Your test does seem to show that Roon will drop any manually added artwork if the album gets re-identified/re-scanned. That’s not good IMO. It’s not bitten me, because I’ve always used album artwork stored both in track metadata and as a folder.jpg file in the album folder.
I think this should be flagged as an issue to @support
And Version information. I suspect and will test today, that any manual edits to the album, type, version, artwork, will get reset during the identification/re-identification process.
On I side note: this seems to be true for artists too. I’ve noticed that for manually added artist pictures, for instance, when a new album gets added which involves an artist who previously got a picture assigned by me --> roon will replace the “custom artwork” with the one it has stored in the cloud or even revert to “no picture”.
I’ve started to retain copies of artist pictures I grabbed from the net locally just in case because of this behaviour.
Pondering more on this it seems as if my artwork IS recorded somewhere because if the PC is shut down and Roon fired up again it IS all there.
So, until this problem is fixed, maybe I should have a backup of the Roon program somewhere? Then, if there is a meltdown on this PC of Roon I simply reinstall the saved Roon program files.
Would that work??
I understand where the developers are coming from with backups. the complete Sooloos BU was a PIA, taking several days even using EISA connections to fast docks wheras the Roon BU only takes a bit over an hour for this large library of close to 17k albums.
But there must be a fix to these problems so we can have confidence our editing of albums is safely preserved in some sort of backup. Maybe there does need to be an optional one like the Sooloos one. With S. it was tedious BUT it did save my library more than once so was worthwhile. We need to feel confident Roon can do the same in an emergency - PLEASE!
Roon is touted as an advance on Sooloos which it is in a lot of ways but this remains a SERIOUS deficiency for me.
It get’s cached - but I wouldn’t rely on the fact artwork is cached because only roon controls how this is handled (you can set the size of the cache but that’s it). I think roon should not overwrite changes it let the user make under any circumstances without asking first. But at least in your case you’d be able to prevent that for covers you create by saving them alongside the music files as cover.jpg - as others have pointed out already. 
Thanks for responding.
Sadly it is a bit late to create a cover.jpg set of files unless I now go though and re-creat around 5000 of them using print screen - a daunting and unattractive task. There MUST be a better way!!
For the covers you’ve already created but not saved elsewhere (and which are still shown in roon) there is a way to save them - but I’m not sure if it’s the better one.
You could copy the images from the cache to another location and save them alongside the respective album as cover.jpg - for covers counting in thousands this will take time though. 
I’m not on windows therefore I can’t provide you with reliable info on where to find the cache and what programs to use to make this a little easier - maybe somebody else could step in.
Mmmm. Agree that there must be a better way. Developers???
John, not sure I understand.
Are you saying you deleted the artwork from the pictures folder after you inserted it in Roon?
75% of it was created under Sooloos and that artwork was attached to the files absorbed into Roon so those jpeg artwork files were never kept. So, in the last 15 months with Roon I’ve tidied up quite a few more albums with artwork suiting my purposes better and no, have never kept those jpegs and had no idea that I needed to.
So I’m perplexed about this situation. Regardless of the work done since Roon, it is appearing that I would also lose all the edited artwork done years ago while with Sooloos. If so, the move to Roon could have been a very bad one if Roon crashes.
I’m not a programmer so cannot fully appreciate what is going on but that artwork MUST be recorded there somewhere. If it was not, then it would never appear when Roon is rebooted.
If it is buried in the Roon program then my earlier question (not answered yet) is if copying the Roon program would be one way of preserving all the editing. Obviously that file(s) would need to be updated every time there was a change in Roon so the current backup would mesh in with it.
But if the artwork and other editing items are not in the current backup they must be in Roon somewhere so it should be possible to extract and save them. Maybe, rather than revise the current backup program a second one could be devised for artwork etc not currently addressed. Of course much better for there to only be one backup but …
I don’t know if those can be resurrected. Roon techies will have to answer that.
But let me make a general statement, John: always keep everything. This is not a Roon statement. It applies to anything you do. Never throw away anything. Early drafts of documents, notes, pictures, anything. The cost of disk space is zero. The value of your effort is large. Larger every year, as we get older.
I hadn’t understood your workflow earlier John, but now I can see that your concern about losing work is a real issue. As others have said, going forward you should save your amended artwork into the album folder as “cover.jpg” or “folder.jpg”.
I found some old discussion on the Sooloos forum where @Carl spoke about how Sooloos embedded cover art into Track files on export. I suspect that your pre-Roon artwork will be written into your music files like the example in my post above.
It may be possible using mp3Tag, or a similar tagging utility, to extract artwork from a file and save it as an image file in the music folder. If so then that could probably be built into an expression and applied over your whole library. I’ll have a look and see if I can work that out.
So far as your post-Roon work goes, however, if this was only ever stored as an Edit in the Roon database then it will be prone to the fate of edits when an album is identified. It may be that the Export function from Roon similarly embeds coverart in files. If so, that could be a route to recover the artwork into a separate image file.
Roon keeps an image cache for artwork which on windows is probably somewhere in the users appdata folder. Something along the line Roon/Database/Core/.../images_1/... - maybe you can figure it out.
Since the cache is structured it’s difficult to browse directly but you could use file search tools which do flat browsing and view the images that way. But as I said - saving those images to a different location, preferably as cover.jpg alongside the respective album - would be quite a job.
As an intermediate measure you probably should just do that: copy the currently cached covers somewhere for later use. Every time roon identifies an album you may risk loosing another one of your edited covers.
Another way to get to your covers would be via the roon-api - it gives access to browsing and images but without coding something you won’t get far. And somehow I think you’re not into tinkering with javascript and node.js … 
If only Andy - no, unlike Sooloos the artwork is not embedded.
Thanks for your concern. Fingers crossed the developers will come up with a solution as it appears it is not just artwork that could be lost in a Roon meltdown.
However, I’ve not seen any reports of such an occurrence, have you? But of course this can happen with ransomware or other PC catastrophes regardless of how stable/good is Roon so it remains a potential problem. For this same reason I have a separate (powered off dock) 6TB HDD with all the music files on board and copy backups to unconnected memory sticks. But if neither have the edited artwork and some other data then my problem remains.
LOL u-gee, spot on. My IT “knowledge” is self taught and not very extensive I’m afraid. And these days the old 82YO brain gets very challenged so I tread very warily. My youngest son is an IT professional programmer working for Siemens (in 3D graphics), but sadly that is in the USA so his expertise is only available when he occasionally visits.
@JOHN_COULSON … another way to save all the cover art you’ve created and which is still shown in roon would be to use EXPORT from within roon.
You could do this
Also,
This way, your custom covers will get embedded into the exported audio tracks. You may then for example keep those exported files as a backup.
Ah, it looks like you are right 
. The artwork IS attached to the album on export. I just experimented by exporting a recent album onto a Sony player and the artwork was there.
So, my backup 6TB HDD will be formatted and the whole Roon library exported to it and in future any new entries will be exported rather than the original ripped files copied to it. So, if in the future there is a Roon meltdown, I’ll simply address Roon to this library of files and all will be well.
Thanks heaps.
POSTSCRIPT: A note of caution has descended. I might only export the classical music files (as they are the main & important ones with the modified artwork) onto a spare 5TB HDD.
Sadly this is not the answer and I’ve abandoned the idea of exporting all the classical fare - the files are far too big for this so I must again appeal to the developers to come up with a better alternative.
Even if I did select out and export only albums with modified artwork, reinstalling the thousands in this collection would be a miserable task. There must be a better way!
Hi John,
As set out by u_gee above, you can embed covers edited into Roon into the file using Export.
This post sets out an automated method to extract embedded covers into an image file (folder.jpg) in the directory where the music files are stored.
This method should be first tried with a selection of albums to test that it is working as expected. You can then apply it to batches of albums, depending on the processing power available. As usual, keep a backup of the original files and work with copies in case anything goes wrong.
This method uses the freeware Windows utility program mp3tag.
One of the features of mp3tag is to permit user defined chains of Actions to work on the filenames and tags of all selected music files in the current directory (and any added directories), including files in sub-directories. Actions are grouped together in an Action group that can be named by the user. In this case we will be creating an Action group consisting of a single Action (Export Cover to File).
Open mp3tag and navigate to a directory containing music files using the change directory icon. Select at least one file, preferably with an embedded cover.
In the Menu bar select Action/Actions (Alt +6 keyboard shortcut). This will open the Actions Group editor. Select “New” from the icon column on the top right hand side and name the new Action Group “Export Cover to File”
The Actions window will then open to select Action types to add to the new Group. Select “New” (top right icon) again and an Action selector will open. Select “Export Cover to File” from the dropdown menu and click OK.
A window will open to configure this Action. Use the following configuration:
Remember to include the leading underscore in %_folderpath%. In this format string “%_folderpath%” is a variable for the folder where the selected music file is stored and “/folder” creates a new image file (default is jpg) in that folder named “folder.jpg”.
Press OK to save this configuration and OK to close the Action screen.
If you now select the tick box for the new Action Group “Export Cover to File” and click OK then it will perform that action for all selected files in the current directory. Alternatively you can Cancel and navigate to a directory that you want to use.
Remember, start off with a test batch, use copies retaining an original backup and work in batches that are convenient for your CPU to handle.
Hope that helps !
Thanks Andy - I’ll try this out - looks promising. I’ll report back soon.
