Hi Danny,
Had a look at this, and I’m sorry this is just Roon passing out the work on the metadata used in Roon to everyone else.
One of the main points of Roon is that your library is provided with rich metadata by Roon, in terms of artist bios, images, reviews, history, upcoming gigs/concerts, the links to resource pages, so what we are now having to do this process ourselves for Roon?
If this was a crowdsourced project and open source software tool, sure, but last time I looked you charged for the use of the software.
Sounds like you need to hire more people to gather and manage the metadata provided by Roon, instead of getting your customers to this for you.
It was broken before. Just search these forums for all the complaints.
But now the solution exists.
You may disagree or not want to participate, but that’s ok, because there is no shortage of people who are contributing. I was hoping everything would be adjusted by summer 2022 (including the long tail), but the effort has been far more popular than we expected. So much so, that we will be done in a week or so and able to offer more shapes shortly.
We disagree on this point completely. Luckily, you can benefit from all the people who agree with our strategy on this matter. You don’t need to contribute a single thing.
As for all those people who do want to contribute, they don’t need you to look out for them. They are perfectly capable of making their own decisions of whether they want to contribute or not.
Given the extreme popularity of Art Director contributions, we feel that this approach is both valid and fruitful for all. We will be doing more like this. Again, if you don’t like approach, you don’t have to contribute.
I think it’s a great idea. Who better to improve the images presented by Roon than the customers who are using Roon? And, as customers, we don’t have to pay more for Roon to cover the cost of more employees doing this.
EDIT: Just make sure any pictures you upload aren’t copyrighted.
I find that journalists’ view on life to be both pessimistic, sad, and obsolete.
I have received hundreds of PMs and emails since we started this company from people who asked that we build something where they could contribute metadata. My advice to them has been to contribute to Musicbrainz or fanart.tv. Now they have something that makes the cycle tighter and thus more fulfilling.
Sure, so if moving to a crowdsourcing model, then open up the Product Roadmap, User decisions on the content of future releases, open Beta programs, etc.
Given that users are contributing to the metadata libraries used by Roon are you making them open source or are they still remain part of the Roon’s IP Assets, despite their existence being on a contribution basis by external 3rd party users?
We already crowd source content. For example, our translations and internet radio directory are both crowdsourced.
We are not moving to a crowd sourced model. We are continuing to augment our existing data model with crowd sourced contributions.
No. What you ask for would not be very useful. For example, with Art Director, the vast majority of the work being done is favoriting and cropping hundreds of thousands of licensed images. What good is opening that data if we cannot open the image itself? You clearly haven’t thought this through.
One thing is to let the user to adjust the images in his library (and of course for his interest and benefit) and free riding to improve your commercial product. Borderline, but acceptable.
Other thing is to ask people to edit images that are of no interest to them, only to your benefit. And dressing this up as a crowdsourcing beauty. This is hardly crowdsorcing. That seems to me downright taking advantage.
At least be straightforward: “we thank you for donating your time and effort for making our product better”
We thank those who contribute for their time and effort to helping make Roon better.
Let me repeat myself from above:
We disagree on this point completely. Luckily, you can benefit from all the people who agree with our strategy on this matter. You don’t need to contribute a single thing.
As for all those people who do want to contribute, they don’t need you to look out for them. They are perfectly capable of making their own decisions of whether they want to contribute or not.
Given the extreme popularity of Art Director contributions, we feel that this approach is both valid and fruitful for all. We will be doing more like this. Again, if you don’t like approach, you don’t have to contribute.
I guess I don’t understand a lot of things, but I really don’t understand why anyone would have a problem with this. Why are some people so cynical? If you don’t want to contribute, then don’t. Just reap the benefits of the efforts of those who do. There is no downside here.
EDIT: Just make sure any pictures you upload aren’t copyrighted.
No, it isn’t. Roon’s job is to provide us with access to a variety of sources of metadata, which they do. If none of those sources contain an image for a specific artist we can either live with it or add one of our own. The quicker we do that the quicker there will be no need for the button.
I’m not being deliberately obtuse, but why is this a problem? If I add an image for an artist, mine and everybody else’s experience is improved. Why should I be concerned what happens to this ‘data’ in the future?