One thing I would add about the search function failures, at least no one is trying to blame it on the users network yet!!
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"Dickens David Copperfield” is a pretty unique search term, there’s not much ambiguity there. The opening post to which I was referring, mentioned a search for “Money”.
“Money” is ridiculously ambiguous — unless you’re only searching your local library and you only have one album/artist with Money in the name. Music Brainz returns 750 results for 'Money" and I’m not seeing Pink Floyd on any of the first few pages.
I can’t talk of your experience as you didn’t post any real examples. Not that I can do anything if you had, I don’t work for Roon. But personally I haven’t been noticing issue with queries that unambiguous myself. That’s not to say you and others haven’t or that Roon’s search can’t be improved, it obviously can.
There was a thread where Roon have been collating feedback, maybe post some concrete examples there so that Roon can see if there are general / concrete patterns that indicate where the search is badly falling short. Give Roon something concrete to act on, posting ''search doesn’t work" doesn’t help anyone.
But mainly my reply was in relation to this comment and the fact that Roon is already using a tried and tested search platform and that whether it was OSS or not was somewhat irrelevant.
The underlying search framework isn’t the issue, you still need to index, tokenise and weight queries to your specific domain to get decent results and that isn’t easy to get right across the board for all users and all content sources, it takes time and tuning. Roon also allude to this here.
Roon could also look at how results are visually presented back to users, that can often help users find the result they want even if it isn’t the first result returned — hopefully that is something they are looking at in future.
Also I think you’re giving far too much credit to library systems, I’ve used plenty that are terrible at free text queries. Although I’d agree something was up if I couldn’t find Dickens’ David Copperfied 
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Yep. It doesn’t take that much to define a decent regex+synonym-based search engine, and Roon is failing very badly on that.
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I’m not trying to flame the engineers at Roon, or start any sort of war, but please compare the Search function in Roon to any/every other music service that operates over essentially the same dataset – it just doesn’t work well.
Thanks to @j_a_m_i_e for the insights, but that leads me to believe there is an issue elsewhere (like caching), because – again – other services using same datasets just don’t have these issues.
Using Roon on my mobile at home, the search often times out, and only after canceling the search do the results appear. Even my wife is exasperated by the poor results and performance, and she isn’t tech in the least.
I’m not sure what the issues were that caused Roon to change the search, but it feels way worse to me now …
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Sadly it is the case with Roon, I have posted many unambiguous examples in the Roon Search sucks thread and later inside the Beta group. The guy working on Search acknowledged the problem (which is a biggie) and promised to fix it in the future - but really and truly this is basic and should have been the first thing to fix.
“Trovatore Pavarotti” is as basic as “Dickens David Copperfield” but sadly does not get all results.
Sad but true
I have been very active with screenshots on this - that is why I was on the Beta team - so writing “Give Roon something concrete to act on, posting ''search doesn’t work” doesn’t help anyone." is wrong and you are making a statement without any foundation.
No need to immediately try and find blame in the person posting a problem 
We used to have the “Roon search sucks …” thread to consolidate search issues on, and sometimes Roon would respond on it. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent thread for post 880 problems.
Here.
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This is why filters are essential and should be available to select before or after searching to narrow the results presented. Roons search results are just a mess really, take up too much screen real estate. Use smaller icons like the ones from track layout to show the choices and have a filter bar. Every app had this for a reason, it’s a simple ui choice to aid users to find what they want. The below from Roon is just not vey good when you see it next to all the other apps.
Also why do tracks that don’t have Money in the title show up this is not right. It should not be looking at the artist name when I am in tracks.
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Search should prioritize the results that have been manually chosen by me in the past and then the results that have been played in the past. It’s stupid to keep putting on top of the list that results that I keep ignoring when I search for the same thing. Also, it’s stupid to put on top of the list results that I have never played or songs by the artists that I never play.
I mean… try to be smart about it! Prioritize the music that I like!
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Getting search right helps the whole flow, so it should be at the top of the improvement backlog (imo)
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It is hugely better than it was, and I certainly wouldn’t call it extremely poor; there are just still bizarre exceptions. If you can find Beethoven Symphony 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 how can you not find Beethoven Symphony 1,2 3 or 4?
(Is it that the low numbers - 1, 2, 3, 4 - also apply to movements of other pieces? - there will be lots of tracks of Sonatas, symphonies Comcertos etc, that match with Beethoven and 2, but only the symphony will have tracks that match with Beethoven and 6)
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Better in one way, worse in others. The overall speed has taken a nose dive. Quick jump is still not quick and lags behind considerably
and still jumps about until it gets where it needs to, by then you have already completed search, the search back takes many seconds to return results, the way it presents the results is messy not that this bit changed its always been bad. There is so much more that needs to happen to bring it anywhere near any of the native streaming apps which work and work very well at this primary feature.
Yes I do, in FLAC.
But Roon search takes me to Qobuz version if I select from list.
I don’t know that it’s worse or better, but finding Money at the top of the results should seem like a no brainer (not considering the engineering difficulties, just the outcome)
My wife constantly fails to find new music she likes and will fire up Spotify on her phone, do a search, and the type the exact string into Roon so she can eventually find it. She will often complain it’s the wrong version and spotifys first result is reliably the one the one she wants to hear.
I love Roon, but I notice our flow is most often interrupted by the search experience and so I would appreciate energy here to continue perhaps trying different methods (or even user customisation on search value systems) to see if it can become a little bit more refined as per the other music platforms that have seem to have this nailed.
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I’ve found search lacking forever, but yes, it does seem to be getting worse. The number of titles that it misses until typed precisely is crazy bad. Moreover i cant seem to find my preferred library versions of classical in the sea of tidal titles…why? What’s the purpose of the library if not to give some semblance of priority?
Roon also seems to forget my live radio stations. At least once a day it says “you have no…” and i need to restart.
Finally, when i took my laptop on the road (my normal server is ROCK) it lost my playlists. Then briefly “found” them, and then lost them again. Sigh.
Can we stop adding features and focus on bug fixes and usability please?
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Expected behaviour, I think. You probably started using the Core on your laptop, which, unless you had been keeping everything synchronised between it and the Core in the ROCK/NUC (and this is not easy to do), would only know about your Tidal collection…
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No. Aside from the comment on playlists/radio stations all this relates to my RCOK which has been in use for years.
If the laptop did not know about the playlists and radio stations, then how, pray tell, did they show up (on the road) then vanish? illogical.
If you mean by in synch, having the same database, how do i import it (without going down to linux)?
But the search issues are purely ROCK and its had years to learn.
TIA,
G
Because, I think, there is caching on the local client from your ROCK, which then would have been eradicated by the fresh information from your local Core…