No Artwork Airplay [Solved]

Hi Guys Newbie to Roon liking it so far.
Just started with Roon its great so far. But i have NO artwork showing through airplay. All my artwork showed up with iTunes with Airplay but not 1 peace of artwork shown up with Roon,
Using Airplay With Pioneer N-50-k Network player.

Hi Marko,

Am I right in understanding that you are referring to album art showing on the display of the Pioneer Network player ? If not could you explain where the artwork is missing ?

Thats right Andrew . 100% shows up using iTunes but with Roon and added some tracks with Tidal last night and artwork from Tidal or Roon won’t show. Could be a bug that will get fixed in next update, fingers crossed.

Let’s leave a flag for @mike or @brian to let us know about artwork over AirPlay. I know RAAT can support artwork, but that would require the Pioneer to be RoonReady.

Cheers Again Andrew.
i Know the Pioneer is fully compatible with Airplay, But see what happens hope the next update won’t be to far away…

@mike, this is probably the same issue as with Denon. I think next steps there were a log with -airplaytrace -rtsptrace.

@Marko_McElroy keep in mind, AirPlay isn’t a publicly available standard or specification. Only Apple + it’s trusted NDA’d partners have access to the actual documentation for it. Everyone else who supports AirPlay in any way is working with a patchwork of incomplete information, including us.

We know that artwork display works on the Apple TV. We’ve heard a few reports that some products do not have working artwork, which suggests that these devices work differently. Unfortunately, without access to documentation or a copy of that device, we are in a tricky spot when it comes to fixing it.

In general, these things get fixed once we get some hardware in-house that replicates the problem. We encourage hardware companies to send us samples of their hardware so we can test, validate, and fix issues like this. Unfortunately the mass-market vendors like Pioneer, Denon, etc are usually the least cooperative in this regard.

I am hoping that we can do something to debug this remotely. @mike will follow up.

I sent you the logs for my Denon with -airplaytrace -rtsptrace yesterday, hope it helps!

Cool Thanks Brian i replied to Mike’s Pm fingers crossed Happy to help out with logs if i can.
Cheers

Something to keep in mind about this:

As best as we can tell, Denon, Pioneer, and Marantz all use BridgeCo’s chips to implement their AirPlay support. So it is fairly likely that they have the same issue.

Based on the logs, we’ve confirmed that:

  • Roon IS sending artwork to your devices.
  • The devices are accepting the artwork and responding back with “OK” (this is the point where I was hoping to see an error message telling us what’s wrong)
  • The artwork is in the correct (JPEG) format used by AirPlay devices
  • The artwork is a well formed JPEG file

A little bit more discouraging is this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/90-receivers-amps-processors/1865945-airplay-always-crashes-same-song-marantz-sr7008-4.html

Which suggests that Denon+Marantz devices (at least) have artificial artwork size limitations and may fail to display artwork or crash if bigger artwork arrives, and that this can be reproduced using iTunes by tagging files with larger images.

I’m starting to think that the whole problem is that we send higher-resolution images than iTunes. We send images at 1024x1024 regardless of the original size–our image scaling code is better than whatever the AppleTV uses, so it looks nicer if we up-scale it, and the AppleTV running at 1080p could use the extra pixels to make it look nice.

I suspect that iTunes is just sending whatever is embedded in the files/their database, and their images are usually small enough to work ok.

Not 100% sure about this…but it is feeling like we are bumping into a limitation on these devices. Now to figure out how to confirm that…

HI Brian
Interesting Thanks for getting back so soon.
I was hoping for a something to be wrong as well, I would source most artwork myself in or around 600x600 i only made adjustment to some artwork to day and 1024x1024 would not show, if that happens i just scale it down to 600x600
seem to work all the time. Would not display 1024x1024 over airplay to Pioneer unit, That was using iTunes as the playing source. But will show using remote app on iPad,

But any way thanks for trying and for been so quick at getting back. Maybe something will change in the next update.
Keep up all the great work with roon…

Mark

Maybe we should scale to 600x600 (or similar) for everything but the AppleTV. It’s difficult for us to detect devices we’ve never seen one by one, but I don’t think there’s anything besides the AppleTV that benefits from the larger images, and it’s easy for us to detect when we’re talking to an Apple TV, since we have them all kicking around here.

No Worries Brian.
Thank you for trying anyway.

After some experimentation in the field (thanks guys), we’ve concluded that 500x500 is well-supported by a wider variety of devices than 1024x1024.

So, Roon is going to, by default, scale artwork to 500x500 before sending it to all AirPlay devices that are not AppleTV’s. AppleTV’s will still get 1024x1024 since they don’t mind, and they benefit from the higher-res artwork.

This will go out with 1.2.

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Thank you!!! Can’t wait.

1.2 is here!

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IT WORKS!!! Album art on my Denon!!! I’m doing the Snoopy happy dance right now.

-mike

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Thanks for your help getting this one resolved Mike!

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