Hi all,
Build 898 includes a new approach to solving this problem. Once you’ve updated your core+remote to Build 898, try it out for a few days and let us know how it feels.
We did some performance optimization to the image loading process which made things 2-4x faster end to end depending on your hardware (biggest benefits for weakest hardware).
In addition, we changed the caching model so that it’s willing to display a “stale” cached image during the loading state instead of making you wait for it. In the rare case where the image changed on our servers, it might flip to the new one a fraction of a second later.
This means that over time, your core and remotes will build up a semi-permanent cache of artwork that can be displayed without speaking to our servers, which should have similar “local network speed” properties to how Roon worked before the update in December.
Note that we still are not pre-loading images at library import time and do not plan to change that (for many reasons, which were discussed above in this topic). In in day-to-day use, once you’ve browsed around a bit and populated those caches, it should feel very close to what was there before the updates in December, and most importantly, it should stay that way and not feel like it’s depopulating every couple of days.
Thanks for all of the feedback on this, and let us know how it turns out for you once your devices are updated to build 898 and you’ve had a chance to live with it a bit.