Dealing with album art in Roon

My albums are stored single album per folder and box sets may have a sub-folder for each disc. In general I have the album cover saved as folder.jpg in each folder, but in the case of box sets I handle them as follows:

  • if the box set is a compilation of an artist’s work (which generally implies the same cover art for all discs in the set e.g. Rod Stewart - Storyteller: The Complete Anthology 1964-1990) I store a single instance of folder.jpg in the parent folder
  • if the box set is a reissue of a series of albums (which for me generally implies I want the original cover art for each album e.g. Pink Floyd - Discovery Box Set) I store each album’s cover art as folder.jpg in the respective sub-folders

Two questions:

  1. Will Roon use existing cover art (folder.jpg) or will it fetch its own from the cloud
  2. How will Roon deal with artwork for box sets filed as I describe above
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+1. I absolutely need this to be understood by Roon as well. It’s my normal behaviour, and is inline with Jer’s recommendations for directory structure for box sets.

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+1 This is my approach as well

Ahh, thanks for pointing this out… I never thought about the distinction. I’ll have to do some testing to see where we stand with this and if any improvement is needed. I’ll update here with my results.

How does Roon decide whether to retrieve artwork or to use pre-existing artwork in the album folder?

How does Roon decide whether to retrieve artwork or to use pre-existing artwork in the album folder?

The largest pixel area wins by default, but both are preserved in the databases, so if you don’t like our artwork, yours is a few clicks away.

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In general: We import cover art from JPG or PNG images with filenames that indicate a front cover image (“cover”, “folder”, “front”) from the directory containing the media files. We also import cover art from the media’s tags.

As @brian said, all the cover art we discover with your files is preserved in our database although we may choose to use artwork retrieved from our metadata service if it’s higher quality.

if the box set is a compilation of an artist’s work (which generally implies the same cover art for all discs in the set e.g. Rod Stewart - Storyteller: The Complete Anthology 1964-1990) I store a single instance of folder.jpg in the parent folder

We don’t currently import cover images from a directory above the media files, as you describe here. I agree that we should pickup these images.

if the box set is a reissue of a series of albums (which for me generally implies I want the original cover art for each album e.g. Pink Floyd - Discovery Box Set) I store each album’s cover art as folder.jpg in the respective sub-folders

We don’t support separate images for the individual discs of an album – there is just one image for the entire album. So in the case of this organization scheme, we’ll import all of the folder.jpg’s and pick the largest one to use as the album image.

@jeremiah

Thanks for the clarification. Is there a way to tell Roon to ignore all image files other than a specified one (eg folder.jpg) when looking at user supplied artwork?

No there isn’t.

Ok, to help me ensure I don’t end up with stuff I don’t want in Roon, are you searching for “star"cover"star”.jpg/.png and “star"front"star”.jpg/png or finding cover.jpg/.png and front.jpg/png?

I’m using “star” above to denote the “star” filename wildcard above the 8 key on a kb as the forum software is interpreting the actual character as a format italics command.

Sorry, I’m not sure I understand the question.

We’re going to make the best effort we can to find the right cover image, and we’ll always provide a way to customize the results via editing within Roon.

@jeremiah - apologies, I’ve edited my previous post for what I hope will clarify my question.

[quote=“jeremiah, post:7, topic:244”]We don’t support separate images for the individual discs of an album – there is just one image for the entire album. So in the case of this organization scheme, we’ll import all of the folder.jpg’s and pick the largest one to use as the album image.
[/quote]

In the case of a box set like Van Halen The Studio Albums 1978-1984 would it not be prudent to allow the user the option of using separate images for the individual discs of an album?

Perhaps a simple way of dealing with multi-disc sets in general is to use album art from the directory above the media files if nothing exists in the media folders themselves, but where artwork is encountered in the individual folders housing the discs making up a box set to then use those. This way the user gets to decide whether the box set cover is used or whether the individual album covers is used.

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Chris Rea’s Blue Guitars has 12 individual covers painted by the man himself, one for each disc. I presume for this one is going to have to tell Roon to treat it as 12 discs, and not one album.

Roon is always aiming to provide a match to good metadata, with Rovi (AMG/Allmusic) the premium source for the Roon metadata server. As far as I can see, Rovi only has one cover image per album. Therefore Roon is set-up with one cover per “album”, be it an individual CD or a set. This means that when the metadata server has an “original album covers” set as a single item, you will get a single cover.

Practically speaking though you can choose, because you can make Roon fetch the discs as individual albums rather than as a set. This only gets messy when the set has something in it which was never released in individual album form, although even that can be worked around in a number of ways.

What you can’t currently do is mix the two. I would also like this: each album in the set having its own cover, and the set as a whole having a cover. This would either mean user intervention or Rovi et al upgrading their offering, or both. (I think Roon’s amazing power with metadata really has the ability to make Rovi up the ante…)

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Ah, I see what you’re asking @audiomuze. We do not currently do the wildcard matching that you propose but I’m open to adding more patterns for recognizing cover images.

As for disc-specific images – if there is an interest we may consider it for the future.

Throwing this into the mix. Sometimes you want different cover art for certain songs within a folder where you’ve already got a folder.jpg file that’s appropriate for the bulk of the tracks. In Sonos (probably accidentally) this can be done by storing an alternative album cover in the file itself as a tag. Easily done in MP3tag or Tag&Rename, etc. If there’s an album-cover tag in the actual file, Sonos displays that, otherwise it defaults to folder.jpg. Works nicely.

it would be nice to have a little toggle that allows us to force use of local jpg files. I spent weeks getting the album art I wanted for each of my albums. Roon knows best after a 90 minute library import?

i’d rather not spend more weeks clicking through each album in Roon just to force my selected file.

Absolutely !

I want control over my carefully selected artwork.

In my case, album art is stored as [album].jpg in the folder holding the actual music files. 99.9 % of the time, I want the cover of an album to correspond to the cover of the original release of the album, i.e., I don’t want any “remaster”/“gold disc”/whatever album artwork. An option in Roon settings to force the use of local artwork would be perfect. I guess this goes along with the “control over the metadata” issue that I have with Roon. I spent years carefully tagging my music so I would like to use my own genre tags, my own artwork, etc… Apart from that, Roon is completely outstanding !

On a side note, additionnal artwork (back, CD, liner notes, etc.) are stored in a subfolder named /(artwork). Other software already offer cool solutions to view the additional artwork.

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+1 for both better box set/collection handling (i.e. a main image for the box set, which when clicked on opens up the box set and shows the individual covers for each disc in the set, if they are there) and for incorporating liner notes and rear album covers! :smiley:

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