Black area on side of artist photo banner

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.

2 Likes

@danny

Why the change compared to the past? The “black boxes” started occuring just recently… so it has not always been by design.

Why didn’t Roon team just center the artist image and maybe use some blurred background towards the sides if needed, like this?
image

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.

1 Like

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 :wink:

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.

1 Like

Just curious, but why are some Artist images small circles and others are big rectangular ones like those posted in this thread?

I’m confused, I’ve just noticed that’s the same Artist can sometimes be a small circle and other times be a large rectangle:

Then I found this image by clicking the Artist name somewhere else:

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.

Not sure what you mean because I’ve found the same Artist with both versions a few seconds apart (see edited post).

which one came second? can you reproduce this?

Ok, I’ve opened up a ticket with my QA team on this. I feel like something is off as well. Looking into it.

1 Like

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:

can you ever flip back to the circle?

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.

@danny Some examples for investigation:












Basically 99.9% of artists in my library have black background. No white/grey found in my library except for these rare examples:


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.

7 Likes

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:

Is there a way to resolve this? I tried resizing the window but to no avail.

Other than this, I’m warming up to Art Director’s potential. Everyday and my artist page is looking more and more clean.

Hello and welcome Miguel,

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.

1 Like

its not deployed yet.

@danny great. Looking forward!