Roon ARC doesn't cache album art properly for offline

[therourke]

I am using the latest Roon ARC (beta) on Android 17, Pixel 9.

My Roon ARC works relatively well when I have no data connection, letting me play downloaded albums. But during these times of no data connection, most of the album art in Room ARC is not loaded. It makes everything look messy, and finding albums more difficult since I can’t see 75% of the art.

The art loads only if a data connection is in place, or sometimes randomly if I scroll a lot. I assume the album art has been cached with the files themselves, so the loading error doesn’t seem to be because ARC is downloading the art fresh each time (though that is possible). But something is triggered by a data connection that loads the album art, regardless of cache.

Anyway. It’s a weird behaviour that has remained unchanged for a year or so now, and I am starting to get frustrated by the behaviour on my London Tube commutes.

Thanks

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

This (covers either entirely missing or only displayed as small low-res images, when offline) has been an issue for years and reported many times before, e.g.:

ARC Album Art.... again!

As previous topics have been closed, here’s a new one. It’s incredibly frustrating, please fix it! Here we see a couple of missing album covers, Revival and More, I know they were there once upon a time. And some Cat Clyde albums which look colorful, let’s click on her… [IMG_1958.PNG] So, apparently several Cat Clyde albums don’t have any artwork after all [IMG_1959.PNG] Is it really so difficult? I don’t know, I’d just like to see it fixed

It would probably have more effect if you add your feedback in this^ feedback thread. As you know, Roon Labs doesn’t monitor posts in Roon Software Discussion.

Just a few quick additional examples out of many more:

Issues with Roon ARC Offline Functionality on iPhone [Ticket in]

Just for clarity, there are at least these posts from myself https://community.roonlabs.com/search?q=%40suedkiez%20arc%20covers%20missing%20order%3Alatest and others by @mikeb like this one (and elsewhere, Mike‘s and mine often overlap in the same threads) Plus there are also other affected users AFAIK. As you can see in the search results for my posts, above, it was more than once said that there is a ticket and occasionally that it’s fixed, but it never was actually fixed for whatever th…

No or bad Album covers in ARC offline mode

Yes, it is very annoying. There were several attempts to fix it but they clearly were off the mark. It has been reported many times in Early Access (and I think elsewhere in Support etc) and they have a ticket (but I don’t know what’s so hard TBH). E.g. these and several others: (In the second thread it quickly became clear that I had been too optimistic)

ARC B260 fix for missing images in downloaded content [Investigating]

That haven’t worked for me neither. After switching off SDL, deleting all (but “keep”) SDLs and starting SDL again all the older kept downloads had low quality images. Entering and playing each of them while online refreshes image with higher quality. Don’t know for how long… And freshly automatically downloaded SDLs still contain low quality graphics in album description although they present high quality graphics on Now Playing screen. [Screenshot_20240411_133514] [Screenshot_20240411_133…

Many more can be found by starting from these search results

https://community.roonlabs.com/search?context=user&context_id=suedkiez&q=%40Suedkiez%20arc%20offline%20covers&skip_context=true

[therourke]

That’s very frustrating. I can’t understand why this extremely simple thing should be so difficult to fix.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

I don’t know, either. Let’s hope that this will help:

@vova

Even though we have added quite a bit to ARC over the last six months, including streaming service pages, nugs support, and Focus, we are now refocusing our attention on reliability and performance, similar to what we have been doing with Roon. We are seeing a clear signal that this is what matters most to users right now: new functionality is hard to enjoy when the client itself is not consistently behaving as it should.