Hi @Squeezemenicely – thanks for working with me on this. I understand your frustration here, and I’m confident we can figure out what’s going on.
While it’s still not clear to me we have a bug here, I just want to again restate something: whatever is going on, I’m confident it won’t be destructive with regards to any art you’ve added.
So, I watched the video and it looks like exactly what I would expect to happen if:
An album’s cover art preference is set to “best”
Roon retrieved cover art that was higher resolution than what was in your files
If these albums are set to use “best cover art available”, Roon is going to follow that setting. And of course you’re free to change that setting if you’re unhappy with the behavior.
We need to understand the situation these albums are in before Roon automatically updates each album’s metadata. And you seem to be saying that Roon’s metadata preference for cover art is changing, which would be a bug.
So to be clear, you’re saying you told Roon that these albums should use art from file tags or edits, as opposed to “best” right? That’s my reading here:
Can you post a screenshot of the artwork settings for another album you’ve edited in Roon that hasn’t been updated recently by Roon? It would be helpful to see an album that has your artwork settings set how you like them.
Then we can compare the “before” album to the albums you think have had their artwork settings changed, and get a clear picture of what’s going on here.
Examples would be interesting here @Jeb – then we can take a look.
Also note, you can tell Roon to always prefer the art in your files by changing the cover art preference in Settings > Library > Import Preferences.
Well, imagine you tagged all your albums with 500x500 covers.
With “best” selected, think about the scenarios that can occur when Roon retrieves cover art for all your albums:
Roon found a 400x400 cover – your art “wins” and is displayed
Roon found a 800x800 cover – Roon’s copy wins and is displayed
Roon found a 400x400 cover but a month from now finds a 1000x1000 cover - your art is initially “best” and gets displayed, but later you still automatically get a higher quality cover
Even without “best”, the system already covers some other common use cases:
Your files have no art - Roon’s art is displayed
Roon finds no cover - your art is displayed
Neither Roon nor your files have art – no art is displayed
The point is, if we only offered the “Roon” and “File” options, the first group of numbered use cases above are significantly worse. The setting would force a single, overarching decision for your whole collection – hundreds or possibly thousands of albums at once – without any consideration of image quality.
Without the “best” option, choosing “file” in example #2 or #3 means you’re not seeing Roon’s higher res art. Alternatively, choosing “Roon” means you lose a higher quality image in example #1.
The “file” option is great if you’ve done a lot of grooming and trust your own art over Roon’s – our art is always improving but the system is absolutely designed to give you that kind of control, and prevent Roon’s cover art from ever showing any time yours is available.
As usual, our default setting is designed to give you the best possible experience with the minimal amount of configuration by the user.
And if you you don’t like the cover you’re seeing, you can always fall back to the art in your file tags with ~3 clicks. But definitely let us know in that case as well – a lot of these concerns just kind of melt away when the art we’re delivering is great, so that’s always going to be a primary goal for us.
This is a typical example of an EDIT I made where I did not like the cover Roon offered (again a pretty bad cover not from the original record label) So I chose my Cover and FILE was selected.
Really and truly there is not that much a user can do (or do wrong) here. So the setting for this album would now be FILE and not BEST - to make this absolutely clear.
Then the 1.6 troll would come along and suddenly it would be BEST and a different cover.
This never happened in 1.5.The general setting is BEST. But again just to make sure, the edited cover is FILE and this is selected. So this is the exception to the general rule.
Why some have changed and others not - heaven knows. But as I wrote before - yesterday I listened to an album and it had my edited art and today it suddenly had the ROON BEST cover.
All I did inbetween was sleep.
BTW this is it,it was suddenly set to BEST, but this screenshot shows the fixed version - so I had set it back to FILE
So this is the FIXED screenshot, back to how I had it before the troll played with my database
Unfortunately, I have to confirm this behaviour of Roon 1.6. Yesterday evening, it also happened to me, right in front of my eyes. Sadly, I can’t remember which albums anymore, as I was busy trying to fix some other problems (not caused by Roon itself). But I too am positive it was with albums I myself chose the cover from File.
As I too have a collection that is very large, heavily edited/groomed myself and containing a big slice of classical, it would also be a nightmare to me.
Yep, just found several examples where the ‘File’ cover I selected earlier is now changed to ‘Best’.
It seems it only changed the ones I had set to File to best. For those where I added a new image, the image is still selected.
Not quite. My point earlier was that in a scenario like no. 3, there is a a significant chance the user is worse off. If Roon’s only measure of image quality is resolution, then it can’t guarantee that it isn’t substituting a different cover that the user doesn’t want.
-SK
1: user selected and edited album and wants to keep that manually edited album for ever without Roon interference. But Roon interferes
2: user selects BEST and is happy with Roon has to offer at the time and Roon upgrades to a higher resolution image - which the user does not like.
1: Is a bug
2: I actually understand why Roon does this - obviously the Roon engine cannot decide what would be visually more pleasing. In most cases users do not even notice, since it is the same image just in higher resolution - so better. But sometimes there is a completely different cover, the only thing that could help that, is if Roon could detect if the cover is the same just different quality and only upgrade that.But that would probably be too difficult to put together.
In some cases it can be as if you parked your car outside and it had a few scratches etc The next morning you find it was completely freshly coated in pink metallic. So in a way better, but not in all ways. If that happens you can only pretend to be very secure about your masculinity and take it as a man. In Roon atleast the solution is just a few clicks away
One thing I also wonder about, has Roon changed its album cover metadata provider?
No, we’ve not changed our image metadata providers, but two important changes have happened:
We re-jigged the prioritization of album cover metadata.
Album and artist images now update, something which has not happened before Roon 1.6.
We actually favour cover art which has been reviewed by humans, because, in spite of recent advances in machine learning, humans are still the best judge of what looks good. For local (i.e. non-streaming) content, we prefer a high quality canonical image of an album cover, rather than one that is release-specific.
That’s interesting - there may have been a bug present all along, but we are only now seeing the effect of it in 1.6.
It’s just a thought, but the choice between Best/Roon/File exists in three places:
in the Album Editor/Edit album tab
in the Album Editor/Metadata Preference tab
in the Library Import Settings
Now, clearly we’re mainly using the Album Editor/Edit Album tab to explicitly set the cover art to File. And we expect, for that album, that choice to stick. But what if the default setting in Roon for metadata preference is for Best, and the bug is that our choice in the Album Editor is being overridden by the default setting for metadata preference?
We would never have seen the effects of this bug until 1.6, because as you say, album covers now update with metadata refreshes, which has not been the case up until now…
Herein lies a problem, a canonical cover could look like this - just imagine suddenly seeing this in your collection. It is just awful - and that is not even a matter of taste. I don’t care how many pixels it has.
The way a collection looks is very important to collectors. I hunted down CD albums in the original boxset because it had a nice box and Cover, whilst I did not like the cheap alternative cover - even though the recording was exactly the same.
To me the way Roon looks is just as important as the way it functions. It is supposed to bring this analog collecting to a digital age. But I believe the same rules apply here.
Especially with the handpicked images. But something as abismal as the picture above, has nothing to do with the original cover. It is not even released by the same record label.
So suddenly changing something that you got udsed to, or even love is a difficult task. Some coverarts are actually like art and big favourites of mine, suddenly having a completely different picture would not be a great experience.
The look of Roon is extremely important, part of this are album covers. The other part is the Now Playing screen - which stirred up many emotions on this forum. So it really matters.
Bottomline edited stuff should never change, neither the Titles we put in ourselves, nor the coverart.
As for the automatic changing BEST cover option, well we must wait and see how that goes.
I’m afraid this is going to be a pretty annoying feature.
I’m not 100% sure that the covers Roon already changed in my collection were really set to ‘File’ at my end. It might be that I was happy with the default selection at the time I added the album. Now, roon found a better image and replaced the default one. Because I don’t recognize the album anymore (and would definitely be something I wouldn’t choose when I added the album) I go in and change it from ‘Best’ to ‘File’.
With the automatic updates, I think this is something that will keep happening.
I would prefer a general setting ‘Never automatically update my cover art’.
Maybe slightly at a tangent but from the screen above, I find myself frequently “adding image”. This is usually quite awkward as it means navigating a folder structure which is not really what roon is designed to do. But it happens a lot. I simply do not get a “FILE” option on this page. But when I navigate to the folder it is pretty much always “folder.jpg”, sometimes “cover.jpg”. It is very rarely something more cryptic and most of the time I will have embedded the cover in the track as well. Am I missing a configuration switch?
Once you click the Add Image button (and then the Browse for Image button), you’re in the Browser, which will be looking for image files (e.g. JPEG or PNG format files). Most of the time, if you’ve ripped a CD, then in the album folder this will be given the name “folder.jpg”, or sometimes “cover.jpg” - this will be assigned by the ripping software you use. If you’ve downloaded an album, then the supplier may well have given a cryptic name to the image file, and you’d see that in the folder. You aren’t expecting to see the image file called “FILE.jpg” are you? Because that’s very unlikely to be the case…
No Geoff. On that page I very frequently see only two images. Best (i.e. the star), Roon (i.e. the Jellyfish). I just don’t see an image for File at all.
Mostly the albums I am talking about are my own rips or CUE conversions where I am using the same handful of tools set up to put a 900x900 image which by default I have set to “folder.jpg” in the album directory and usually embedded in the tracks as well.
It is a boringly predictable routine. I import into roon. Roon does not find folder.jpg, does not display a file option and then I go to “add image” to load it.
Apologies to all in going OT: You may wish to consider your workflow in the future and have your rips store local artwork embedded in the tag, rather than as a separate folder.jpg file).
If, heaven forbid you lose your folder structure, you will have a much more reliable source of the correct artwork.
I’ve seen examples where someone’s folders have been accidentally trashed and they were left with thousands of orphaned “folder.jpg” files and no easy way to re-associate them.
but the system is absolutely designed to give you that kind of control, and prevent Roon’s cover art from ever showing any time yours is available.
