Like the title says, Comcast decided to fail me a few days ago. I was listening to roon as usual.
All the album art disappeared after some scrolling. There is album art in all the track metadata (I put it there), roon should fall back to that. Maybe it does because eventually the pictures show up for what is on the screen but scrolling instantly results in a field of grey boxes. The user interface got super sluggish and jumpy.
I can understanding getting info from the net when I’m exploring and following links in descriptions, but for simply playing my own music and scrolling through 100% my own albums, I found this unacceptable.
That begs the question what is in the database that I’m always backing up if basic usage of the software requires poking at the mothership?
If iTunes ever gets the metadata cross-links, and reviews that roon has, it’s game over…
I believe room changed the way album worked fairly recently. We are no longer backing it IP (hence the size of the backups decreased). In the internet drop scenario, it would make sense that Roon is trying to pull the artwork and the timeout value is really high, so it keeps trying. Eventually it should fall over and revert to local.
As for iTunes, Apple Music has album reviews and allows editing of metadata and the uploading of user music files.
I’ve had a similar experience about nine days ago… Internet failure Saturday 10 pm… no technical service until Monday 8 AM. This means, no Tidal albums, only local albums.
Like @Sheldon_Stokes I noticed many grey boxes where album art should have been displayed. Eventually, little by little, as if by great effort, some or many but not all album covers were displayed. Roon ‘knows’ if the Internet access is dead and indeed, in these circumstances it should fall back to the file album art which I have in all of my local albums.
I mean the music discovery aspects, like reading band history, and being able to click through referred artists etc. iTunes does not link any of that to albums I own, only to albums in apple music (the service). That is the only thing roon has going for it. The GUI and the way it works is really bad (still). It doesn’t look, or behave like a native app (because it’s not), it feels like I’m navigating a weird browser.
Although the way how album and artist artwork is being treated has indeed changed recently, it still is being cached locally the first time you try to access it. And then, if and when Internet access breaks, Roon (the application) must be aware of the fact that Internet access is cut-off and should in this case fall back to the file-based album art, if no locally-cashed artwork is available.
Ah I see what you mean. Does seem very unlikely that Apple will ever provide that as the original idea of uploading music was to ween people onto the streaming service.
When I saw this limitation, I did an export of the albums from Roon to CSV (for soundizz). I imported them into Apple Music and now it links up.