “beethoven symphony 3 claudio abbado eroica”. Once you’ve found it, add it to your library. It should be a bit easier to find it after that. Alternatively, I can suggest you create a tag and add it there. I know it’s not ideal, but this is a bit more complex case than “Michael Jackson - Thriller”.
To conclude, I truly do appreciate your efforts and the provided examples, and I hope that we can improve most of them soon.
You evidently haven’t read my post. I’ve told you already, twice in fact, that “Beethoven Symphony 3 Abbado” is already in my library, at least the version with the BPO which was what I wanted. But it doesn’t appear in the search drop down nor as the Top Result.
I don’t accept your premise that Roon search should throw up everything that contains “leyenda” as it’s trying to do now.
That’s simply setting yourself up for failure.
Make it so that users can define exactly what they want to find, whether it’s la Leyenda from the suite española or the band La Leyenda.
I’ve suggested parametrized search many times. Qobuz has solved this very elegantly with tabs: enter your search string and click the tab “artist”, “album”, “track”, “composition” or whatever.
You get rid of the ambiguity this way without making it too technical for the user. Less frustrating as well. Seeing a junkyard full of random results is funny the first time. After that it’s just frustrating.
Here is something that has been driving me bonkers since the latest search update happened. As I type, different search results come up that change the more I type.
What I often find is that I will type and what I want will display. When I stop typing to choose what has come up, it disappears by the time my finger taps the selection and something else gets chosen. This absolutely 100% defeats the purpose of having the search results change as I type.
For example, I often like to listen to Miranda Lee Richards. I own all her albums. So as I type “Miranda…”, she pops up as first choice. As soon as I stop typing to select her name, she disappears from the search results entirely. I then need to type out closer to her full name to choose her. This 100% defeats the purpose of having results change. As soon as she is first choice, I stop! She should still be first choice…hehe, at least one of the choices!
I pretty much agree with all the examples shared here as I have the same experience. The search functionality is broken.
I do wonder if the developers are working on some fixes. The large number of replies should indicate that there is a problem and a lot of users are impacted.
@zenit seems to be from the Roon search development team and started to shed some light on how search is currently working and what we can expect as improvements. It is not an explicit list as Roon does in general not communicate what we can expect and when. But read through his posts in this thread and you might get some insights. I’m still confident that some of the obvious flaws like ignoring parts of the entered words (preferred ‘or’ between search words instead of ‘and’), no tolerance on obvious misspellings, etc. will be fixed. And maybe even implementing some syntax on general word order like Artist, Album, Track and an equivalent for classical music could be imagined.
