Complete Album Art - Sleeve Notes - Booklets

As I mention in my post: since May 2016.:wink:
Thatā€™s four and a half years now. Iā€™d call that a long time.

Genius.com has a good library of images for each album.

Speaking of which, if possible, why not partner with them and use Geniusā€™ lyrics as well. One of the most annoying things to happen in Roon is when I read incorrect lyrics. It seems to happen quite more often than whatā€™s written on Genius (where the artists sometimes even verify the lyrics).

1 Like

Uh, contrary to the theme of this thread - Genius.com does not have complete album art or sleeve notes at all - only front covers, which can be found in many other places. What that site does have is information about the album covers, which is pretty cool.

To say that Genius only offers front covers is just plain wrong. A lot of them include the back cover or inlets. It obviously depends per album. Not all albums have sleeve notes or even a back cover to begin with. And even if they did, you canā€™t expect any online resource to be perfect. Iā€™m just saying that Genius is good option and shouldnā€™t be overlooked. Other than lyrics, it offers a lot of metadata that Roon users would find interesting, I believe.

Give me an album that has back cover or inlets - Iā€™m keen to take a look. I just randomly searched some very well known albums and none of them had anything other than the front cover.

JhenƩ Aiko - Chilombo
FKA Twigs - MAGDALENE
The Weeknd - After Hours
Run The Jewels 2

These are just from the top of my head. Please do your own research next time. For me, finding an album there with only a front cover seems to be uncommon.

Interesting. I searched for some very well-known albums and found the opposite. Perhaps it is just selective.

Yes. Please ROON I want to see and view all the back covers, inside sleeves. Etc.

2 Likes

Not having access to the original liner notes is a deficit far below the standards of competence and availability i have come to expect from Roon. Any chance the original liner notes will become available? If so, when?

1 Like

I struggle to imagine where Roon Labs would get this information. Iā€™m not aware of a service that provides authorized high-resolution scans of original liner notes for every album ever released. If you find one, please share the information with Roon Labs.

In my case, for a few albums, Iā€™ve removed the staples and scanned the notes myself, but this usually involves some editing in Photoshop to get the page order and layout just right before saving as a PDF that Roon can display. Iā€™ve not worked out a particularly efficient way to do this, so Iā€™ve only done so for a handful of albums.

4 Likes

Providing liner notes is not something Roon necessarily has control over. It is up to the labels to distribute this information along with the music files. Some streaming services, Qobuz for example, do provide a fair number of booklets and liner notes, at least for newer releases, and several classical labels do so with their downloads (like Hyperion).

As many have noted, there is no source for digital liner notes for the mass of released music. If there was Gracenote would have integrated it into our products long ago when I was running the company. There is no chance that anyone will go back and scan complete liner notes for the 10s of millions of album that have been released. There is not enough money to be made in licensing this data to pay for it and it would take years to get a product to any level of critical mass.

Having said that, what will likely happen is that more and more companies will start producing complete digital liner notes for new music and new remasters of older music as many are starting to do. Over time this will encompass an increased % of released music but it will be a slow process.

Roon could provide a process to support user submissions of scanned liner notes and itā€™s likely there would be many in this community that would take the time to do it and this would accelerate coverage but itā€™s a tricky process. You have to weed out incorrect submissions, there will be a few bad eggs that will submit lewd images that have to be weeded out, there are often different liner notes with different artwork for releases in different countries and you have to have a process to determine what is the best submission if you get many for the same album release. Itā€™s doable but itā€™s an investment in tech and people to make this work.

8 Likes

Crowd-sourcing this is a good thought, but in addition to the caveats you mentioned, copyright ownership could be an issue in some countries. Roon probably could not distribute user contributed liner note scans without permission from the labels and artists.

Yup. You are right @David_Snyder. Would take a licensing deal from the labels to be legit. They own the liner notes except for the lyrics (if included in the liners) if they converted to digital form from graphical form which are owned by the publishers but Roon is covered there.

Discogs comes pretty damn close. Just a shame that they canā€™t allow users access to the original high-res scans, and instead have somewhat dumbed down scans. You can use algorithms in Photoshop to increase the size and maintain some quality though.

I understand, but that is a shame. I listen mostly to jazz. The original liner notes, particularly those rendered accompanying Blue Note recordings, are informative and edifying. Given Roonā€™s comprehensiveness and artist cross-link facility, access to such notes would be a natural concomitant to an already superior experience. Moreover, while not bad, much of the attached Roon commentary is superficial and inadequate (and lifted word for word from Allmusic). Access to the original liner notes would, as noted, complete what is already an outstanding and educational musical experience.

3 Likes

I couldnā€™t agree moreā€¦

2 Likes

Some albums display links to Wickepedia articles about the artist or album but ROON does not always provide these links internally.

Is there a reason or something to enable inside ROON to provide the Around the Web links?

Given it is four years after your response, I donā€™t think your promise of addressing this response is genuine. To be able to incorporate original liner notes into the scope of information that Roon makes available would be fabulous.

Roon seems to be trying to be too ambitious with some features, like the liner notes, to the point that they will likely NEVER get implemented. I donā€™t expect Roon to seek out, parse and provide ANY liner notes or booklets. All I want is for Roon to either load them from a file THAT I WILL FIND/EDIT AND PROVIDE MYSELF embedded in the folder with a specific name, or have an interface button that will launch a pdf viewer with the target of the pdf stored in a specific folder. How hard could this be to implement? Just save me the trouble of exiting Roon and browsing for the directory with the album art and booklet and Iā€™ll be happy, as I think most users would as well if no implementation of something more robust is likely to happen. Same with the editing of album reviews, artist bios and incorrect album lyrics. Just provide a mechanism to load and display info the user can provide in the form of a file within the album folder. It would be easy for a user to edit an html file named artist_bio.html or lyrics.html or album_review.html if they choose to. Let users do some legwork, and just provide a way to load these with the interface. Please.