There have been various threads prior to the release of Roon 1.3 relating to adding a feature to show album art. Now that this feature has arrived with Roon 1.3, I figured that it would be helpful to have a thread to discuss how to improve this feature.
First off, this is a great feature that has been missing since day 1! And the implementation is pretty smooth - the icon showing the number of images is very helpful. The small thumbnails at the bottom of the screen when browsing the artwork are very helpful. The ability to scroll through the artwork with the mouse wheel is great. And the ability to go “full screen” when clicking on an artwork is great too.
So here are my suggestions for improvement:
1. Add the ability to “manage” this artwork from within Roon.
For example, the ability to delete and re-order images. Currently, I have a lot of duplicate images as there are probably 2 versions of the image in the folder or in a subfolder (a smaller version has acted as the main thumbnail in the past). It would be extremely helpful if you could remove images from within Roon (not necessarily delete from the disk (though this would be a good option). Also regarding duplicates I think sometimes Roon may be showing the folder artwork as well as the “scraped” artwork, which is the same but probably a different size/resolution. Second, the ability to re-order the artwork is required if we are to read booklet pages etc in the right order!
2. Move the album artwork icon from just above the review to under the main album cover (where the bitrate, time and quality data is).
This would make more sense as it would be in a more intuitive spot right next to the cover, not somewhere where the user has to search for it.
3. Expand on the artwork icon.
Rather than having a single icon saying that there are “6” artwork items to be seen, it would be more helpful to have a few individual icons relating to specific parts of the album artwork - these icons could “appear” if the corresponding file(s) are present. For example, there could be separate small icons for rear cover, media image, and liner notes/booklet. This way, if the user just wanted to see the back of the album they could just click the “rear” icon rather than wade through the whole bunch of images. This feature would somewhat rely on feature 5 below.
4. Increase the number of artwork thumbnail images from 8.
Currently, if I have more than 8 artwork items then the thumbnails at the bottom of the art browser only show the first 8 images. After that I can view the rest of the images but the thumbnails stay the same. There is lots of space on my screen to show about 3-4 times this number of thumbnails, and that would be helpful.
5. Naming of images.
The “image info” link at the top of each image is helpful to show the file details, but it would be helpful to name each image, e.g. front cover, rear cover, media image, booklet page 1, page 2, liner tray, etc etc. This would allow for easier sorting and organisation too.
6. Dimmer background.
When browsing artwork, the background is dimmed but still distracting - I would dim the background a bit further.
These are my main ones for now. I appreciate that the Roon team will currently likely be busy addressing the support issues that have inevitably arisen with the new release (or enjoying a well deserved drink/smoke), though hopefully these requests can be addressed in time.