Prefer cover art from file tags

Thanks for the feedback here @Chris_Ellison. I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that using “best available” works in the vast majority of cases, although I can see why that’s problematic for your collection.

My personal feelings on preference are closer to garym, since a high res image stored once in a folder next to the files will take up less space on disk than storing the image over and over in each file, but we do support both methods – our editing model just doesn’t include the ability to set collection wide preferences for ignoring one even when the cover art is a higher resolution.

I’ve moved your posts over to the Feature Requests section so we can gauge feedback the next time we’re working on editing and collection preferences.

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By the way, I’m also ok with the current “prefer best artwork” approach. But choices, if not difficult to program of course, are always nice.

Hi @mike - thank you for taking the time to look into this.

I see where you are coming from regarding higher quality images stored outside of the files themselves and if it were possible to guarantee that Roon was going to pick the correct file then great. Unfortunately I think that with the current approach you are spreading the net too wide and will catch multiple image files that are not in fact the front image of the album that people will want to represent the album. Since all files containing ‘front’, ‘cover’ and ‘folder’ will be considered with the file with the largest size being automatically selected, in many instances a ‘rear cover’ or ‘sleeve cover’ (in the case of Japanese albums with separate OBI strips over the main cover) or other undesirable file will be selected.

Wouldn’t it be better to have an order if priority that isn’t simply the size of the file? If you don’t want to use the embedded art (which I understand as will probably be lower quality) then how about always using files names exactly ‘folder’ or ‘cover’ next. This means the user could more easily control which file is selected. At the moment I am having to analyse all my ‘Artwork’ folder manually renaming the unwanted ‘…cover…’ and ‘…front…’ files to something else to stop them being selected in front on the desired ‘folder.jpg’ file that happens to be slightly smaller in size (but still higher quality than the embedded image).

I hope this makes sense.

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Whoah ! :astonished:
Please be careful here…

I’ve carefully edited all my metadata over years…and embedded artwork / folder artwork shows exactly the correct images - not the images from the re-press version, not the images released in Belgium, or Italy, Japan or the USA - they show exactly the images that are on the covers of the CD’s / DVD’s / Boxed sets etc etc that I have in my collection.

The option must remain, with - IMHO - priority first to embedded, then folder.jpg / cover.jpg

If getting the correct metadata’s important to people, then please ‘respect’ that. :wink:
If it’s not important to others, then it doesn’t matter !

All just IMHO of course, but I feel that the correct artwork’s important. :slight_smile:

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I’m having exactly the same issues as Chris, a ‘Prefer embedded artwork’ would be very welcome. I also spent years work in embedding exact square and correct artwork in al my tracks, that now are overridden by remaining images in my ‘Artwork’ subfolders.

3 posts were split to a new topic: Folder.jpg not being used consistently

I agree that there should be a “Prefer embedded artwork” option. My reason is that many times I can find a very good quality (good color/contrast, no blemishes or lines, etc) cover at say 400x400 and all the larger ones or my scans are poorer quality. Sometimes I still keep the larger poorer quality one because it is the exact cover for disc/version I have and reflects the correct label and numbers and I keep it for reference.

Oftentimes in Roon the covers are displayed as smaller thumbs anyhow so the samller size doesn’t hurt at all, but the enhanced quality is noticeable.

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Yes agreed. It must be possible to improve on the rather crude way that roon decides “best”. Largest is actually rarely the best. I often have smaller images which are much better. There are many reasons:

  1. Aspect ratio. I will usually prefer a smaller ‘square’ image over a higher resolution rectangular image unless correcting the aspect ration creates too much distortion. A mish mash of high resolution images with different aspect ratios creates a right dog’s dinner on many roon screen’s which is hardly “better”.

  2. Contrast. Smaller images with better contrast can be better than high resolution images.

  3. Brightness. Smaller brighter images are usually better than larger illegable darker images.

  4. Color balance. This is often important where you have multiple versions and want an easy visual clue to distinguish.

I like several posters here have gone to a lot of trouble over many years and would prefer a more flexible definition of ‘better’.

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I’ve just started a Roon trial today again after trying one 6 months ago.
Like many people here I have spent a lot of trouble getting my artwork exactly as I want it.
All my artwork is embedded, and for some albums (like greatest hits) I have individual artwork for individual tracks.
Maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I’m pretty sure on my previous trial Roon was displaying the track artwork for the track playing.
Now it seems to select a random (probably highest resolution image) and displays that for all the tracks in the album.

I second that there should be a prefer embedded artwork option, but it should work for individual tracks.

I’m currently using Minimserver to stream my music and that works this way … as does iTunes.

You can set it to prefer your artwork … there’s nothing random about the choices it makes. I don’t think it supports individual artwork for tracks, artwork is an album / single / EP thing, I’ve ever seen an album released with unique artwork for tracks.

Hi @Steve_Catterall

It doesn’t quite address your issue but my work around is this:

You can always break up greatest hits compilations using “Fix Track Grouping” so that in effect roon treats each track as an individual album. Then you get individual artwork for each “track”. The next step is to assign a common tag to each track. E.g. “Steve’s Party Mix”. Then when you click the tag you bring up a screenful of tracks each with their individual artwork. You can then pretty much treat the tag as an album.

A bit extreme I know. But works for me and I had to do something similar with my box sets to retain the visual clues of the individual album covers.

I know this is controversial and these boards will probably always splinter between the groomers and the non-groomers but there is another category in the middle ground of “relapsed groomers” who just don’t want to groom any more. For them, non of the existing prefer roon, prefer file or prefer best really works. What they really need is a cleverer “prefer best” option.

For example, as a general rule I certainly do not want to’ prefer file’. I have done a lot of tagging in the past but it is just a hopeless task and I want to rely now as much as possible on roon automation features. But without a cleverer ‘best’ option I have a catch-22. I have made a lot of investment in artwork in the past which I want to retain, but on the other hand I do not want to do that going forward. For us relapsed groomers the only thing that would really work is a cleverer ‘best’ option so that we get the best of both worlds.

How should that option decide on what is best in your opinion? I think this could only based on some technical attributes of the artwork.

Simple, select all the albums where you’d like to leverage your own artwork, set Roon to prefer your art. For unselected albums and others you subsequently add Roon’s default should work without you having to lift a finger.

Yes, it should be a weighting of a number of objective measures (including resolution).

An easy one is aspect ratio. I normally prefer a square image over the highest possible resolution. That is, an aspect ratio of 1 is more important to me than the highest possible resolution. That would be very easy to measure. It does’t have to be exactly 1 however so this could be configurable. For example, most people would not notice that a 1080 x 1050 image is not exactly square. Most people on the other hand would notice that 1080 x 980 image is not square especially on screens where large numbers of album covers are being displayed side by side.

I am not an expert on this but I have the impression that there is also a lot of work out there from the image processing industry on image quality metrics. It is not straightforward to develop objective measures but I would have thought it was possible to adapt some of this research in image intensive apps like roon. For example:

Hi @evand. That is exactly what I do now. The problem is that it is just not working for me. I have over 8,250 albums and growing because I have a lot of old cue’s and ape’s I am gradually converting. What this means is that in practical terms I cannot do a batch select of all the albums where I want to retain the embedded art because I simply cannot remember which albums I corrected the aspect ratio for or cleaned up the color balance or contrast.

All, I can think of doing is scrolling through the album view a page at a time picking out albums that stick out because they are subjectively ‘muddy’ or do not have a ‘square’ aspect ratio, or whatever. But I soon realised it was yet another hopeless OCD task I would never finish and lost the will to live, half way through the 'D’s. I would much prefer roon to take care of this sort of thing for me, so It would be great if roon had plans to offer a smarter ‘best art’ option but I am realistic enough to realise they probably have other priorities. So, on balance I just live with it but that doesn’t stop it bugging me.

Yes, you can work around the issue. One of things that attracted me to Roon was that it took tagging and displaying seriously. There’s all sorts of detail there that I’m not in the least bit interested in, but I’m glad its there, as it shows the attention to detail that’s been taken.
I just don’t think the same level of attention has been paid to artwork.
I accept that not everyone cares as much as I do about artwork. There should be an option to use the ‘best’ artwork without users having to bother too much (what ‘best’ means is a separate discussion)
But you can save different artwork to individual tracks. So if someone goes to the trouble of finding individual artwork for different tracks, there should be an option to display it.
So as well as a ‘use best’ option there should be an option to use in order

  1. The embedded artwork in the track
  2. A folder jpg/png
  3. A Roon default.

Hi @Steve_Catterall, You are now in ‘feature request’ territory. You know there is a thread specifically for that? Best of luck!

Sorry, I thought this was the Feature Request section :grinning: - and the thread is about preferring cover art from files, which is what I was asking for … so I thought it was the best place to ask ???

Oops :relaxed:. My mistake. What I probably should have said is that maybe it’s time to consolidate the thread with a proposal roon could respond to.