I was off work for two and a half weeks - it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Get plenty of rest.
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Get well soon Danny.
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I find it hard to believe some of the posts I have read herein.
I have made some contributions to the Art Director program and have done so willingly and gladly knowing it should help everyone.
I don’t find it a chore or consider myself being used in any way shape or form.
I just wish I had a little more time to dedicate towards it.
I think it’s quite simple, if you don’t like the idea then just don’t partake, there are plenty who are doing so your contribution will not be missed.
BTW…get well soon @danny 
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I can’t quite tell if there are some here who think that I ought not contribute my labor voluntarily.
I get the intent of “Roon should err more on the side of watching out for content creators proactively”, even if I personally think that Roon is on the right side of the intent of the law as currently written. But I do not get the source of “Roon should not crowd source from anyone, even if I have no obligation or expectation to participate”.
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Just to build on that. Roon is opening a wide door to copyright infringement that it’s members may unknowingly walk through. Roon knows this of course, but is ok with it. The community may not fully understand the legal trap set here. Internally, Roon appears to act proactively to support copyrights, but appears to take a restorative approach with community members. This unfortunately places it’s members in legal jeopardy. For the benefit of everyone, I hope Roon loudly flags copyright law at the front of their program that requests others to provide them images. In creating a “corpus” of music, I would like this community to support all artists not just musicians.
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I have been simply moving images around, and selecting preferences, via the HTML art director tool. I didn’t even realise uploading of images was possible.
I agree. It is completely ridiculous for the expensive subscription based service to require its customers to improve it. There are so many gaps and poor photos. For example that of Sir Simon Rattle is at least 30 years out of date. He will have a PA and publisher who can do this sort of thing for him as will all celebrities.
Thus you just end up with the system stuffed full of marketing The latest and greatest and little for the more obscure way information is more helpful.
Not sure if serious??
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When I go to a gig, after paying for expensive tickets, now they want me to applaud as well, to help create atmosphere… What next? 
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There are endless debates on forums around the ethics of Spotify/Tidal/Qobuz paying artists 0.001p per stream yet people here are more than happy to upload photographers work without any recognition, credit or payment.
I guess because it’s ‘just a photo’ they found on the internet the origin of it and effort that went into producing that image can be disregarded.
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Interesting debate. Here’s my take on it… which is (as are most things on the internet) my opinions, not facts…
Algorithms are good - up to a point. Like categorising music, you can figure out certain things about a track using algorithms. Like the key it is in; tempo; identify parts like verse, chorus, bridge etc. You can make inferences from it - is it “uplifting” or not. But there are limits to what an algorithm can do in terms of feature engineering. The algorithms will work better with known good features instead of trying to extract them. There is a streaming company who suggests great playlists. The algorithm may be like valence, but the source data - the music features - are human curated. No computer figuring “I think this is in an uplifting key, has an upbeat tempo…” but someone augmenting what can be machine generated with human interpretation. “This is a song about love, about failed relationships…” so the songs suggested follow themes that are not computer extractable. Maybe we are getting towards where we can do speech recognition or parse in the lyrics and then run some sort of deep text analysis on it to get to the same result.
Human curation is possible - and the sentiment here seems to be that roon should be doing it. That comes at a cost. Complaining about the monthly / annual fees now? Hire a team of folks to curate the music… it isn’t going to go well.
The other argument seems to be “why am I being exploited here?”. Go on Facebook. By virtue of being there you’re creating data to be exploited. Click like on something? Ditto. Post something? Same again. Use a search engine to search the web…
As I see it the roon approach is less nefarious than that, and you’re going into it with your eyes open. Plus it is voluntary. If you feel hard done by - fair enough. This isn’t the gig economy and we aren’t driving for a rideshare company. Contribute if you want.
I’ll leave the soapbox by the door as I show myself out 
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I am using rateyourmusic site that have all above…If only we can have ways to make plugins to integrate external sources to our tastes.
I’m very happy with the crowdsourcing as it will improve my library without investing much time. I completely stopped adding own images because it consumes so much effort and I’m the only person who will see this. It feels like resource wasting. I started adding missing Albums to MusicBrainz instead. The community often adds more value by improving my submission. And they can only do this because I initially submitted the albums. It would be great if I could submit unrecognized albums directly to MB from Roon.
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I have no problem with this concept. We just need to make sure the pictures we upload are not copyrighted. I’m not sure how to do that and if everyone understands we need to do that. For some reason, I was under the impression Roon could check that, but I was mistaken.
While this original point has been discussed from many angles, one not covered is that while Roon does promise rich metadata, they have never, IMHO, promised coverage for everything that exists in the music world. As someone who ran a music tech/data company that at one time had 300 people doing music data and still was no where near providing perfect content and wasn’t even trying to tackle bios and reviews, I can say definitively, there is NOT enough money in the market to fund an effort to do this, nor could you afford to hire enough people to even try to tackle it. Anyone who thinks Roon should be doing this and/or has promised to do this is just not living in reality. No single company in the world is doing this today nor can fund this kind of effort.
What Roon is doing is integrating content from as many quality sources as they can and normalizing it to the best of their ability, Art Director just provides another source of data, nothing more, nothing less. You can choose to participate or not the same way you can chose to submit corrected or new meta data to music brainz which will then propagate back to Roon.
So let’s not get bent out of shape and welcome a great new addition to the Roon product. Use it or not. It’s all up to you.
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I really… wish the tone of the ‘discourse’ here were more… less… well, just not so combative.
I understand many commenters are unreasonable, Danny, but I also find your tone terse and somewhat inciting. I think it’s your job to be less combative.
I know it’s your company, and we’re just paying for a service, but as a paying customer who comes here for information and discovery I routinely find it off-putting how many threads are fraught with argumentative exchanges, and how many of them feature posts by yourself.
I’m not trying to add to the fray, just, well, somewhat pleading for the people who run a company and product for which I have a lot of gratitude to be part of the solution and not the problem.
I don’t envy you having to debate a number of the users here, I see that there are strong feelings on both sides, but as a, what I consider representative, user here I have to comment on how all this ‘vitriol’ makes me feel. It pushes me away. From the thread. From the site. From the product. And, I don’t want to be pushed away. I’d prefer the opposite, frankly.
My. Two. Cents. Thanks for listening.
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I do understand the argument here, it feels, in some ways, like Roon is an open-source software although it is privately owned. People are in their own will contributing their time and effort into transforming Roon, but this is technically at the benefit of the beholder. From what is currently offered for contribution, this is not seen as such a big deal which I currently agree with. If Roon was asking to volunteer with the backend development of Roon, that would be a whole different story. Anyone can do what they want to do and if you have a lifetime subscription then assisting Roon is as making the software you own, better for all users.
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