Liking most of the choices the team there are making for the Roon UX as it evolves. Especially loving all the relational linking of an album or artist to others related / similar / influences/ing / etc … And where the "Now Playing … " panel has evolved to with the configurability of what meta categories may show and what order (tho, I do wish as a song plays there was an option I could also click in the pane’s configuration to have Roon cycle thru every one of them; but that may just be me). I do sometimes question the choices of Roon Radio (of my local library; I don’t stream) based on the last song played, but the vast majority of the time it continues to do a fantastic job and reminds me of or surprises me with the music I have in my 50K+ tracks that I may not have listened to in decades or never before. I could go on.
But one thing I would like to have the developers there address is this… I’d like to request you to add an item to the backlog that:
A song or album with an “exact string match” in Search Results, regardless of what position that match starts in in the match’s album or song’s primary meta data, be ranked higher than other results.
I think if I gave that more thought I could have worded that better. But as a picture is worth a 1000 words, let me add some screen caps and detail.
But first, what was I doing? I was doing some filesystem organization and moved some of my CD rips around to different sub-directories from where they originally were. I lost track of one album I knew I had in my Roon library. I went searching for it …
So, I first thought the album name was something like “Ultra-Lounge: The Leopard Skin Album”. But I didn’t find that (or similar) either on my filesystem or in Roon when I searched for “leopard”. So then I simply searched for “Ultra-Lounge”, and this was the quick pop-up search summary results …
Based on what I cited above that I thought was the album’s name, I was looking for an album cover that was “leopard skin”. As I didn’t see it in that list, I went my my file system and searched for “Ultra-Lounge” there instead of “leopard”, and I did finally see the album name. So I continued…
I clicked “See all results”. Still not there. Scroll down. Still not there.
Then clicked “More” in the “Albums” section. Now, if I have Roon maximized on my 2560x1440 (landscape) primary display, 21 albums show on the screen at once. I still did not see the album I am searching for in the list. (Sure, I could page down. But the whole point here is, how far down should I have to look for something that has an exact match in the name?) No screen cap necessary. The next two should do the trick.
It is only when I have my Roon UI maximized on my second 1200x1920 (portrait) screen, that I see the album art that I’m expecting to find on the “first page”:
A single click down of the center mouse wheel brings the album title into view too.
Please note that,
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I searched for “Ultra-lounge”
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I am first shown all the albums that start with “Ultra-lounge”. Wouldn’t expect anything else; no surprise there.
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But then I am shown close to 20 other albums with “ultra” or “lounge” or neither in the name. Yes, I know that in the case of neither, it may be that a song on the album has either ultra or lounge in the name. But in the list of albums you see above, that is not always the case. [edit: sometimes I see it is other meta data.]
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It is only until position 24 of the search results that I find what I was looking for. The album named “Welcome to the Ultra-Lounge”. And I gather that is because “Ultra-Lounge” is found not at the start but later in the title string.
It really seem to me that the right thing to do would be to rank that higher. Because it is a search result hit on the entire string that I was searching for: “Ultra-lounge”. [edit: removed the add’l point I originally made as I dove deeper into all of the search results and I didn’t find that to be as strong an argument as I had originally thought.]
Thank you for listening. Hope this makes it to the backlog and that the stakeholders agree with my logic (if I can be so bold as to call it that -haha) so that this adjustment to the ordering of search results is made in a future release.
Thanx again,
Steve
