Questions about used file tags and artwork

[ChristianK (Christian Klingspor)]

Hi - new to Roon since yesterday and considering moving my music library, consisting of about 2500+ albums, from an Aurender server (which earlier replaced a Slimdevices Transporter library).

After importing my music library most looks quite ok, but i wonder why only the front cover of my albums show up. Is there any way to see the beck cover as well? I have most artwork for albums scanned as front.jpg and back.jpg in the album folders.

Second question is regarding file tags used by Roon. Is there any documentation available about what file tags that are actually used by Roon? Is for example ARTISTSORT used?

Anyway, thanks for the good work. Looks really promising!

[extracampine]

Hi Christian,

Welcome to the Roon community! I think you’ll find people very helpful here.

I will address your first question regarding album art. There is currently no way to show the back cover - or any other covers such as liner notes or other images. There has been some discontent about this, as many users purchased Roon due to this selling point, as quoted from Roon - “The era of the LP and its gatefold sleeves filled with incredible imagery is in the past. But the images are not. Roon puts them all at your fingertips again.” This text has now been removed from the main Roon site, and replaced with an image contrasting a colourful LP gatefold sleeve with a boring file browser window - so the meaning is still the same.

HOWEVER - there have been many requests for this feature (such as from @timlumley and many from myself :D) and I believe that it is on the roadmap, i.e. the possibility should be added in a future release. I am hoping that it might be the next release but we’ve had no confirmation of when.

There are a few other threads where you can read more about this issue and which you may want to contribute to; in order of size:

Complete Album Art - Sleeve Notes - Booklets

One of the most appealing reasons for initially signing up for Roon was the ability to get the full album experience, as from the LP days, which would include full Album Art, sleeve notes and any other information that came with LP’s. While this has not happened at the moment, (this is not a criticism as the Roon Guys are doing a superb job providing, what is in my opinion, the best music software on the market), I’m hoping this will be included in the next build. In the mean time, can anyone …

Dealing with album art in Roon

My albums are stored single album per folder and box sets may have a sub-folder for each disc. In general I have the album cover saved as folder.jpg in each folder, but in the case of box sets I handle them as follows: if the box set is a compilation of an artist’s work (which generally implies the same cover art for all discs in the set e.g. Rod Stewart - Storyteller: The Complete Anthology 1964-1990) I store a single instance of folder.jpg in the parent folder if the box set is a reissue of…

Album sleeve liner notes on Roon

One thing I’d like to be able to do is store sleeve notes for an album (PDFs preferably) and read them whilst either browsing or listening to music. Could this be possible with Roon?

Incorporation of Album Liners from Downloads

JRemote has an “asset” button that allows the end-user to read the PDF that is in the file containing the album that is playing. While I understand that Roon gives the end-user plenty of access to information about the artist, selection, etc I would still like to be able to access, from within Roon, the PDF liner that is included in the download if available as JRemote allows.

Complete Album Art, Booklets and Notes

I know I keep banging on about this topic, but when I first discovered Roon the feature that interested me most (after Sound Quality) was the ability to have all my Albums Booklets as well as all the Art and notes associated with my albums. This is one of the features mentioned on the Web Site at the time. We have now had various new versions of Roon but this feature is still lacking. I wish to make it clear I think the Roon Guys are doing a fantastic job and since having Roon I’ve not enjoye…

Album art - rear and other

Is Roon able to show the rear album art, as well as the front? I have spent a lot of time getting the rear album art scans and feel that it adds a lot to the “experience”, which is keeping with Roon’s ethos I would have thought. Also, what about other scanned artwork that users might have, such as the booklet and things. I used to have a plugin for Foobar that would show all the album art in the album’s directory in a separate window. Thanks

Showing more album artwork

This feature has already been mentioned by a number of others, but I am adding some further thoughts on it. It has been mentioned a number of times that Roon should show more of the album artwork - if not automatically scraped, then what the user has downloaded and put in the album folder. I wonder if on the main album screen, the existing stuff could be shifted to the left a bit, with a space for the rear cover art to the right of the text. I think this would look good, as the front and rear …

It’s also on my Top Priorities list for the next version:

Roon 1.3 : Top Priorities

Roon 1.2 has just gone live and it’s great. And, as the team say - “Enjoy Roon 1.2, and remember, we’re just getting started”. That is what I like to hear. In this vein, and following on from the last thread for feature requests for version 1.2 (which has now been closed with the release of 1.2), I thought it would be helpful to start up the next thread for version 1.3. Early days I know, and I’m not looking to detract from the recent great release, but in the spirit of continual improvement, h…

[ChristianK (Christian Klingspor)]

Excellent - thanks for the reply!

I understand that this has been asked before, but a quick search didn’t reveal anything of use (I probably used incorrect search terms…).

Just to be clear - I can definitely accept that a nice piece of software lack some features, but the key to success is rather quality/stability, continuous development/release cycle and how responsive they are to customer requests and transparency/visibility of the product roadmap.

[DrTone (Jeff)]

Second question is regarding file tags used by Roon. Is there any documentation available about what file tags that are actually used by Roon? Is for example ARTISTSORT used?

Roon, really doesn’t use your tags for anything except maybe to help match with their meta data source. The exception being Genre and unmatched albums. In fact you don’t really need tags at all if you use good file and folder naming standards.

You do have the option to override track names and a few other things with your tagged values but that’s done on an album by album basis not by default.

[ChristianK (Christian Klingspor)]

Ok, that explains it - useful information! The problem is that I have a number of albums showing up in Roon where for example the track titles are either misspelled or where every word in the title is capitalized (which shouldn’t normally be done in Swedish). I have been working very hard ripping and tagging all my music to get it in perfect shape, but to use my own tags I have to go through all albums one by one and instruct Roon to use my own tags instead of Roons meta data source?

I also have an issue with artist sorting. For example the artist Cajsa Stina Åkerström is sorted under A instead of Å which should come after Z according to Swedish language sorting rules. Have I missed something?

[DrTone (Jeff)]

The problem is that I have a number of albums showing up in Roon where for example the track titles are either misspelled or where every word in the title is capitalized (which shouldn’t normally be done in Swedish). I have been working very hard ripping and tagging all my music to get it in perfect shape, but to use my own tags I have to go through all albums one by one and instruct Roon to use my own tags instead of Roons meta data source?

You can select all your albums at once and change all of them to use your track names if you want. Once you have your albums selected click the edit button at the top right. Choose the metadata preferences tab. Click on prefer file for “Track’s Title”.

[ChristianK (Christian Klingspor)]

Great, thanks!

[Sunrise (Jeff)]

Hi Christian,
Roon allows flexibility in how the Artist view is sorted.
click the icon with multiple horizontal bars (top left of every view)
Settings / General / Artist Sorted By:
select “First Name” from the drop down

Jeff

[ChristianK (Christian Klingspor)]

Hi Jeff

Thanks for the suggestion. I have seen and tested the different options, but storting on first rather than last name will just move the problem since I have artists like Åsa Jinder in My collection

Maybe this is a bug that should be reported? Does anyone know if the software should support locale/language settings for sorting?

Thanks,
Christian