Search delivers quite confusing results

I’m testing roon with qobuz. There are a lot topics already about the search behavior of roon. I did not find a suitable one covering my issues so let me add a new one.

try searching for the famous song ‘Macarena’ from ‘los del rio’
expected outcome :

  • Top Result: the song ‘macarena’
  • In the track list of the result set: have ‘macarena’ at the top

Instead, I get the album from los del rio, which has in this case ‘macarena’ in it. OK, that’s an result option, but not what I expected, and not what other streaming services brings as the top result.

In the track list, ‘Macarena’ is on a lower position, not top. other streaming services are more intuitive that the most popular song should sit on position one.

You can have other examples, like ‘smoke on the water’: Top result is good here, Track list result brings the title from ‘Mofa 25’ to the top of the list.

I would love to see roon providing stronger search results, on a par with streaming services. Otherwise it does not bring the value needed to be competitive.

Okay, a couple of comments. First, as has been said on this forum before, Roon is album focused not track focused. So the album listed first is as expected. As you said, you’re good with that. It does give you what you want. As far as the particular track you expected to be listed first, it’s unclear how Roon prioritizes the listed results. Remember, Roon has no way to know which version of the song you’re looking for. As to listing the most popular first, the metadata doesn’t contain a popular field. Roon has no way to know which of the various versions of Macarena is most popular. I tried the search in Qobuz’ app and it failed miserably. If you search for Macarena, Los Del Rio is nowhere to be found at least in the several dozens of listings I scrolled through before getting bored. There are hundreds of listings for Macarena in the title of the track or the artist name, but no Los Del Rio. If I search for Los Del Rio the first two track listings are remixes. The very last track for Los Del Rio is the original Macarena. So in this case I would say Roon is not worse than Qobuz’ app or maybe better. I can’t say for other apps.

Indeed, there might be better examples as qobuz struggles as well to bring the most popular result to the top. Amazon and deezer are better here. see attached screenshots.

I tested other examples, and roon is not bad, but behind others if tracks . for example, search for the track ‘smoke on the water’, and you will get the track from Mofa 25 as the first one listed under tracks. The top result works great.

I tested a bit more since my first post, and especially today, I got good results. Might be an issue with this very diverse search expressions. if you search for ‘satisfaction’ for example, only Amazon Music is able to bring the famous track from the Rolling Stones up.

Let’s see what the roon team can do to advance their AI.

Just did a search in the Qobuz app in “tracks” for Los Del Rio Macarena. Worked fine although the original was listed fourth.

As for Roon search… my opinion is well known: it needs to be redeveloped from scratch.

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