Search for Individual Track is Failing [Ticket In]

Another wonderful tale of the utter mess that is MetaData inside roon.

Today, i’m putting back together a 7 hour playlist. Something I’m having to do manually, as roon for some reason, has no mechanism to import playlists exported from its own product.

So here I am, going through my library re-adding all the tracks that made up the playlist, using the CSV for reference.

I present to you this gem from the dark tales of roon nonsense…

  1. i search for “Why Don’t you” a track by Cleo Sol, that I know for a fact is in my library. In fact, here it is… in my library

  2. a search for Cleo Sol, also shows that she is in my library, with the correct album

  3. but when i search for “Why don’t you” i get this


    which is a NON library version of the same song from a random EP that I haven’t added and is being pulled down from qobuz.

  4. so i force roon to search only my library, for a song we know exists, and we know is in my library

no results of any kind that show the track I’m looking for.

Why on earth, is something that has been operational for over a decade now, and costing people money every single month, this utterly rubbish at doing the absolute basics.

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You can totally reimport Roon exported playlists. Depends on the file format for imports. A CSV file can be converted to m3u or even XML just fine.

Perhaps your library files have poor embedded metadata? Roon can only do so much with the data it has access to. If your files are poorly tagged, then it is prone to mistakes or bad guesses.

I do definitely think that Roon search could be better - mainly for its inability to deal with any guesstimations whatsoever - but I haven’t had troubles similar to yours.

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What happens when you click on the library icon in the results page?

Incidently, I think Roon only returns one match for a given artist and song title.

As per my images, if I only select library, I get no matches for the song

I’m searching for the song title for goodness sake, that’s not even real metadata and you can clearly see the song title when you go find the album manually. If there’s a metadata problem, it’s one roon is creating for itself.

To further this. What’s even more screwed up is if I search for slightly different terms, it shows me other matches from the correct album, but not the actual one that matches the song in searching for

I’d be less enraged about it, if we hadn’t all been going on about metadata inconsistencies for years. The team at ROON seem to spend forever focusing on features no one asked for (the “improve” button anyone?), but have still had glaring issues with library management for most of the last decade.

But, much like being stuck in an IOS ecosystem, I can’t imagine the pain of having to move away from roon at this stage.

These appear to be general searches, e.g.:

… and from library.

However, if Roon can’t find it with the library filter, I’d check the file metadata and import settings.

Moving to Support .

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its linked from qobuz, and i’m searching for the song title… i mean thats just plain text, it shouldn’t even need metadata, its data i can see with my bare eyes by looking at it.

Thanks for the clarification. Performing your search, I get these results.

I would have expected a hit, so I tried this.

I’d expect to see Mama from their eponymous album, Genesis, but it’s not listed at all. There are some odd results for a track search, too. Why is album title influencing the track results?

I think this is a regression.

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And this is the thing… i don’t often post because usually i just live with it, but it’s not the first time that ROON has made it hard for me to find music I know I have in my library, when I’m searching specifically by the name of the title of songs or the album itself.

It does make me want to explore just going down a different route, like converting to a BluOS device and streaming from NAS.

I don’t use ARC, or any of the EQ features, ROON for me is purely a way to organise and search for music in my library. If it can’t even get that right, then its going to be curtains. A shame as I’ve had it since about 2013.

Added to the ongoing issues around mixed airplay zones, that roon have been ignoring for months, and we’re really putting the nails in the coffin.

My only suggestion is to use filter instead of search for library items. In this instance, go to My Library → Tracks, and in the Track column, enter your search. For example, …

I tend to use search to discover releases outside my library.

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i mean feels like a long winded workaround for a basic search feature that should just “work”, like it does for the other 98% of my library

Here, I googled it for you

yeah i dug a little deeper and saw that… seems odd that they have an export feature built into the playlist itself, but to import, means taking that export and putting into into your library folder on the network, and then getting it to scan.

feels like a very primitive way to deal with the issue.

but then, this is Roon we’re talking about

Hi @David_Crosbie1 ,

Thank you for the report. I appreciate you taking the time to share your observations with us.

I’ve forwarded the details to our search and data team, and they will be reviewing the information to determine the next steps. As for the playlists issue, note that you can use the method mentioned in the guide, or also use a service called Soundiiz, in case it is easier.

If you have any additional details or encounter any further issues, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Your feedback is valuable in helping us improve the experience for everyone.

In the end it was just as quick to simply recreate the playlist manually, it was in doing so that I came across the search anomalies. There were a couple more, but the Cleo Sol one was the most puzzling and one I couldn’t explain away with my IT hat on.

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Hey @David_Crosbie1, thanks for pointing this out. I’m able to reproduce the issue, and we have a ticket internally for it. I’ll have to investigate a bit on what’s causing this, because the library item should pop up in such a case.

The ticket might close within that time, but we’ll post an update nevertheless.

As a workaround in such situations, you can “favorite” the track (or artist or album), it should appear as the top result when you search “why don’t you”. Adding the specific album title works too, but you end up typing a lot.

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Some artists often have the same track or different versions of the same track within multiple albums. Particularly with Genesis, if you search genesis mama the default one at the moment generally seems to be the one from the eponymous album, but if you enter genesis mama archive you should get the track from the album Archive #2 1976-1992.

In this case it seems right that the library variant of the track is displayed, but the version from the eponymous album should be visible too. So it’s the reverse issue from what David is experiencing. I’ll have a look into it together with the other case.

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I have Mama from the eponymous album, and this isn’t returned in the track results along with other official studio and live releases.

Moreover, I should not be seeing every track from the The Genesis Live Archives: Mama, a bootleg, in the Track search results. With the exception of Mama (1983-11-27: Philadelphia), “Mama” only appears in the filename and album title tag.

This doesn’t appear to be correct. I can only assume that in this instance it is caused because the album is unidentified–but that should not be an excuse for using album title for track results.

I’m glad you’re able to reproduce it, and I’m not just going mad!