Search should honour special letters. Ø≠O, A≠Å

Programmers: there are good programmers, mediocre programmers, and bad programmers.

Most reasonably capable programmers would be using Unicode throughout their application, which would automatically support the world’s various alphabets. Capabilities are often limited by the inherent capabilities of the toolkits and libraries used, as well; injudicious selection of such can create application shortfalls like this. That could be an additional factor.

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I was surprised to see this happening, to be honest. Usually search with proper letters (ÆØÅ) goes fine. In other apps, I mean.

Is this Roon or Qobuz that has this problem, do you think?

Roon sorts Andersson, Åkesson, Ärlingman the same, that A is the same as Å and Ä. That’s not true, A is in the besinning of the alphabet and Å + Ä is in the ed. I am so annoyed by that. All my music that contains Å Ä and Ö is sorted wrong.

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Roon needs to improve the support for local language and language settings in your client! For example, I asked for localized sorting four years ago and nothing has improved.

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Beginning to think that this isn’t really a Feature Request but a @support issue…

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A performance issue according to @brian but I think Roon is prioritizing other things and I guess the users that are active on this forum isn’t representative for the whole user group. How does Roon collect feedback from users in Andorra or Mongolia to see them Happy? :wink:

it would be interesting to know their current take on this - the post below is over three years old.

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I agree!

Also, how many of the world’s languages only use the 26 letters in the English alphabet? English and…?

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Hello everyone,

I work on search at roon and I wholeheartedly agree there is definitely room for improvement in how non-Ascii characters are handled, and it’s not being ignored. My own family name includes characters like č and ć, and I worked a lot with German content before, so I do understand the frustration about it.

Generally speaking, character normalization is done mostly for the convenience of the user, and not because English is preferred in one way or the other. Like @Chris_Rudmin mentioned in the case of searching with “bjork” should definitely yield “Björk”. “bodo” should yield “Bodø” as well.

On the other hand, the user typing in “Øst” without quotation marks should respect that and prioritize search results that are “closer” to the original search query.

@Thomas_Nielsen 's response is spot on about the deeper challenges regarding the wild west of metadata sources and transliteration.

Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be fixed overnight, but it’s quite high on the priorities list.

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Hi @zenit,

Thanks for the information and reassurance. I’m happy to learn that it’s high on the priorities list. Looking forward to seeing it in a near future update.

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Search, in general, In Roon is so consistently frustrating that many times I just give up and go to Spotify where the track I am searching for usually appears instantly on my first attempt.

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Just to let you know that these are not special characters, these are part of alphabet. For me the last letters of alphabet are å,ä,ö and they are used in our language frequently

My given name is Njål, they are not special characters to me either, but to the average English speaker they are.
Just to make a point re A≠Å:
If I was to search for Agnetha Fältskog written with a Norwegian æ rather than Swedish ä, or Björn Ulvaeus with ø rather than ö, I would still expect to get the former Abba members (and Abba) as results, just after any music person actually named Bjørn Ulvaeus or Agnetha Fæltskog.

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And don’t forget that there is a convention that names with the Scottish/Irish prefixes “Mac” and “Mc” should be sorted together, so “MacWilliams” comes after “McGlaughlin”, and in some collating schemes both may come before “Masters”.

Indeed, my point was just to make sure that when speaking of different letters to many users these are everyday letters. Although I must admit that å is very rarely used in Finnish, my native language. Ä and ö are very common and can be used in artist names or song names.

Do you have any specific examples that you find very problematic?

That might be nice sentiments - but Roon is a commercial organisation and this has to paid for. Roon does not offer Chinese, Cyrillic, Amharic or the multitude of Indian languages and their different alphabets.

It would be interesting to know what the locale settings are on the Mac and Nucleus. On Nucleus, presumably you could ssh to it and type “locale -v” to display the settings. Does this also work on Mac (in a Terminal window)? Don’t have one to try it with.

This would tell us what language and character set the computer thinks it is using.

One advantage Audirvana Studio will have starting this Sunday is they will support six languages.

Yes, they are part of your language. When we say ‘“special characters”, we mean letters not found in the 26 letter English alphabet. Although that is my language, I am sensitive to the fact that for billions, it is not, and that any language I can think of, other than English, has different letters either instead of, or in addition to, the 26 that English uses. I pray that Roon begins to address this shortcoming. (And the sooner, the better)

The latest one was searching for Leann Rimes, How can I Live. I put in “how can I live without you” and it was nowhere to be seen yet Spotify pulled it straight up.

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