Real album liner notes in Roon

Not seeing anything recent on this in the knowledge base. Am looking for the actual album liner notes. For instance, Bill Evans’s notes on Mikes Davis “Kind Of Blue” or the notes for “Aja.” Etc. I’m using Roon almost exclusively on an iPhone. Tnx…

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i would love this as well, but I don’t know of any digitized album liner notes source on the web that has any decent database. I’ve been bemoaning the loss of liner notes for years on all streaming services

I’m not the sort who read liner notes with CDs, but I would in a heartbeat with Roon.

This might be the kind of thing that could flourish quickly with a shared user resource library, but I imagine the lawyers would seize up if it was implemented.

Some liner notes can be found online BUT as @John_V says it may not be too legal.

I often thought this for Opera Libretti too but thy are bound to be copyright somehow, even just the translation aspect

This has come up numerous times before on the forums. There is no decent online source for liner notes. You can often find them online somewhere with some searching, or you can scan your own, and then add them to Roon.

A shared resource library as @John_V mentions would be excellent but as it’s unlikely to increase revenue I can’t see the team implementing it. It perfectly doable though - as an analogy, take a look at the Launchbox software. This is a front end for games & emulators, though links in with an online database where users can add and update artwork for their games. Would be excellent for use with audio.

i too would love to see this

Probably telling you nothing new, but FWIW, some of the Qobuz pdf booklets, where available, are identical to the liner notes. Bill Evan’s liner notes are definitely there. Same for a fair proportion of my Bandcamp purchases (and presumably same for other purchase & download sources).

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I discovered today that Chandos has the booklets on line

Dubious legality to attach in Roon though ?

I assume that if they are made available for download, then they can be added to your own personal Roon installation. Providing you don’t distribute them further, then that is presumably fair use? But then, IANAL

Edit: when I purchase downloads from Chandos, then I certainly add the booklets to my personal Roon…

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What I was hoping was that the notes, cover, and music would be all-of-a-piece. When You buy CDs or Vinyl, you get the whole package. I hoped this would be online somewhere. Guess not. Disappointing. In terms of Roon creating a rich environment for curating our music, this would be the ultimate…

When you buy CDs and rip them to Roon, then you can scan the liner notes and add them as PDFs to the rips as well - they are then visible in Roon.

When you buy downloads from some labels (e.g. Chandos, BIS, Hyperion) you will get liner notes in PDF form that can be added into Roon - they are then visible in Roon.

If you subscribe to Qobuz, then Qobuz usually make the liner notes of recent releases available as PDFs - they are then visible in Roon when you add the album to your library.

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There are a substantial number of pdf liner notes for older recordings on archive.org

There are also some on musicbrainz and discogs. However, they are almost impossible to search for on musicbrainz and the notes on discogs are not great due to size limitations.

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Yeah, it’s a real shame about the discogs size limitations. I’m not sure if Discogs hold the original size but have resized versions available for download.

I am not able to add always PDF’s to Roon.
Sometimes I succeed, sometimes not, that frustrates me a lot.
Is there to fix this correctly?

So I suppose the question is: where are you putting the PDFs?

You need to put the PDF in the Album folder

If there are multi discs, make a folder per CD, in a master Album folder, include the PDF into that folder

It seems to work for me. You could try Edit > Force a Rescan

Yes, if I put a PDF into an Album folder which is in my Mac’s Finder. It sometimes works, but not always.

What does not work for me to put a PDF afterwards into Roon’s Album Editor > tab Edit Album.

I think that’s not possible within Roon.

I wish Roon could do that.

You could go to Roon’s settings, then storage, then force a rescan of the relevant music folder - I find that doing this usually gets Roon to pick up any changes or stuff added.

I think it should pick it up on a locally attached drive, but not from a nas or share. For this case a manual scan sould find it.