In the screen size you have when you see the black box, the designer felt that 16:7 would take up too much vertical real estate. Therefore, a design was created to allow for a shorter height. Maintaining aspect ratio ( which is it requirement ), that means the width is also shorter and that space needs to be filled by something. I saw tens of designs during development and these were the best.
As for why the images noted above are using the black colored area, those just need to be resolved. Maybe the thresholds are not set right, or maybe the algorithm needs improvement for detecting what is worthy of black or white. That will take some development investigation.
This blurred background design was the very first design that I suggested to our designers, and they actually implemented it. It looked horrible in reality. The blurred design only works if it’s truly edge to edge, and on a large percentage of our users desktops, the sidebar is open at all times, causing that blurred part to add a second hard edge that makes it look like it’s floating.
Now we have big black boxes on nearly every banner…not very elegant on white theme. Also the white text on black is in complete contrast with the rest of the page.
An option to have “box background follow theme” would solve this…
Feature request
The reason they didn’t apply before is because we used to crop the photos to fit the aspect ratio.
But cropping the photos to fit some random aspect ratio is what caused all the chopping off of relevant parts of the photo.
We used to use facial detection to avoid the important parts, but that doesn’t always work as my original post on Art Director stated.
The original versions of this project did not have you actually do the adjustment, but just had you tell us where the important parts were. The data that we were getting back from early users was extremely inaccurate and inconsistent. Very few understood the goal. In an effort to make something that people could actually understand and get through quickly, we had them adjust photos to fit an aspect ratio. Very few messed that up, and spent a lot less time per image. Thus was born to fixed aspect ratio.
If no banner is suitable, we use the Avatar. For it to be suitable, a photo must exist, it must be adjusted for the banner shape, and it must have votes.
The small circle came first. It’s easy to do - I think pretty much all Artists do this small then big thing - it did it with Sinatra and some others I tried earlier tonight. I’ll try to reproduce it for you.
Here’s a few I just found. Happens about 75% of the time I’d say:
Yes, I can just use the back arrow if I do it within a few seconds. Having gone back into Roon just now, the small circles images have been replaced with the large rectangle ones.
no more needed, we are on it. I’m going to put a temporary close to this topic so it doesn’t get a pile on… wait for a bit and I’ll come back with good news.
Apologies if this issue has been resolved, but the “black box” issue still persists with me. I use Roon Remote on my Macbook Pro (13-inch) and every artist page looks like this:
I have only been able to replicate this behaviour with this artist and this banner image on my 5th generation iPad Mini at landscape orientation. I cannot replicate anywhere else at any window size or resolution. It’s early days but I feel Art Director is improving Roon every day.
These observations will undoubtedly help Roon’s QA team so thanks for your input.