@danny, may I politely bring my above question to your attention once more, please?
@joel, if you’re commenting on the above, I wonder if you would be so kind as to comment on my proposal to improve the album art feature. I had suggesting adding the ability to remove and re-order items in Roon, as there are many entries with duplicate album covers. I had also suggested increasing the number of thumbnail images from the existing 8, at least for larger screens, and had suggested an option to allow the user to name the images (rather than just showing the filename). Thanks!
@joel, it’s been almost a month since I first asked my question. I can understand if the answer is that Roon is still negotiating, or that it’s not a priority or whatever. In fact, I would be happy with just about any answer. I just fail to see why it has to take such a long time. Probably my ignorance, but I would appreciate a reply.
1 Like
Hey guys, lots to do and I can’t get back to every thread immediately, particularly when it’s really a feature request (and really one for @mike!). I’m sorry that this one went unnoticed/unanswered for so long.
That said, back cover art (and more) is absolutely something we want to make happen. However, it’s more complicated than simply doing what allmusic does. Allmusic takes Rovi/TiVo metadata and, although it supplements it in some areas, fundamentally, it’s just Rovi. This makes it easy for them to simply serve up whatever Rovi gives them.
For us, Rovi is not enough; we need to fill in very real album coverage gaps, so we use multiple metadata providers. And then there’s TIDAL… This creates a pretty unique problem for us, equivalencing different editions of albums for which we have metadata, and identifying your content as accurately as possible. Now bear in mind that for rear cover art to be unobjectionable, we can’t serve up incorrect album release / image matches and then have to deal with user complaints that we’ve got it wrong; this is a terrible waste of our time and a major distraction from getting work done that really improves the user experience. So we have to get it right.
Finally, having the metadata is only part of the story; we’ll need to do some user interface design work to ensure an awesome user experience when we deliver this.
How are we going to get there? In general, we think that we do a pretty darn good job with equivalence; however we recognize that there are some problems and it’s clear to us that our current metadata infrastructure and pipeline could do with some work. Certainly, they were never designed to be able to ingest and equivalence an arbitrary number of metadata sources, as well as finely control the pecking order of these sources for every possible type of metadata (album art, classical composition metadata, reviews, etc.) . So we’re in the process of designing a “next gen” metadata processing pipeline and service. We’re taking this opportunity to fix a number of systemic problems, allow the system to grow in various directions, and facilitate new product features (of which rear cover art will actually be quite a trivial one from the metadata perspective). This isn’t a small project that can be delivered in a couple of months, but it’s an important one; and it will be worth it.
10 Likes
Hey @joel, thanks for your detailed answer. I appreciate that the Roon team wants to get it right and that this will take some time. No problem, the important thing is that this is on the roadmap. Keep up the good work, it will make Roon even greater than it already is!
3 Likes
Thanks @joel. I like the sound of the interface redesign. Don’t forget to add the ability to delete images from within Roon and to re-order the images.
1 Like
Hi, as far as pdf are concerned, would be great if you could consider a solution like issuu. Allow to go through pdf like in a book without leaving current app. Would add to user experience instead of opening the pdf outside of Roon.
7 Likes
TuneMap is in the pipeline I see for metadata which could be licensed out to Roon.
https://www.tunesmap.com/this-is-tunesmap/
New York Times had this article on TuneMap
This would be a great resource and save us all time personally moding our Roon where it falls short on Album & Artist info.
6 Likes
If Roon can license & integrate TuneMap it just may take part of the app to a new level!
3 Likes
Yeah, saw that one too. Has great potental, they also have a serious team working on it. Works only with sonos and apple tv so far though but it seems to work with allmost all music streaming services out there. It’s not a player by itself as far as I understand but an add on that delivers metadata content to what’s being played. Would have liked to play around with the beta version just for fun but I don’t have a Sonos nor an Apple TV. Not so sure if they are eager to provide anything to others though, seems more like a competition. They also, like Roon, do not generate any data themselves, they just collect it for you and present it in a way they choose for you. Roon could collect all this data themselves and do with it whatever they feel like is good for you. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.
1 Like
Metadata helps justify the cost of Roon. This is a no-brainer.
+1. Such a cool app! Hope integration is possible. Would be amazing to have it work with Roonbridge otherwise.
1 Like
Thought I’d pick this up again - having the complete album artwork (booklet) to flip through on the iPad whilst playing the CD would be really amazing…
3 Likes
I know this had probably been covered so i apologize in advance, just don’t have the energy to scroll 82 pages.
How do i view the back cover of an album?
Thanks.
Claus
You can add it to the album folder along with PDF files.
You can? Do you have a link that explains this? I’ve tried searching the Roon knowledge base - no luck.
Thanks, in advance.
Not sure where it says it now but you can, and I have dropped pdf files in the relative folder for an album in my hard drive.
Drag and drop, I use QNAP. Try one and see.
You need to get the PDF of the album art from somewhere, and then add it to the folder which contains the music files. You do both of these activities outside of Roon. Then get Room to re-scan the folder (if it doesn’t do it automatically).