Andrew, so in essence, in reply to my message #52, you are saying “this is not a bug, but a feature”?
Fine, but can we please have the definitive statement from someone on the Roon team? I don’t feel that @mike has really addressed this point directly in his replies thus far.
Edit: your message has disappeared, so this message seems to be left hanging in mid-air?
Yes. This is good advice. I make a folder.jpg but I embed in the individual tracks as well. This used to be an issue because of disk storage and network bandwidth. But hardly these days.
I deleted my post as my understanding didn’t match the results after testing. Changing the Edit Album selection does not alter the Metadata Preference to the chosen selection (which was as I expected) but it does appear to return it to a null state, which is surprising. Changing the Metadata Preference, however, does alter Edit Album. I now suspect that both are intended to be linked but the linkage is not working properly and that may be part of the issue here.
Here is one cover that Roon changed:
Other than a misspelling of a principal composer (it’s Grainger), it’s not terribly bad.
Now, here’s the original cover, one that’s embedded in the files. Try not to giggle:
It’s only half the resolution, but as someone said, it is a different cover entirely.This one is in keeping with the old Mercury Living Presence look. And while I never know what he’s smiling about, it’s interesting!
Anyway, another data point. Five clicks back and it was restored. But a minute I won’t get back.
In scenario 3 Roon picked an acceptable cover initially. If the cover art looks good, you might not edit the album to choose anything at the time of import. You can see from the comments that the default settings have been commonly ignored by users. And if prior versions didn’t update, there was little reason to notice them.
-SK
It’s not clear that what I found is a bug. But I will describe it in a bug report for the devs and let you know the result.
The behaviour I reported has been found not to be a bug. I was making assumptions about the Metadata Preferences tab and what it might mean if no button was selected.
Testing is continuing to try and replicate reports of Artwork volatility, but so far the Roon team haven’t been able to replicate the issue.
Strange, well I posted this in a different part of this forum
Edited Covers
All of the covers shown in that screenshot are hand edited, with the process of selecting the Cover in the FILE and therefore not BEST anymore for those specific albums. Since these are bookmarked I am 100.000 percent sure that these were manually edited. Since they all have the LP covers and not the CD covers.
after the update to 1.6 some had changed and had different album covers, yet with higher resolution - but not the covers I had selected. This never happened in 1.5.
It happened with many more files, but here for these specific albums I have a screenshot that I had posted here in december.
After changing all the wrongly changed covers back to how I wanted them, I have happily not found any more changes (but also I have about 4000 albums, so have not checked every single one)
If it is not a bug, then I guess the new feature in Roon to improve covers by providing higher resolution images is not just changing the resolution but might be replacing certain covers with totally different ones (Different picture altogether)
The covers that were changed in my collection were never picked by me. I’m sure that all my covers were identical to the CD box inserts. (I always upload my own image, or select File, if Roon doesn’t have the correct one when I import an album). Since this issue was raised (release of 1.6?) I changed around 10 or 15 of them to be ‘File’. I noticed they were all set to ‘Best’ but the Best was something I didn’t recognize as one of my CDs. (see an example above).
I’m not sure if I had them set to File before of if the earlier Best version was a match with my CD.
If I had set them to File at the time of import, then I think its a bug. If not, Roon uploaded a totally different cover to become the new Best. (=new feature)
Indeed, I have several instances where my original cover image file (scanned at 700x700 pixels) has been replaced by a new (and different) cover image from Roon because the image has a higher resolution.
I’ve edited the albums concerned back to use my image files, but the Library import settings remain at “Best”. We’ll see whether the next time Roon refreshes my metadata what happens to these cover images…
I completely agree that this is extremely annoying. I was browsing my collection and was surprised at how many of the album covers were different from what was originally there. I am pretty picky about album art, and I don’t like Roon just choosing the artwork for me, especially on things that I have already changed once. I just finished replacing the artwork on all my albums in DSD that had changed, and that was probably 30 titles. I’m afraid to look at the rest of my collection. Can we avoid this in the future? Please??
One more thing: As I am going through the rest of my collection I notice one way to recognize if my album art has changed from before is if it looks darker and “murkier” than it did. Even though the new art the Roon has inserted is technically higher in resolution, they all seem to look worse. It’s easy to spot. There are a few exceptions, but I’d say it’s about nine times out of ten worse than before. Is there going to be a fix for this or way to avoid this?
No one is saying “There is no bug”. I am reporting back that what I thought was an anomaly in the linkage between Edit Album and Metadata Preferences pages is not a bug. I had a specific hypothesis which has been negated.
Roon are continuing to test, but so far have not replicated the issue. Usually once a bug can be repeated, it can be squashed very quickly. The trickiest critters to replicate are intermittent bugs. There is usually a “hidden variable” causing the intermittency and the trick is teasing it out.
By way of an example, there was a particularly intractable bug in the Fix Track Grouping screen that Vova and I spent an afternoon (my time) unsuccessfully trying to replicate in a Skype session. He made careful notes of everything I was doing, however, and when Brian reviewed it he was able to isolate the problem to my restarting the Roon Remote. A seemingly inmocuous step, but it was where the bug was lurking.
As I understand it the following steps are the best guide to replication we can give:
Please post if there are any further steps or if I have misdescribed something. As I understand it no one is experiencing a higher resolution edited cover reverting to a Roon version ?
If we can find some factor that is common to the covers that reverted, but not the covers that remained the same, that would be very useful.
First question in that process. Was there something about the method of adding the File cover in common ? Were they embedded covers or in separate files ? If separate files, did the naming convention change (folder, cover etc) ? Was the file format (jpeg, png) the same ?
I appreciate that folks may already have reported these details, but it’s a long thread and if we can gather those details together we will be helping Roon help us.
@andybob Did you have a new provider for the covers?
A lot of the new covers are not from the original releases.
For example:
It’s a real crime to change this beautiful cover
against THIS
I was using a lower res File version of Died Pretty “Lost” and testing how swapping back and forth in Edit Album affected Metadata Preference and vice versa. I wasn’t able to test by rolling back to 1.5 and upgrading to 1.6 so I was only testing a particular suspicion, not the general case. I’ll leave that to Roon.
Also, no fair using pictures of Kate Bush. She stole my heart thirty years ago and is yet to return it.
Yes, this is what I have experienced also.
That second Kate Bush cover is an original. It is the Japanese album cover.
AJ
Andrew, with respect to the last step, as far as I can tell, all my own covers were replaced by the Roon version when Roon had a higher resolution image file available. It does seem to have been a once-off occurrence that happened with the upgrade to 1.6. I went in and put all my covers back, and so far they are all still in place.
Thanks Geoff. That’s significant.