Roon - Album Art Criteria

[Bill_J]

Forgive me if this information is covered in another post and I have yet to find it …

What is the best criteria for Album Artwork when using Roon? By this I mean providing my own album artwork, as opposed to having Roon supply it?

I’m thinking of items like:

• Embedded vs folder.jpg

• File type (jpg)

• Size of pictures (in bytes)

• Pixel dimensions

Thanks for any assistance with this.

[jamie]

Hello @Bill_J,

Thank you for reaching out to us with your question. I’d be happy to help with this.

I asked a member of our dev team for more insight on this. They recommended adjusting your preferences for Artwork to prefer best in your import settings. You can make this change by navigating to Settings>Library>Import settings and selecting Prefer best for Artwork as illustrated in the screenshot below.

By doing this Roon will always default to the image with the best quality when processing your local files.

I’ve added italicized text for my responses to your specific attribute inquiries below.

• Embedded vs folder.jpg

Embedded preferably

• File type (jpg)

jpg is always a safe bet

• Size of pictures (in bytes)

There’s no specific limitation here, for sake of storage nothing excessively large

• Pixel dimensions

We don’t have a particular square pixels recommendation. I’ve seen quite a few community members say anything around 500x500 or higher works well.

I hope this information is helpful.

[paulgh (Paul)]

Not disagreeing with what has been said. But I differ in two areas.

1. I have artwork set to “Prefer file”. I want the artwork to match the version of the album I have. Sometimes the cover changes between versions. For example, a MFSL cover is different from a standard CD cover, and the Roon search won’t normally pick that up. So I make sure I embed the right cover version in the file.

2. I prefer 1200x1200. No reason, except it is more or less consistent with what I do for movies in Plex (1500x1000). I kinda think 600x600 is a bit small if you actually want to read something on the cover, and the larger size does not seem to affect Roon’s performance in any way.

[jamie]

Hello @paulgh

Thank you for sharing your suggestions with @Bill_J as well!

I also use 1200x1200 jpg as my personal preference for album art where possible. I’ve always liked seeing the MFSL band across the top of an album cover also!