Is there any way to have band images weighted more toward older photos from their period of peak artistic/commercial relevance, rather than all these latter day photos, when a lot of them are now just legacy acts? Seeing all these elderly men in photos of bands from the 70s and 80s that I love is honestly a bit depressing.
I realize you can add photos manually, and I might do that for a select few bands, but I signed on for Roon based in part on the promise of no longer having to perform such tedious manual tasks. As great as Roon metadata is (for the most part), there really isn’t a lot of flexibility. By contrast, in Plex you can choose from about 10 different movie posters for a given film. I wish Roon could be more like that - to be able to do an image search and select what you want, instead of being stuck with the one image you are given. You wouldn’t even have to pay for the licensing (I don’t believe) if it’s just scraping off the internet, as the audiobook app on my phone does for book covers, for example.
Hi Lee, this isn’t really a metadata issue, as that means an actual meta-data problem, ie incorrect information. You are really making a Feature Request. If you want I can move the thread there.
It really is kind of dumb the way it works right now, so I would say it is a meta data problem. As a lifetime subscriber I wish there were a few more music nerds, a few more ux pros, and a few less 20 something code kittens with no awareness of musical context on the Roon team.
For Roon to do this I suspect they’d need to rethink their metadata ingestion model. Images seem to stem from TiVo, Tidal and probably Qobuz and I presume arrive as database changes are pulled from the aforementioned.
One thing I think they could easily do is pull custom artwork from the user base on an opt-in basis (the client knows which artwork you’ve added or changed) then make them available to the entire user base. That in itself should go a long way to 1) filling in the many, many, many blanks; and 2) creating some variety/ depth to its image bank.
From Roon’s perspective, it’d also be a rights management nightmare. Just because a picture is posted online doesn’t make it legal for a company (or even a fan) to use it.
True, I guess they don’t need to put a target on their backs. Alternative then is more licensed content at higher cost to users. How do the likes of Plex do it?
Looks to me as if it’s philosophically “same as Roon” and pass the buck onto TheTvDB / TMDB/Fanart.tv or whomever their metadata provider is. My hunch is also that a company built on the premise of everyone ripping their DVDs (something that itself is totally not built on DeCSS) and blu-rays (AACS, anyone ?) might have a little bit more of a, let’s say, wink-wink, nod-nod attitude towards infringement than Roon might.
The biggest problem for Roon is that many bands/artists had few or poor quality photos taken back in the day. Roon has minimum standards for their artist photos. That’s why many artist have no photos. They don’t exist on the internet or they are of such poor quality Roon doesn’t want to use them. That’s why so many of the artist photos are current not from their heyday.
Much of the cover artwork is pretty mediocre. My guess, assuming it’s still even accessible in a realistic fashion, would be it’s probably because the providers either don’t care or don’t have the manpower to screen it properly, and that’s why you get stuff that’s sourced from scans.
If you look at the pictures provided by Roon, you’ll see they’re all sourced from various web sites. If you do an image search for a particular artist you’ll likely find the bio picture on someone’s web site. They’re not special by any means, but for proper display by Roon they must be a minimum resolution and aspect ratio. That said, many newer artists don’t have their metadata updated by the providers (Tivo, etc.). Also, there appears to be a level of obscurity applied here. An artist with a hit record is more likely to have a quality picture than a studio musician who appears on two or three records.
I prefer seeing a current photo. I’d rather be informed than entertained, because relying on others to figure out what would be entertaining is a fast dive to the lowest common denominator. The option to choose would be nice, but my guess is that an older photo is going to be a photo that we’ve seen millions of times. Boring.
If you look at most of the cover art Roon uses full screen, you’ll start noticing the halftone, because none of it is properly descreened (that one isn’t, and also has what looks like a color profile error on top of the printing on the lower right. My guess is it’s sourced from All Music Guide. Amazon’s rendition of it looks correct, though):
It is not really proving a point giving one real example, but I will do exactly this anyway: The Smashing Pumpkins. Not a band I have listened to or followed much in the past decade or so, but their classic albums has their given place in my music library. Whoever that person fronting SP in Roon today is, it was for sure never a member of the band back in the day. I have no clue who this person is!
