Nothing is ever so simple.
The first immediate snag I struck was locating the albums. Something I had not realised before - editing an album and changing the artist in Roon, is not reflected in the file listing in Windows Explorer. It seems that Windows Explorer maintains whatever artist was first nominated when the ripped album is saved into the HDD. Obviously Roon takes note of the change in artist and saves that in its backup file, but it made finding one set of albums, whose Artist had been changed and art covers redone, a near impossible task.
I’ll look at persisting later on with your MPTag suggestion but it will not be an easy or simple task with (I’m guessing) about 5000 covers to save. It would be less work to revert to an earlier suggestion of just saving the whole bunch of albums with changed cover artwork. But of course to pick them out in any restoration process after a Roon crash disaster would be a major and very time consuming task. Yes, a lot less work than re-doing the covers but …
PLEASE developers cannot you come up with a neat solution which attaches altered artwork to albums in the backup process. Obviously not everyone makes the time and effort to do what I have but I know from past Sooloos discussions many did change covers because of dissatisfaction with the low res stuff often downloaded from databases, so I’m not Robinson Crusoe.
The current Roon backup is much quicker and neater than the huge and time consuming files required in Sooloos and I can understand the motives in avoiding that and maybe the current backup schedule suits many Roon users. So, to cater for them and also for nutters like me, could there be two possible alternative backup options -
the same as now with artwork ignored
an extended backup which includes album artwork???
Editing in Roon doesn’t change the underlying files, ever (except for deleting). If you have stored files in an Artist/Album directory structure then they will stay there until you change the file structure, no matter what you do in Roon (except for deleting).
If you have edited Artist or Album and now want to locate a file you can add Path to a Track browser and view the Path in your System. You can order by Path and copy the Path for use in a file manager or mp3tag.
How do you see an altered backup process working ? If your altered artwork is stored only as an edit then it will be lost on identification. You need to store altered artwork as “folder.jpg” in the music file directory and tell Roon to globally prefer local files for artwork. Backup can only copy what the database currently holds. I don’t believe the database retains prior edits.
As an inarticulate PC user I cannot really answer how a backup process could work. All I can appreciate is that Roon does have modified artwork stored somewhere. If it did not, then on re-booting Roon it would not appear.
With Sooloos, the artwork remained attached to the FLAC file without any need for any “folder.jpg”. All modified artwork done under Sooloos has ported over to Roon. So, I was reasoning (naively?) that a FLAC file exported from Roon could have the artwork attached and this appeared to be the case as I reported earlier.
So, exporting the files with modified artwork to an HDD could be expected to give a backup source for the artwork. If Roon crashed it would then be a case of importing the complete set of FLAC files for all albums, currently duplicated on another 6TB drive, restoring using the Roon backup, then feeding in the other set of exported Roon files with the artwork and then eliminating the duplicates which are without modified artwork - a tedious but not impossible task and one a lot easier than re-doing the artwork from scratch.
But as I said above, I confess to being IT programming ignorant . All I’m looking for is a relatively simple way of backing up album artwork if there is no way it can be achieved with a Roon backup. I can see your good suggestion using MP3tag is one way out but it looks to be very time consuming with the added complication referred to before about actually locating edited albums.
Storing the cover in a FLAC file is known as embedding. You don’t have to isolate the files containing embedded covers in order to run the mp3tag Action described above. If the Action finds an embedded cover it will create a “folder.jpg” file in that folder path. If it can’t find an embedded cover it does nothing and moves on. After you’ve checked it with a selection of files you can point it to the root folder of a backup of your music files and let it run. After some indeterminate time (hours ?) you’ll have extracted folder.jpg files.
I don’t know whether prior artwork can be recovered from a Roon database backup. Let’s flag @suport and see if they can tell us.