+1 for PDFs. Jpgs would be nice too…as long as they get treated like a pdf.
I think the critical things for such a feature are:
Easy adding. I have thousands of pdfs. It would be a part time job to add them all to Roon manually. The ones I have have come from all different sources and aren’t particularly named in an uniform way. Some are scans of actual booklets while others have come from record labels or distribution services. Thus, Roon needs to have an easy way add the right booklet automatically. One obvious method would be for roon to grab a pdf stored in the album folder. Another way might be to have an artwork folder in that folder…just put whatever you want Roon to grab in there. It could be a pdf, a collection of sequentially numbered jpgs, or maybe both. Obviously this should have auto sync so that if I change the content it updates in my database.
User experience while browsing. Right now if you click on the album cover it pops up. You can store multiple images in your database…but its hard to get to them. What would be ideal is if you clicked on the album cover in the album view the album cover pops up and you get a link to the booklet (or maybe the artwork folder). Click that link and the first item replaces the album cover and has left and right direction arrows so that you can browse through the booklet. This needs to be big enough to read the content…those fill most of the Roon window while it is up.
+1 … I usually have a “Folder.jpg” for the CD insert cover and a “back.jpg” for the back of the insert. Would be great to click/tap on the album cover and be presented with the full-scale view of the album art (this is how it works, today), with a little gallery or filmstrip image along the side to select additional images or PDFs resident in the album’s folder or directory.
A further comment regarding the improved album art/liner notes issue, which I decided to tag on to the end of this thread (there are a few album art threads).
As well as the current plans to improve Roon’s handling of album art/liner notes - could the team consider adding an option to show both the front and rear album art on the individual album screen?
For example, take the following photo of the Roon individual album screen (randomly found on Google):
There is some “real estate” on either side of the screen. It would be great if this screen could show the rear album art as well. For example, the front cover could be moved to the left somewhat, the text centralised and made slightly narrowed, with the space on the right then being used for the rear album art.
I know that this might not work on smaller screens or lower resolutions - which is why it should remain an option. But it would be so much more immersive to have both front and back covers on the album screen. These are the 2 things you would first look at when you pick up a physical media. Obviously the other artwork (liner notes etc) would still have to be made available via some other means, as discussed in this and other threads.
When I used to use Foobar, I customised it to do this:
Looking back, my old Foobar setup does look a bit like an early Roon prototype with the artist/album review, waveform seekbar and “tabbed” approach to showing information Though of course Roon looks and works so much better…
On another note, I found that having the front cover in the jewel CD case helped to “frame” the image and make it look more like the album and less than just a JPG. I couldn’t find an equivalent for the rear album art. I wonder If this might be an option in Roon - the user could choose what type of physical media to use for each item (there could be options for CD, vinyl, web, cassette) - or they could set it to use CD for standard resolution and vinyl/web for anything high res. Would make browsing albums more like browsing a physical collection, rather than a digital representation. This is one thing with Roon - it is good at getting info re the album and everything to do with it - though currently has no capacity to show the actual lineage of the copy the user has. Just a thought
Another shoutout for a feature like mentioned here.
Right now I’m going through the painful process of scanning all booklets and tray cards to go with my ripped CD-collection.
I’m following conventional naming standards (folder.jpg etc) but of course this is yet only preparatory work for when a software for controlling and playing music (like Roon…) will feature booklets and full artwork. Until then it just rests in folders and I still have to use my packed binders to read through booklets.
I’ve been doing some research over the last few days on how people store cover art and other associated media – feel free to describe how you’re storing your cover art, what you’ve found common conventions to be, what your use cases are, etc. We’re listening
front cover: cover.jpg or Cover.jpg
If I have anything else, it is typically back.jpg and other.jpg for anything else. Sometimes I’ll have a liner notes pdf file in same folder as well.
“If an image named “Folder.jpg” is placed inside a folder, that image will be used as the thumbnail for that folder and as Album Art for media files in Windows Media Player.”
main Folder: Cover Image > Folder. jpg or Cover.jpeg
Subfolder named art or main Folder: jpgs (back, front, cd, matrix, booklet#", etc.) and/or Bookllet/Art.pdf
@mike Thanks, I really appreciate your interest and reply. Regarding artwork and booklets I always use the same naming conventions as @Oliver_Pix mentions above except I use “Artwork” as name of subfolder, and always PDF instead of JPG. It doesn’t really matter to me what format it is, as long as the quality is good enough. For liner notes from jazz CD’s I’ve found PDF to be a bit better…
For ROON I would love to get an artwork function that would allow me to click on the album cover (which would naturally be folder.jpg shown for each album if I’ve done my job right) and once the folder image opens up I would then be able to scroll right/left to go through the booklet pages and end up with the back of the tray-card.
In order to get it right Roon would have to follow agreed upon naming conventions for artwork to potentially automate the process, but it would maybe have to be manually possible to override or even do an artwork import per album similar to how we fix track grouping today.
folder.jpg for cover, inlay.jpg for back/inlay, booklet.pdf for booklet/notes. All stored in album folder with music files. Each music file also has the same cover art embedded in the metadata.
Love this idea and think Roon has the best views so far in that you can explore who worked on things pivot into new forms of discovery etc which is great and reminds me (closest) of paging through the liner notes to discover more things of interest or to simply queue up. Not sure where all this info would come from since it’s not really out there that I’ve seen … I’m in the midst of a library re-rip to flac and can’t honestly consider scanning in the liner pieces. It’s great that the album covers come through EAC but I’ve also been digging through discogs when it’s not automatic.
I personally use the OSX app Metadatics for my metadata editing (love it).
For the purpose of embedding artwork, it uses the following nomenclature:
Front Cover
Back Cover
File Icon
Leaflet
Media
Lead Artist
Artist
Conductor
Band
plus about a dozen more.
I’d love for Roon to be able to display some these image tags, even if I have to populate them myself. (to start, skip you guys providing the content).
Would it not be more efficient from a storage and consistency perspective to have the images named as such and saved to the folder in which the album resides rather than embed all of them in every file?
Yes I would vote for saved in folder rather than embedded in each file.
In terms of naming conventions, I have a few PDF liner notes booklets but the vast majority are image (JPG) scans of each page. So I would tend to have:
I think as long as Roon is flexible in terms of allowing the user to assign images to the corresponding part of the album artwork, there will be few problems.
As this is coming in 1.3, would using the naming convention ‘booklet.pdf’ be a safe bet? I have some time free this week to put PDF booklets in the relevant folders, so wondered if calling them all ‘booklet.pdf’ be okey? And what about if you have a couple of booklets for one album, how would you name those?
Though of course Roon looks and works so much better…