Art Specs for Missing Artists

Assuming the artist upgrade is complete for now, I have numerous gray spots I’d like to fill.

New art for these missing guys is easy to find (which begs the question of why the user has to look) but what are acceptable specs? Width, height, resolution, file type? I recall a sentence or two in the KB but can’t find it, and I am unsure if those specs are current anyway.

OR, am I going to be relieved of this task by upcoming updates (I know, no timelines, sigh)?

The specs for a full page spread on the artist page are a jpg/png that is larger than 960 dpi horizontal and an aspect ratio of at least 1: 1.55. I don’t know if anything has changed for the new “now playing” page. If you add more than one pic then roon will cycle through them giving a nice animated effect on the display page.

It is not easy to find pics online using these specs so you will need some kind of image editor to crop to fit. World also has changed as well so for example google images will issue these warnings (geared more to on line bloggers, youtube etc. I think, but not really sure)

You will find also that centered images will not work well with centered text on several roon pages but the now playing and display pages do not have that problem. Unfortunately they look odd with images cropped hard to the right or left which do look well with centered text. Can’t win I guess.

Thanks Tony. I was all set to pen a note to Roon for their upgraded artist pics, and the pics themselves are better.

But their treatment is, well, not ready for prime time. I don’t know what is happening, but when I first open an artist, I get something like this:

Decent pic but an old one. But the second and subsequent times I open the artist’s page, I get this:

Now why oh why must we take a decent (and old, low-rez) pic, and expand it to the point of silliness?

Now, here’s one I just uploaded. The first time I went to the artist page, the photo looked about like this:

image

Not bad, I think. It then only occupied a small fraction of the screen, but plenty good enough.

But once Roon’s heuristics get ahold of it, look at the result:

If this is a good as it gets, Roon should give users an option to say “never mind”. This is an amateurish, sorry to say.

Lest you think its all negative, here’s one Roon’s formula got right:

Except for needing a slight offset of the head, this works.

Yes. The Seal headshot is almost there. Off-centered to the left would be a lot better. So many image library shots are centered headshots. If it is possible for the heuristics to offcenter at the same time as pulling down vertically to avoid the cut-off head syndrome that would be a big improvement in a lot of cases.

I’m afraid that my experience of Classical artwork is that a lot of it is historical, or poor resolution or just plain bad like your examples and is much worse blown up to a full page spread. It can be very difficult to find Classical artwork on-line that benefits from this sort of treatment.

On the other hand I can also see that some off-centered 3/4 shots are starting to come through. They work really well with centered text on the artist page but much less well on the playing now and display pages where there is a lot of empty space without the text.

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I suppose, if ultimately Roon are to add that extra special something for us virtually exclusive streamers (I don’t collect CD’s or download media files any more) then adding to and tidying up Qobuz artwork and metadata is going to be a major part of the appeal. Its obvious after years of exclusive streaming for me now that the discovery process and cross linked information is sorely lacking, labels and distributors could do so much more, but they don’t seem interested. Now Roon and Qobuz are talking nicely and both seem very eager then the extra cost of Roon on top of the streaming subscription is a no brainer for me - I’m loving it.