Just for clarity, there are even cases when typed correctly, the desired album still isn’t found. 
That too 
Though I have seen examples in the search thread, I have never have it happen to me in practice for my searches, so I guess it’s not very frequent
I wish my experience was the same as yours. While I wouldn’t say I run into this “frequently”, it’s happened often enough to be puzzling and a bit irritating.
Personally, I’ve given up on trying to understand Roon search and just accept occasionally my searches will be a bit challenging.
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Anyway, not to muddy the waters here, this also happens for identified albums/artist, so is not exclusive to the issue here, but surely might be a cause for a search failure in general
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One more thing about this: Interestingly though, although my working theory is that the composition info comes from the metadata services, I just realized that the identification as a composition does also work for unidentified albums. So maybe the theory is crap and the missing composition issue comes from something else.
Again the unidentified Wood for Rainer album, you can see that it recognized compositions, although the album is a) unidentified and b) does not exist on streaming services at all (note, no Versions tab because it only exists as a local CD rip)
EDIT:
Hmmm. The recognized compositions however are for tracks that do have streaming service releases, however. One Small Faces and one Big Star track. The other tracks here didn’t get a composition entry:
So I guess the composition metadata must come from online sources after all, but the matching is done locally for unidentified albums as well
EDIT 2: Nope, in this case it was because the track had no composer. Adding a composer made the composition entry appear. But I do know from other cases that this does not always help. Very odd
Thanks very much for all the information. I do understand what you are saying. Looks like it’s a composition thing maybe.
Take this promo CD by Styx. Unrecognized.
All the songs are not recognized either. Search Come Sail Away. It pulls up first any title with some of the words. If I put in “Come Sail Away Styx” I don’t get the composition listing on the search page and the track listing just lists the songs from the Come Sail Away Anthology plus a single listing for the Grand Illusion album. So I just left it without the Artist.
Since Radio Made Hits is not recognized the search results don’t show up for Come Sail Away, or any song on the album.
The credits just list Styx and has no composed by Dennis DeYoung info.
It seems unrecognized albums or songs are found easier when the composer is listed to what Roon wants it to say? In these cases Stevie Wonder and Dennis DeYoung. Styx I guess doesn’t count in these latest results. I didn’t know the composition part was that useful for search.
I will try some 3rd party tagging software and edit the meta for the credits in some unrecognized albums to see if the songs show up in a search. Thanks.
In the first search result screenshot, I can see that the result is missing the Radio-made hits album. Odd (as in my above case it finds unidentified tracks/albums just fine), but search in general can be so hit and miss as @Saturn94 noted above that it is difficult to say if the missing search result is caused by the unidentified status or not. It happens for identified ones as well.
The next screenshot is from the My Compositions page again, so this is again not directly related to search results but probably to the composition property that I tried to explain above. Maybe you can fix that by adding a composer to the track if it’s missing - or not.
I don’t think that the composition stuff has an effect on search results, other than the fact that search results can also include compositions (not just tracks and albums) and this would of course not work if the track is not recognized as a composition to begin with.
Proper file tagging might help with the search results in general, I don’t know because my local files are always properly tagged and I don’t know what happens if they are not
Good luck!
Thanks. Most of my unrecognizable albums don’t show in a search. That was just a few examples. I was trying to show how it reacts to songs and albums. I had to use the composer to try to show that Roon is looking for composed by and that info is missing. My files are tagged correctly but not to the level for a proper search for unrecognized songs or albums in Roon. I didn’t think composer info was a big deal but looks like it’s part of my solution. It’s more important to me that the songs are found on unrecognized albums than the albums themselves with the way I like to look at song info.
I do appreciate your help. Thanks.
It’s weird, I don’t really understand why you have so much worse results than I seem to have with the unidentified searches. I tried a few more of my unidentified ones and I had search success for all of them. I am not doing anything special Sorry I couldn’t help more, I hope you can make it work for you or someone else has better ideas
Just another example of Roons overall search quirkiness.
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That is because you are filtering only on album titles and artists in the Albums screen. If you want to search Track titles then you need to use the Filter option under the Tracks screen. Try it, I bet you will find the Stevie Song.
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Yeah, I don’t get it and don’t understand why search is so bad. If I go to Albums and list them by Title I can scroll down and see every single Billboard Top 100 album I have. If I search on Billboard, I do not get the same result. I only see the ones I have edited that needed the year in the title. (I have been adding the year in manually).
All the titles have “Billboard” in the name but search does not find them. So the search function is still garbage.
Quirkiness - code for terrible
I might be miss understanding but If you want to list all albums with billboard in the title using the general search isn’t the right tool it’s for finding specific artists, tracks and albums not a list of albums.Use the funnel filter in albums to show them all. Then multiselect then add a tag called Billboard to them. Then you can create a focus on that tag and save a bookmark for repeated use. If you add another Billboard album tag it and it will automatically be added to the same focus. This will make managing stuff like this easier.
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I think the issue is Roon is not built like it should be that would make any of this intuitive and search would just search and provide all results.
When in Albums, I can scroll down and find Albums I cannot find searching using the filter field set to album title. No idea why and I’d rather listen to music anyway.
But overall Roon is getting me my music even is the software is not great quality. Beyond that little annoyance, it loves to flat out quit on iPad or a Mac for no reason. It’s better than anything out there but not everything I’d expect after all these years. Oh well - on to the next track.
Ok thanks. I was searching by albums because I bookmarked all my unrecognizable albums. I still thought the search or filter would find songs and albums.
Filter does what is says, it filters text strings. So if you use Filter in the Album browser, you can filter album titles. If you use Filter in the track browser, it filters track titles.
Similarly for the Artist and Composer browsers where it will filter on their names.
And in the Compositions browser, there are filters for each of the attributes you have set up to be listed:
(click the gearwheel icon to choose which attribute you want to be listed in the browser)
Ok. Thanks for all the info.