A way to prune halftoned covers, or apply custom covers to files

Quite a number of Roon’s metadata providers’ covers seem to come from scans of printed material.

Whatever the cause of this disaster, the result is fugly, fuzzy, halftoned images, with black points all over the place, so no visual consistency. It isn’t Roon’s fault, but it makes everything looks sloppier than it should.

Of course, since better quality sources are often available, it’s possible to manually correct the offending images, and avoid the repulsive sight of a bunch of dust crammed onto a fuzzy dot pattern stolen from God knows where, but it’s a bit of a pain, and there’s also the question of what happens if or when there’s some type of database drama.

So, coupla things…

a) Would it be possible to give more weight to quality over definition, or to a provider that takes care in what they do ?

b) Would it be possible to have an “export custom data to original file” option / toggle / whatever, that’d export just the data the user changed ?

c) if a) and b) are impossible, would it be possible to enable flagging of the offending art, so that some mechanical turk, somewhere, can have a look at it and protect others from the eye-gouging sight of some of the art that more negligent mechanical turks let through ?

if a), b) and c) are impossible, would it be possible to enable sharing of corrected artwork between Roon users, which both might save people work, and might provide a bit of solace as to it at least sparing other users the waste of time ?

What I miss too sometimes are more or better criteria to estimate the visual quality of covers; often my file embedded covers get dismissed by Roon just because the cloud version is bigger in pixel size. Size may matter, but there’s more to picture quality than the dimension in pixels.

“Provider” might be more difficult to influence. On musicbrainz one could provide (quality) cover artwork which Roon then could pick up.

To not loose pictures I’ve added to Roon manually I made it a habit to save the pictures in a Roon Media folder before adding the picture in Roon. Depending on how many pictures you update in Roon manually this may or may not work in the interim.
Album covers I do usually add to the audio files with an external tagger anyway.

BTW if you export albums which got a custom cover added this will be included in the exported audio file as cover art. At least a short test I made suggests that this will happen.

As said above - if you want (and the album exists there) - you could try adding the better artwork to musicbrainz / Coverart archive and that way also share it with others. Without examples it’s hard to guess where the bad artwork for your library items originates from. If it’s allmusic it may not be so easy to influence from the outside, if it’s musicbrainz, there’s a chance. Given that you do actually have fitting artwork for a release, of course.

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