My response to @Jake_Watson was mainly about search performance (timeouts, etc.) rather than the quality of the results returned.
I’m not sure if the performance problems some folks are reporting are due to where they are in the world (Internet latency) or setup issues with Core or their home network. However, Roon search is not inherently slow or unreliable.
Having spent a fair bit of time in this community, my observation is that networking ends up being the root cause of 80%+ of the performance problems that Roon subscribers report. This can be annoying, but I’d rather have that than an issue internal to Roon that I’m powerless to address.
I’m not saying that every issue, or even most issues reported on this thread are due to poor network performance. But, I am surprised that more folks are not investigating this area or what they are using for Core. These can impact Roon search performance quite a bit.
…and before you say it, Roon and Spotify are not the same kinds of things. Comparisons of search results or performance are not particularly meaningful.
Actually this is silly. Of course it should find Pink Floyd if your a Floyd fan.
It should be pretty simple to prioritize searches based on your own library and listening habbits. Clearly money by Pink Floyd is a common song for the OP and his grievance is quite valid. Roons search is just really bad.
This is the key point. Despite all the promotional bumf spouted about AI and Valence, it only seems to be operative in the cloud, so has zero musical search knowledge related to your local library and personal listening habits. It is of no use it seems for those with predominantly local libraries and wishing to search and listen to them ahead of anything in the cloud.
Here are the compositions returned for for “Mozart Symphony 40”. Symphonies 34, 39, 35, 29, 32, 38, 36 and 31, and two Piano Concertos and a String Quartet. But no Symphony 40. Luckily it gave me an album of the work, from which I could get to the composition, but that shouldn’t have been necessary.
There are problems like this with classical, where album results seem to be prioritised over compositions.
Having thrown Tidal into the mix for a little while (on the £2 for three months offer) my feeling is that Tidal is very (too?) heavily prioritised over local / my library content and - for me - the emphasis feels off, for want of a better word. Looking more broadly at Roon for me right now, (beyond search and looking at behaviour in album views and elsewhere) Roon feels like a fancy front-end wrapper for Tidal and I feel like I’m constantly hitting the Library icon to hide the Tidal results.
I get the thing as well while typing in Search that you see what you’re looking for fleetingly, before it’s replaced with other stuff that you’re actually looking for. The search results seem to jump around a lot while typing and it’s no good trying to stop and select something as it’s gone before you can get your finger or mouse pointer to it.
Yes! You can kinda see the search thinking but as the speed is variable and sometimes slower than it should be I just hit return and don’t bother scanning the drop down. I am asking it to search, not me.
Yep, I find it notably better on desktop or my iPad with a keyboard, when I can ignore suggested search and go directly to the search results page without thinking. On the iPhone, the return key is not something I think of - from just how I’m used to interacting with other apps. So I feel like it’s working much worse, when it’s working the same on both platforms.
It’s not consistent.”Mozart Symphony 40” fails to identify the composition, as shown above. Poor for sure. But “Mozart Symphony 39” is perfect. The composition is the top result , as imo it should be, and the compositions have it as the first choice. Couldn’t want better.
I get Mozart’s 40th back. It is the strange variance of results that I find interesting. Granted I have different local files and may have different subscriptions. But my first result is as I would expect.
The thought of weighing 3 different databases then sorting them and presenting them with the expectation of google like precision is making me super glad it isn’t my nightmare to wrestle.
But actually you don’t get the composition back at all. The compositions Roon offers you in the drop down are symphonies 35, 33 and 28. But not Symphony 40. Right enough you get some albums that are hits from which you could go lomg-windedly to the composition and then the discography. But why no composition? Why do I get a great result for Symohony 39 but not for Symphony 40? And what do you get when you press return to see all results? As previously mentioned, the search drop down has its drawbacks as it changes in front of your eyes and stuff appears and vanishes before you can react, so just hitting enter for All Results is less distracting.
Hate to jump on the negative side on this one but I have to agree it’s been negtively impacted. I did notice any searches for tracks that include apostrophe characters are especially sensitive to what’s entered. I just tried searching for my local “Ain’t talkin’ 'bout love” by Van Halen and had to get all apostrophe’s correct to even return my locally stored flac files.
Sorry David but Roon has had plenty of issues related to slowness of searches caused by their metadata servers. In fact it started to happen more with 1.6 and raises it’s head more often than it should. Great you have not been affected by it but a lot are and in pretty much all cases that I have queried it, it has revolved back to it being Roon server issues. You would get this every Friday for a good run of weeks last year likely related to the database updates.
Pushing me toward an artist on Tidal I’ve never heard of (that’s on me - but why return multiple results for the same artist not in my library pushing everything else off the bottom?).
…although we have ‘Money’s too Tight to Mention’ and two songs called ‘Easy Money’ (not in library), but no 'Money (That’s What I Want) (in my library - more than once).
Pushing artists and content not in the library and making it awkward to find ‘my music’ is what I find a little ‘off’ and it’s one of the reasons I won’t be extending Tidal beyond the three-month offer. Yes, a few more keystrokes will bend Roon to my wishes, but I still feel the emphasis is wrong.
I should have paid more attention to the prior comments you were replying to!
But I was asking more to see if it was known that search results were good for most folk, or if good was known etc based on telemetry or if not that, then from surveys.
My results are prompt and I’m fairly new to Roon so the difference between search functionality then and now aren’t that obvious to me, but I do think improvements would be appreciated as this is easily my #1 issue, which tells you how wonderful Roon is elsewhere.
