When you play back a song in full screen mode you can cycle through different icons for:
Artist photo
Album cover
Album critic
Artist bio
Title credits
The artist photo is every time the same no matter how many albums an artist has. Hence my suggestion to connect (release date wise) the shown artist photo to the album playing.
You play the debut album, then roon should show a young artist, you play their final album, you‘ll see older musicians as artist photo.
I don’t see musicBrainz providing (press) artist photos. Roon must get them elsewhere and probably has only a contract for using one single photo?!
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Ah, yes I hadn’t considered that view. It might take some work to find all those artist images! Take for example Van Morrison, who made 41 studio albums - finding artist images corresponding exactly to each of those periods would likely be quite challenging, let alone finding high quality images! I’m not sure where Roon scrapes the artist images, but I don’t think that there is any provider that would have the images you’re asking about - I don’t think it’s necessarily a contract-related issue.
Granted, finding suitable images from artists from the 50/60/70ties is a challenge and I wouldn’t mind if some of them had to be replaced by a „signature image“ as used now.
But for newer albums more accurate artist images could be found to enrich the experience. For the band Queen there is only one image where you see the band from behind. Not very „rich“.
If a digital image is available in a database it usually has also a date tag and if the year is corresponding to the release year of the album it is close enough to be suitable. The use of press photos should not imply additional license fees (?).
If i recall correctly, Roon is rotating among multiple artist images in the Now Playing view if the played track (album) has multiple Primary Artists specified.
(One example in my library is Thulcandra - Ascension Lost where i have “Thulcandra” and “Finsterforst” listed as Primary Artist in the Credits tab of the album.)
So if we could somehow have an album from Green Day with “Green Day 90s”, "Green Day 00s and “Green Day 10s” Primary Artists, each of them with different artist image, it might be a workaround at least for the Now Playing screen (Artist view).
True, I’m one for Roon to focus on content management, rather than say dsp processing, the problem is how do you prioritise the backlog? Reading the posts for the last 6 months (I’m a relatively new user but after using a bunch of other well known apps I’ve concluded Roon is best for me) I wonder this must be a difficult task for the product owner.
Roon might be better off explaining how they prioritise their backlog so we realise why some suggestions are way down the priority list or will never make the list. Or like Apple they can do what they want, which given Apples share price is also a workable strategy haha
