Are there any rules or keywords that can be used to narrow down a search, for instance I’m searching for a song called New Life and it finds all kinds of derivitives, here’s an example of what Search finds:
it would be nice to use some keywords or something to make searching more accurate such as:
SONG:New Life or “New Life”
In this example, once I drill down into the list of Tracks via View All >, it does show some direct hits, but why would it not sort those exact hits to the top:
by the way, I did try “New Life” and that did work better but it still found hits like Gotta A New Life, which you would think it would only find “New Life”, and to top it all off I never did find my song, it’s over in YouTube as: New Life - M-Sphere.
It seems Search prioritizes results based on some algorithm that mixes relevance and overall user popularity. It’s perfect for just typing ‘Dark’ and getting Dark Side of the Moon, or ‘Yellow’ and getting Yellow Brick Road and Yellow Submarine. It’s easy, and it apparently suits a large swath of Roon Users. That includes me a lot of the time.
What can you do to help get better results?
Mix a unique part of the artist name and song/album title. This seems to weigh on the search relevance side of the equation.
The more you can fill in the title or artist, the better. Duh.
Lower your expectations for music off the beaten path. The popularity part of the algorithm begins to dominate. And since there is no formal structure for searches, Roon Search seems to have a hard time distinguishing whether a string should be part of an artist, album, or song title. The search also seems to try to compensate for spelling errors. But this can have unintended results on occasion.
In fairness to Roon, things have gotten better since about v1.6 in both speed and fetching appropriate results. They use direct, objective results from us to tune and refine the algorithm. So posting examples where the result is much different than expectation (and the reason for expectation) is something that can be used for tuning.
I’m not holding my breath for features which allow more structured searching. But 'ya never know…
Well Thanks, that’s an honest answer, not what I was hoping for but now I know what I’m up against. I’m a long time JRiver user which provides an extremely powerful search language not only letting you search on Album, Artists and Song, but any metadata field.
I’ll bulk up my searches and I just learned that once I select View More > that I can now filter the results, which really helps to narrow down the result set.
Yep, JRiver is really good at some things. I still use it for managing my library because of those tools. Not so great for just enjoying music, compared to Roon anyway.
JRiver will also have another edge in the sense it does not have to cope with all possibilities outside the user’s library, since streaming isn’t a thing. Roon search is a little more satisfying within a library in a couple of ways:
Much of the user’s library is indexed, so as you type in a search term, if it matches words indexed from the library the potential hits autofill.
You can search just within your library, Turning on the toggle, along with the indexed search gives much better results since Roon doesn’t need to consider the vastly larger amount of music possibilities in Qobuz, for example.
I have Qobuz and Roon seemed to do pretty well with a search for “New Life”. Here’s the first two screens. You could use the filter funnel to narrow these down somewhat.
