Roon search sucking... Please provide examples

[Geoff_Coupe]

So it might be on the number of hits? Anyway, AFAIK, Roon Labs is working on improvements (which is why these results are useful data for them), so I’ll carry on listening to the music…

[Jez]

@Geoff_Coupe

So it might be on the number of hits?

Who knows? Why speculate? Or clutch at straws. Either you think a search for “Paul Wranitzky” should produce “Paul Wranitzky” or you don’t. Do you think the results shown here are acceptable or not? What would you think an acceptable result would be?

[misig1]

I’m not capable to read 162 posts concerning this topic, so please excuse me, if I repeat an issue here…

Search is just not usable anymore. Every google entry follows better results than roon, at this moment.

Just one example of many, non usefuls.

“iko iko” - probably one of the most popular songs in the 20th century- gives me back:

I like the album proposals, especially Tchaikovsky (all from my local classic library…) and the title suggestions are marvellous too: Tou Mikou, Sank Nikolaus (local album from a german comedian reffering to christmas…) and so on… Unfortunately no iko iko and no suggestion from qobuz in the first 15 titels, albums etc.
1 (one!) song has been found (Dr. John 1972) - for a song, that was covered 27 times (wikipedia)… And Dr. John was not the most popular one, at all…

Why does the search works in the basic qobuz app? Why Roon is not showing Qobuz results anymore (or at just at the bottom of the list)? I want to discover someting. I know my albums… I dont’ know yet the undiscovered Qobuz (Tidal et al) world…

Add images

[eclectic]

@Jez

I expect a search for “Bach Cello Isserlis” to return recordings of the Bach Cello Suites played by Steven Isserlis.

The top 6 albums Roon offers are by Bach, but nothing to do with the cello except incidentally, and don’t involve Isserlis. Similarly the tracks are for Bach keyboard music played by Murray Perahia or Andreas Schiff, and some Beethoven, all well wide of the mark. If I expand on the track suggestions there are dozens all wrong. Yet there are 36 tracks in my library that should be direct hits.

It is not until the second screenful of albums that a direct hit on Bach, Cello and Isserlis is offered. But since the first screenful isn’t close, there’s no reason why I would normally press More, since I don’t want more wrong ones.

When I search for " bach cello isserlis" (without quotes) it only returns albums in my library. No albums from Qobuz that I haven’t added. Is this normal?

I have to drill down to the artists suggested to see non library albums.

[Jez]

@eclectic

When I search for " bach cello isserlis" (without quotes) it only returns albums in my library. No albums from Qobuz that I haven’t added. Is this normal?

The way Roon seems to work is that it will sometimes return partial matches from your own library before direct hits from Qobuz that aren’t in your library. And the hits from your own library don’t always seem to be ordered by how close they are. So, if you haven’t got Isserlis’ Bach Cello suites in your library, you will get matches on Bach or Cello or Isserlis, of which you probably have plenty. If you have got that piece in your library, Roon might not offer it first, or even on the first screen. You may thus reasonably think the search has failed. And you will only get a maximum of 50 matches. If you haven’t got 50 partial matches in your library, you may get some (often better ones) from Qobuz at the end. But there’s no obvious consistency. If I search for “Bach Isserlis” I get poor results as above. If I search for “Bach Perahia” I get a decent set of results, matching on both words. Now that there is focus it is possible to work round these issues sometimes, though it is tedious and unnecessary to have to do so.

[eclectic]

Thanks. That’s informative.

I don’t have Isserlis’ Cello Suites in my library but have lots of Bach(s) and cello music (far more than 50). Top recommendation for me was a recording of St Matthew Passion followed by CPE Bach harspichord works. I do have Isserlis playing Haydn in my library but that didn’t show up.

[thomas_clark1 (thomas clark)]

I listen to concerts
The date is a part of the album title.
All purchased from same source.
Have 46 from 2014.
When I search 2014 only 22 are displayed.
Have to then try numerous other ways to find the others…venue name, city etc

[Enrico_Corvonato]

Roon Core Machine

Roon 1.8 build 806
macOS Big Sur on iMac Retina 4K 2017, 16GB RAM

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Router Experia, WIFI via Apple AirPort Extreme, core connected via Ethernet cable

Connected Audio Devices

Bluesound Node (1), Apple Airport Express (2)

Library Size

6k albums, 80k tracks
Only local library, no streaming services connected.

Description of Issue

Search results are useless and to my knowledge this happened since after the summer release of 1.8.

Attached are 2 screenshots comparing iTunes vs. Roon. I searched for the string “un homme et une” hoping to find all my songs titled “un homme et une femme”.

iTunes returned exactly what I expected (all my songs under the named title) while Roon returned god only knows what (quite embarrassing, besides being totally useless).

Please do not tell me to use filters or to go to compositions after finding one example.

I want to use the search function to decide whether I want to narrow into albums, songs or else… besides the fact that the “composition trick” only returns a portion of the songs under the same title (other mistery of Roon).

For the records, iTunes does exactly what I need. Therefore there is no much explaining or justifying needed here: it’s only about replicating what iTunes does right and make it happen under Roon. Hopefully this is not caused by the fact that Roon “optimized” the search functionality for the multi million-tracks online services because this would be quite disappointing (and useless) to me.

Please stop this crap and provide a product that works as it once used to be the case. iTunes search functionality is a good benchmark for your testing.

When do you plan to fix this?

Appreciate a quick turnaround because my user experience with Roon has become miserable.

Thanks,
enrico

[Frank_Daman]

I did a search for a track that should yield unambiguous results; “green manalishi”. There is only one (1) composition that corresponds with this search string.

This is what Roon serves up:

Artists should include Fleetwood Mac, Judas Priest, Halford and Peter Green Splinter group in top results.

Albums should include And Then Play On and Unleashed in the East in top results (at least).

Oh come on! Green earrings? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on!

Who else composed the Green Manalishi? Why are these people shown here?

I specifically searched for one composition. One. There is only one. Not two, not twenty. One.

[Neil_Russell]

This morning, I searched “The Mercy Brothers”, and nothing comes up on the results page, even though they are in my library. I click on the MORE button, and low and behold, they are in the 51st position. Here were the top results:

[Squeezemenicely (Dom)]

@tripleCrotchet

I just don’t understand the logic of turning “search” into a variation on these discovery tools and diluting plain old search to the point that its not really a search option anymore.

That is exactly how I feel. Roon search is trying to do something fancy and completely fails at that, instead of just spitting out the results and treating them as words. Like “apple pie” giving you all the the results that have “apple” and “pie” -, but Roon would serve “Cheeseburger” as a result…

Yes @Danny has written quite a few times, that he is aware of search problems and they hired more staff to solve this - but it would be so great if some Roonie that is actually working on the problems, would actually write in this thread and state - “Yes, I absolutely understand the specific problem and we will try and fix this” Or, something like " explain further what problems there are" or just any kind of reaction. This thread seems like posting into a black hole.
Just some communication would be great. I have posted many examples and do not know if the specific problem was tried out at Roon, or if they understand what I mean etc.

Just give us a primitive search function - as in the most primitive databases and then a Roon Special search for the more adventurous customers - that love being surprised.

Thanks a lot!

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

Please stay on topic with examples. The team is working on our search infrastructure and will use these examples as training data to validate their work. It will take time.

[Squeezemenicely (Dom)]

@danny

The team is working on our search infrastructure and will use these examples as training data to validate their work. It will take time.

Thanks, this statement will surely make many of us feel better. So this is not a dead thread and examples will be used. That is definitely a good thing and I am sure there will be many more examples.
This all might seem like complaining, but it is trying to help fix an important part of our daily lives / routines. Music is quite important to us - that is why we are here and using Roon

[Jez]

@danny

Please stay on topic with examples. The team is working on our search infrastructure and will use these examples as training data to validate their work. It will take time.

Thanks for the feedback.

Meantime some posters on this thread might appreciate some feedback on whether there are other ways of achieving the result they are looking for. How do the Roon team suggest someone looks for “Der Fliegende Hollander”, to pick just one example, given that currently the search box doesn’t deliver a useful result?

And given that some of the current issues involve undue weight being placed on the users library, and these libraries are different for all of us, are you confident that the search team are able to test issues related to this, since they can’t replicate our libraries?

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Jez

Meantime some posters on this thread might appreciate some feedback on whether there are other ways of achieving the result they are looking for.

Let’s not do that in this thread.

@Jez

How do the Roon team suggest someone looks for “Der Fliegende Hollander”, to pick just one example, given that currently the search box doesn’t deliver a useful result?

Roon - Seraching for "Der Fliegende Hollander"

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

[Jez]

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

@danny

Let’s not do that in this thread

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

@danny

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

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.

Roon search sucking... Please provide examples

Here’s an example A search for “Der fliegende Holländer” I have 3 recordings of Der fliegende Holländer in my library. Plus another couple that have some arias from it within. The Lee Morgan Sidewinder in the results is particularly funny. It seems the search is just using “Der” and ignoring the rest of the search terms. [Screenshot 2021-07-10 at 11.48.27] [Screenshot 2021-07-10 at 11.29.54] A search for “The Flying Dutchman” [Screenshot 2021-07-10 at 11.34.21]

[Enrico_Corvonato]

@danny

Please stay on topic with examples. The team is working on our search infrastructure and will use these examples as training data to validate their work. It will take time.

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.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

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.

[tripleCrotchet (Tony)]

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.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@Enrico_Corvonato

• 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;

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.