Why is searching for Tidal songs so bad?

Take any popular song and search for it on Roon. Compare with TIDAL.

That’s three examples. Seriously, what’s up with that? Roon finds what I consider the worst possible matches, and puts them as the top results. Tidal, with a sensible search function, puts the most popular and most likely song first. Is this an issue with the TIDAL api?

Also is there any way to see the most popular songs per Artist? For example if you go to an artist’s page on Tidal, you can see their top played songs.

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Welcome to the “context aware” search algorithm of Roon.

What the context might be and how it might be relevant to you is everyone’s guess.

I have been criticizing this behaviour from the first appearance of the “new and improved” algorithm, but the developers do not seem to grasp the problem.

You are comparing two different things. Roon, as far as I know, uses the play data from it’s own users, in it’s search results, etc. etc. It does not use Tidal’s user play data. I don’t think Roon even has access to that information.

So, the most you can say is that for a Lucid Dreams search, Tidal usage has pushed Juice WRLD to the top of the list, where for Roon users, they have pushed Franz Ferdinand as the most popular play option.

For me, both get a “Lucid Dreams” search wrong, as I want the actual band Lucid Dreams and their album Lucid Dreams. THAT is what should be the top spot that search. imho.

And again - preaching in the desert - I take this opportunity to plead to the Roon developers to implement a normal, parametrized search.

So you, @Rugby can and will find Lucid Dreams the band because you told Roon you want to find a band (and with a good search function you could have ticked a box for “artist” and a box for “album” and you would have gotten the exact result from the get go) and you @Ben_Humphrey can get the Lucid Dreams track you want by specifying the artist.

It’s not hard to implement, it’s impressive in it’s simplicity and it works. So why don’t they do it?

I imagine the unofficial TIDAL api they’re using supports Tidal’s ranked search… If I can recreate TIDALs search by inspecting network XRH requests in chrome dev console to determine the search endpoint, then roon can too.