Many years ago, when I began to dematerialize my music, I asked myself the question of the advantage or not of cover art in the music file.
The cover art from file tags has many advantages, and with the current size of FLAC files and the current hard drive capacity, the size of cover art is really something negligible…
1 Like
I would like to add my support to the idea that if the user is choosing Prefer File for the artwork, there be a sub-menu for embedded/folder.jpg/largest. When ripping I manually choose the best possible artwork for each album and have it in the folder with the music files as folder.jpg. Sometimes there is a sub-folder of album scans, and they are sometimes larger but never better. I would like Roon to default to using my folder.jpg 100% of the time. My library is kind of a mess now because of the new behavior of Roon choosing largest by default. I don’t really want to go in and manually fix every album that’s now showing the wrong artwork (I’d rather listen to music!), so hopefully there will be a new default behavior in a coming version. Thanks!
1 Like
+1 for this.
I also usually manually embed or name the best art “folder”. Bigger not necessarily better. I usually prefer “squarer” for CD’s for example, but use a 1 to 3.3 ratio for DVD/Blue-ray rips to give me a simple visual clue.
I agree with the initial topic creator.
This is how I would like Roon to act (or at least add functionality as option to choose priority in settings!)
- embedded image
if not embedded file found, then: - image named folder.jpg or cover.jpg in directory
I always embed the cover I would like to be shown in Roon or other system but I also keep all artwork for the release within the album directory.
For instance, A box or collection can have several “covers” and I choose what I will use, but within the file names of my art scans, several filenames might involve cover or front
Also I have many Japaneese albums with scans of original artwork cover with the OBI on the left side (merged without covering any of the original artwork), but I will always have the original artwork scanned separately without the OBI.
Even easier I believe … Option to exclude phrases of words like “folder”, “cover” etc… from being associated with the front cover.
We Vinbergs should stick together, but in this case I disagree. @mike note.
I am less meticulous than you and some others here.
What I find is that dBPoweramp is pretty bad at finding art, and associates pretty low resolution art with the ripped file. I let it do that, don’t bother overriding, since I know that Roon will find a better version.
Manually editing the art is needed only for rare albums.
But when I need to do that, I don’t copy files in the file system or use a tag editor, I do it directly in the Roon Edit dialog.
So @Mike, having options is certainly good, but the defaults need to suit the most common case, which I don’t think is the meticulous groomers.
Why can ROON not take up the philosophy of iTunes which allows to embed individual pictures to each file? This makes a lot of sense when listening to classical music, where a lot of docu is provided with the booklet. I’m using several pictures (frontside and backside of booklet, photos of artists etc.) which was a lot of work. However, ROON is just selecting the largest file. I like many features of ROON, but not this one. Maybe I should add that I’m running ROON and Itunes on a MacBook Pro.
One more point: in the settings ROON allows for more covers and photos. However, I do see only one picture per album, the one selected by ROON. Is there a trick?
Click on the art, and you can cycle through the images, if there’s more than one. You can also select which one you want to be displayed as default.
“Allow for more covers” does not mean what you think it means. That setting shrinks album cover size and expands the number of grid rows and columns displayed per screen in the album browser.
But, yes, it is poorly worded technical writing from the Roon team, unfortunately.
AJ
Thanks Geoff and Andrew. With the help of your replies I understood my problem. ROON selects exactly one cover from my iTunes albums according to their definition. The remaining covers are just ignored. This brings me back to my first question. With more than 1000 albums I do not like the idea to edit all of them one by one.
You can tell Roon to universally prefer file artwork in Settings/Library/Import Preferences. Under Metadata preferences for Albums, Artwork, select Prefer File.
I think you are misunderstanding.
You can embed an image with each file (each track of an album).
Roon selects one image from all the files in an album.
It would be much better if you could ask Roon to display the embedded image for each file (track). This is what iTunes and numerous other music playing apps do.
Could not agree more but unfortunately Roon is a album oriented player. I am like you and would prefer that Roon would pull from each file because I have quite a few singles (thousands).
I have never used iTunes but I know plenty of folks who do and 99% of them never buy albums. Each and every single song they purchase has the appropriate embedded album art.
As far as I am aware of, Roon is the only media player that does not pull individual Album Art.
This new Chrome Display feature recently introduced by Roon falls way short for me because the majority of my listening is from folders with nothing but singles.
For a program that prides itself on metadata (and it should) it falls flat with this new feature when it is displayed on the screen with the same album art for every song. No other program would do this.
However because of the quality of the audio output I put up with it. If I ever were to move on to something else, this would be the 1st thing that it would have to be able to do in addition to the same music quality output.
–MD
I don’t use iTunes, so I don’t know how it handles multiple images for an album. However, if you have multiple JPG images in an album folder, then Roon is aware of all of them, and you can cycle through them…
Hey Geoff
Unknowingly you pointed out the issue. You referred to album and we are talking about singles.
–MD
Some of you are, and some are talking about albums… And I don’t think everyone is aware that Roon can handle multiple cover art images (and PDFs)… 
and I just want Roon to display the individual track art on the now playing screen.
You wouldn’t have thought it would be that difficult to do.
As it is, the only way to achieve this is to manually split albums into single track albums, which is impractical for a large library.
If someone were to take the time to do this and it was for thousands and thousands of singles, then this would seem to bog down the system with indexing not to mention a lot of work involved.
–MD
I’m aware that ROON can handle several files (jpg, PDF, etc.) in an album. However, this does not solve the problem. Starting from an iTunes library, you can embed cover art to each track of an album in iTunes, what is quit convenient in classical music, where an album is equivalent to a CD or several CD’s (in case of an opera). Of course I can extract all cover art from an album, copy them into the folder of the album and ROON will display my covert art, PDF etc. I tried it; it does work. But I do not want to repeat this exercise for hundreds of albums. It would be great if this job can be done by ROON when importing an album.
How about adding “album” to that list?