One year later and search is still incredibly poor. This is something that really should be addressed at this price point.
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I’ve been using Roon for a few years, although I am admittedly not a power user. It’s basically always worked pretty well for me. Until now, the only complaint I had about doing searches was that it didn’t seem to be very forgiving of my misspelling things. I can accept that, but today I had a really bad experience with search. A few days ago I had listened to the original Broadway cast recording of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”. Today I wanted to hear one of the tracks from it. Short, simple name: “Pandemonium”. I entered that and got a ton of hits, but not the right one. Then I went back in and searched for the album., and played the track. It was there and spelled correctly. I’m no programmer, but how is it possible for search to miss a one word track name, spelled correctly, that is in the music database?
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Do you mean it is in your library?
It possible because Roon’s search logic sucks. Spend anytime with Roon you’ll discover more Search frustrations.
I’ve reported several Search problems, complete with directions on how to recreate the problem. All such examples go right down the rat hole, never to be seen or heard from again.
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I know its not the answer but abandon search and use the other tools , I find Filter far better than Search
Roon will never match Google , there’s no point hoping 
Roon openly admits that Search is work in progress , they even employed a Search Specialist developer a while back to start with improvements . This will obviously take time
At least matching the capability of other music apps isn’t too much of an ask though. Roons search is the worst of any I have used in finding my own music. Still no intelligent search that ignores typos and punctuation mistakes. A year on since 2.0 and this promise of a better search, where is it. We don’t expect a moon on a stick just a fully functional search tool to find what we want.
Chalk and Cheese I want to find Bar Italia, quick search in Plex and Roon. No extra steps needed for Plex type it comes up and refreshes as you add more. In Roon three stages to search for the artist. The artist in Roon was number 15 in the list after I had to perform a full search click only library and look in artists section.
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I was not defending the shortfall, I gave up using it and found ways around it 
it seriously needs fixing or at least some progress report on where Roon are in fixing it
Little tricks like including ONE album of an artist in your library allows you to use Filter on the Artists View the goto Discography then onwards, more clicks/taps but at least it woks.
I doubt I use Search per se once a day even its only really for new artists, if I do it for very simple stuff eg an Artist Name (without typos) but even then
True I have navigated more to filter funnel in artists or albums but it’s more clicks which is just annoying as UI.
Agreed, but it seems the only way to find something in Roon is to know one already has it (and where it is 
).
Who, based on the non-feedback I get when I report a search problem, is MIA.
Was this thread the last search update, time for another one?
@zenit I think was the specialist involved in improving search?
No, what I meant is that if I search for the album, it is found by Roon (it’s hosted on Qobuz). Which in my mind, means it is in Roon’s database.
Yes. As far as I can tell, we’ve seen little progress. I’ve been heartened by some of the infrastructure changes/investments that Roon has made (moving a portion of search to cloud, choosing a more modern search infrastructure).
But as I perceive it the set of things that we’ve seen over the last year doesn’t have evidence that improvements are trickling out, nor that there’s been a big bang.
- no searching playlists by name or contents
- no bucketing of suggested search drop-downs into artists, albums, songs (or playlists)
- no evidence that there’s a feedback loop of manual or automated interventions on the backend to drive frequent unsuccessful searches to likely possible mistypings (eg, “smtihs” to “smiths”)
- ^^ is an instance of broader “most likely result”
- no evidence that autocomplete is trying to interpret most likely root word (eg, if I type “Marth” there’s no evidence that it interprets that I might be looking for “Martha” or whatever the most likely word is in a look-ahead processor)
- search results page has same order of blocks of results (ie, “artists” is always in the same position on the page), regardless of what the most likely sets of results or individual results are
- no opportunity for user feedback- eg, no button that says “this result isn’t what I was expecting” to allow search team to gather any feedback other than search completion rate
Now I still have very strong empathy for @zenit and the team working on search - this is typically one of the more extensive, expensive, and time-consuming pieces of combined front-end and back-end work that any engineering team does when you have a content system / interface, and there are a lot (I say too many) interfaces for them to deal with when making major moves. But there is so much structured data in this realm that I’d like to believe that even with a tiny team we’d see faster progress. I remain hopeful, cause I love Roon. But, like many others, I sure would love an update, even if my very human reaction would be to start grasping at straws and ask for more.
Hey @Johnny_Ooooops
Thank you for the overall detailed critique of search at roon. I understand the frustration and even share it with you in many aspects. That being said, there have been many changes going on in and around search that might not have been super obvious.
The past year there have been new features/content in roon that were not directly in search, but affected it nevertheless. We have added another streaming service to roon - KKBox, there has been the Wikipedia integration, and big changes for the internationalization of content. This meant a significant increase in searchable music, and a need for supporting a myriad of scripts and languages, including Chinese/Japanese/Korean. This increase has presented challenges in keeping/improving the quality and performance.
In addition to that, searching for artists in other European languages has improved, like entering Pražská komorní filharmonie for Prague Philharmonia.
Would you expect your own playlists to be searchable by name and content (artists + tracks)? Or are you talking about Tidal/Qobuz playlists? In the former, searching by title is supported, and adding the content isn’t a huge addition. In the latter, there are issues beyond search preventing it. For Roon playlists - there aren’t that many of them active at a given time.
These cases are related. A good chunk of our current efforts is about them. Currently, we are testing and slowly rolling out spelling corrections for library content, see this example.
This one is a bit tricky, and I’m certain many wouldn’t agree on this point. First of all, if you’re searching for f.e. bach or bizet - in a classical context the order is somewhat different. However, changing the order of each query based on the most likely set of results might be fairly confusing for many. Maybe in the future, we’ll run some experiments on it, but right for now, the top result should serve this purpose most closely.
I’ll need to think this one through and discuss it internally. For it to actually have value, it would have to be done really well, otherwise, it ends up as a frustration button.
That all being said, there will hopefully be fewer and fewer big bang changes in the future and more gradual step-by-step improvements. There are still big gaps to cross, like the above-mentioned autocompletion and spelling correction, but other than that, I’m generally happy if I see a minimal increase each month, as long as it keeps improving at the same rate. My hope is that these little changes cumulatively do become noticeable.
Thank you again for the detailed feedback. I hope this helped to clear up a bit on what’s going on and ease a bit of the frustration.
Wish you a great, musical weekend.
Zenit
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I think I noticed this recently when, after hitting Search, I realized I had mistyped and expected no results but got some anyway! Thanks 
My motto for Roon, since the 1.5 days, has always been “Roon gives you more of everything!” For example, what others can do in one click, Roon takes at least three! 
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[quote=“zenit, post:139, topic:185350, full:true”]
“This one is a bit tricky, and I’m certain many wouldn’t agree on this point. First of all, if you’re searching for f.e. bach or bizet - in a classical context the order is somewhat different. However, changing the order of each query based on the most likely set of results might be fairly confusing for many. Maybe in the future, we’ll run some experiments on it, but right for now, the top result should serve this purpose most closely.”
I think this is one of the biggest issues users have. If I’m searching for a track or album I don’t want to be bombarded by artists that have some sort of similarity to the search query. Maybe a drop down that tells which criteria should be searched? Or a user setting that will set the order of block appearance?
I’m curious
How many Czech subscribers does roon have (with a Czech keyboard)?
Shouldn’t that be equivalenced to the English form “PKF - Prague Philharmonia”, This is the website:
When I go on Supraphon I have to type in “PKF - Prague Philharmonia” to get the discography. “Prague Philharmonia” only returns 1 hit.
In roon it is the opposite. When I search on “Prague Philharmonia”, “PKF - Prague Philharmonia” is the first hit but there is only one album. The bulk of the discography is listed under “Prague Philharmonia”.
Just jumping here to state I’m getting tired of Roon’s poor search perfomance. Might be cancelling soon.
I’m going to add to the posts complaining about the search function. It’s making the whole concept of Roon useless to me.
If it takes me twice as long to find the song I want, regardless of everything else Roon does, I’m not going to use it over Quboz.
A search for ‘Kind of Blue’ brings up this for me…
Of ALL the possible album results, why is it showing me an album that doesn’t even feature the words I’m looking for??! ‘Sides of Blue’ instead of Kind of Blue?
And how can the ‘top result’ be someone not even covering Miles. But merely TALKING about him?!
Meanwhile over on Quboz desktop app, I get this:
Miles as an artist first. The actual album I’m looking for. Songs from the album if I want to dig in to one particularly. This is what a search function should be doing.
All the other bells and whistles and integrations pale when I JUST WANT TO FIND THE MUSIC I WANT TO LISTEN TO. Baffled how users put up with this.
