I’ve begun noticing instances where Qobuz cover art is cropped on the top and bottom:
i can’t say it’s ubiquitous, but seems prevalent in my library. clicking through the cropping is even more pronounced.
it’s not confined to one label (RCA and DG in the examples above).
Tidal displays correctly.
Cropped in the sense of the word are Tidal’s covers, scaled to height in order to fit a square frame.
But CD era front covers usually are rectangular, so if scaled to width to not crop “content”, blank strips top and bottom mar the aesthetics.
I don’t like either solution, but think Roon’s pretty much at the mercy of the providers’ whim, though.
Interestingly, there’s a different square cover for me on Qobuz for your first example, so maybe re-identify that release to ease your eyes.
I think the issue is that Qobuz show a cover using the correct dimensions, but the canvas is square. If the canvas is white, Roon will display these bands.
In my library, there are some releases with a different aspect ratio, and Roon displays them correctly.
PS. There appears to be a regression with version numbers in the display, i.e., adding both VERSION tag, and what is shown in parentheses.
I’m not sure this is recent. I always just thought it was something roon was going to do nothing about. There are change requests to categorize “best” album art as a more square aspect ratio rather than a higher resolution but there has never been any traction.
With the “light” color scheme and non-Classical, narrow white bands are usually not noticeable. Annoyingly roon uses a grey rather than a white background for Classical so it doesn’t matter what color scheme you use, dark or light, narrow white bands are noticeable. Mostly I find that the album art with wide white bands are box sets where the aspect ratio of the box-set packaging is not square. I just crop and replace using microsoft Paint.net. After many years I now have thousands of these jpgs and since roon removed scroll bars from various screens it is borderline impossible to replace these jpg’s.
Most images in my library that aren’t square are from Digipak releases where the image extends the full width of the packaging. However, I have some that are portrait for book sets etc.
But my point is really confirming what @Marin_Weigel said. That is, Roon correctly displays what it receives. If there is an offending cover, I either source a new image, scan the media, or use a lower resolution image that is a more accurate reflection of the release.
i’d have to add it to my library to re-identify, and not sure i should have to do that.
btw, listened to that Beethoven 9th…i found it searching for Roberta Alexander.
…the recording and performance are no bueno, the former dark and muffled, the latter muddled and curiously lacking in energy. not recommended.
