Search/filter with tags and ruminations on advanced search

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I’m finding an odd behavior in doing tag filtering. I’d almost consider this a bug. Bear with me for a messy explanation. I have created tags like “rating=8”, “rating=9”, etc, and bulk tagged my music collection using these ratings, created prior to roon. I also created a tag “compilation”, different from roon compilation, for albums or album sets with a large variety of artists (e.g. the 1962 single album “bluegrass hall of fame”).
Problem: in albums, under tags, select “compilation”. all my compilations show up. Now select tag “rating =8”. These are or’d, and I see no way to “and” them, so I get all my compilations and any album in my collection rated 8. Point 1: let me “and” tags (or tell me how to do it)
Next, even more mysterious, click on the plus on the “rating=8” to “not” it. now I get only (compilations that are not rated 8), not (compilations or anything not rated 8).

In math language, I selected 2 tags a, b, and got “a or b” when I would really like “a and b”. I then negated b, which one might think would give me “a or not b”, but instead I got “a and not b”. To be able to combine tags with full control, we need an “and/or” selector separate from negation. I might call this a “parentheses problem”:
roon interprets “a or notb” as "a not(or b) which is equal to “a and not b”.

In user language, I can’t see how to select “all albums with user tags (compilation and rated 8)”

more generally, in roon design, it was decided to go with “focus”, “filter”, “search” and not permit direct user creation of boolean expressions. I understand this from a usability and support point of view: you only allow and and or where they make sense, etc, but there should be an “advanced” search where fields could be combined in a logical boolean expression (and/or/not). If the results of that search could be added to the queue, it would provide a very powerful way to create customized playlists. (I’m kind of weird, but I want jazz and judy collins, but not miles davis, with tags 8,9, or 10, and no compilations)… well, you get the idea.

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Did Roon ever reply on this request? I do exactly the same as you and want to search for albums tagged: 8 and also tagged: Ambient, (or any other combination of two tags)
Looking through the forum, I can only see recommendations to create negative tags as a very long winded workaround

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My request was neither acknowledged or replied to. allowing boolean combinations of tags in a coherent way seems logical and useful.
Since I haven’t been on the forum for a while, I’ll go a bit out of context. I’ve pretty much given up on roon support. I’ve made a number of suggestions, and found a few anomalies and outright bugs which I reported with mostly enough information to replicate them. Almost nothing was responded to by roon, nothing was assigned a tracking number, and nothing appears on lists of future enhancements. Without source code, this leaves me pretty helpless, though I’ve gotten a few suggestions from other users. Roon is an excellent product - I’ve tried many music systems over the years, and voted for roon with my pocketbook. But the difference between excellent and great is in customer support and quality assurance. Plowing through vast archives of user comments, of varying quality and often incomplete information, seems to be the only recourse for gaining insight and solving problems. The documentation for room is pretty decent, but incomplete. No wonder there is a long thread elsewhere regarding increased user testiness, its pretty frustrating. Instead of reporting problems and making suggestions which are ignored, my solution has simply been to take what roon provides, as long as it continues to be reasonable. (sorry for the soapbox, your question reminded me of my poor experience with roon customer support and this forum…) If you find a clean solution to this problem, I’d love to hear it…

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oops. I should have said that, while roon did not solve my problem with tags, I am able to do a function similar to what you want. you mention ambient and rated 8. What I do is use my own genres (not roons), and then I can use the focus feature in roon to achieve something similar. So, for example, on the ‘my albums’ page, I use focus, check the genres I want to hear and then use the tag drop-down to select tags. As an example, I can start at toplevel album page, use focus to select genres “jazz” and “blues”, then use the tag dropdown to select ‘rating = 8’ and ‘rating = 9’. This gives me an album playlist containing only jazz and blues rated 8 or 9, that I can then play or shuffle.

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I agree that it would be nice if, when picking multiple tags, to have the option of selecting “Match all” or “Match any”, like what we can do now for some of the Focus settings, like Performers, Composers, and Production.

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yes. however, even the focus ability to select fields is sort of helter skelter and not very consistent. I’m an old mathematician: let me select < and, or, not> for each tag/focus criteria, full boolean. leave whats there, make the full search an advanced option. rule out or warn the user if the search will be computationally intensive, using guidelines any database query programmer knows to limit unfeasible searches.

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I would love to see full boolean logic too, but the product managers at Roon Labs are reluctant to add features that are not easily accessible by non-programmers. It took a lot of feature requests to get the “Match all” vs “Match any” logic added to Focus. Expanding this existing approach to multiple Tags should not worry the product managers too much. :slight_smile:

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Thanks but unless i am misunderstanding, this only allows a focus on a Roon genre, not one of my own tags? So although I can add both my tags to the drop down, i am effectively getting tag a OR tab b, rather than tag a AND tag b?
So I am seeing all ambient albums regardless of scope and all 8* albums regardless of genre, rather than all 8* ambient albums?

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yes, this solution uses a mix of mp3 genre tags and roon tags. I had my own genres in the track metadata for my entire collection long before roon. Its pretty easy using a tool like mp3tag to make sure you have all your albums in the genre you want them in: you can do bulk operations to change a large directory of (say) blues all at once. then, once you have your collection with the mp3 genre tags you want, instead of using roon’s choice of genres for each album (the default I think), under settings/library/import settings, set the first 2 fields: no for genres from roons database, yes for import genres from file settings. Then, if in your case all your ambient albums had metadata file tags with the genre field set to “ambient”, my approach works fine: in roon, my albums, use focus to select your ambient genre and any additional criteria you want to include or “not” out, then select the tags icon to select your ratings. My son delights in using this approach to say “I want to hear blues, jazz, and folk, but only albums rated 8 or higher, and this time no joan baez or miles davis”, creating a playlist like that.

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