Search feedback after 1.7

We’re now in Roon 1.7, but the Search results are as baffling as ever.

I have 45 albums of music by Beethoven in my library.

  • If I do an Albums->Focus->Composer->‘Ludwig van Beethoven’, I get all 45.
  • If, on the other hand, I search for ‘Ludwig van Beethoven’ (without the quotes), I get (in the Albums section, after clicking ‘Only show my library’) a 28 album subset of the above.
  • If, instead, I search for ‘Beethoven’ (again, without the quotes), I get a different (overlapping) set of 37 albums.
  • There are albums, in the original 45, which don’t show up in either search.

This seems like a really trivial thing to get right. (Getting more complicated searches to give the expected result is a taller order. But this?)

I assume you have Tidal or Qobuz.
If so, I imagine that the general, magnifying glass, search produces initially 100s of potential results. Roon then tries to sort these according to some relevance criteria. Your own albums will have some weighting but some non-library albums may end up higher in the list.

Roon now chooses the top 60 or so albums. In that list 37 of yours appear. Toggling the Only show my library_ switch will still only show those 37 (it doesn’t go back to that large list).

OK. So is there a way to restrict the initial search to my library, rather than doing an unrestricted search and filtering the result? The “Only show my library” switch is evidently not the way to do that …

Unfortunately not.

There is one brutal way to do this, and that is logging out from your streaming service.
All your ‘Streaming’ albums are temporarily removed from your library, untill you log in again.

I told you that it is brutal!
Dirk

If you want your personal library, select “Composers” view, then use the filter funnel for Beethoven. You’ll have a list of all Compositions by LvB, they will be spread across the 45 albums where LvB is cited as Composer in Focus.
Focus and Filter use the database index. Search is looking across all you have access to, indexed or otherwise. I would not expect them to give the same result. Since Search seems to put a premium on convenience (limiting views based on some combination of accuracy and popularity), the precision we’d like for finding specific instances takes a hit.

Which is completely useless: it yields 171 compositions (4 pages of results, with 50 compositions/page). For instance, each of the 33 Variations comprising the Diabelli Variations is listed as a separate composition.

Sorry, but that workaround for dealing with the broken search function is even more broken than the search function itself.

(Update: meticulously adding WORK and PART tags to the tracks which Roon had failed to identify as belonging to multi-part compositions cut this 171 down to 139 – 3 pages of results. Still useless, but now you can’t blame the metadata.)

Of course, you are right.
The point is the Focus and Filter (funnel) tools use context, indexes, and are specific to one’s library.
Search has way more to consider, is only partly indexed, doesn’t have context and is designed with a bias towards overall ‘popularity’.
It isn’t even a fair fight. Even if Search was limited to your library, you’d still have to weigh through all the other possible contexts (Artist, Composer, Track, etc).
Just adding context would help a lot.

@mike @support

Nothin comes up for ‘Married to the game’ by Future

Nothin comes up for ‘L’enu’ by Buju

Still plenty of room for search improvement.

It should also be noted that the Focus and Filter tools are not available in the iOS version of the Roon App. So there’s no “workaround” for the broken Search function there.