Roon regularly ignores cover.jpg if there are other scans. This is an issue I've been having for a while but I thought it was a misconfiguration, but at this point I'm just confused. I have many albums for which decent cover art is nigh impossible to find, so I often create my own edits from publicly available sources, while keeping the source images in a Scans subfolder alongside the tracks. But no matter the case, Roon will - most of the time - opt for the source image as the main cover art for a release instead of my edit, even though I am very consistent about this throughout my whole library.
I assume, the resolution (more accurately the pixel count) of your scans is higher than your cover art then?
By default, Roon used the highest-resolution front cover available.
Note: From experience I can tell that it is best to keep stuff you don’t want in Roon away from Roon (don’t place it in a watched folder). If the source scans aren’t meant for Roon, keep them somewhere else – or Roon may use them anyway for its Gallery feature and also in the slideshow of its “Now playing” screen(s).
For me, such stuff lives in my main music folder which is not the folder used by Roon or any other software directly. Roon then gets its own watched folder as well as Plex and previously MinimServer. Each of them tailored to what’s meant to be used by the respective software.
Thank you for reaching out and for the detailed explanation.
Just to better understand the issue — could you please clarify what your expected behavior is when there are multiple image files in the album folder (e.g., a custom cover.jpg along with other artwork in a Scans subfolder)?
Are you expecting Roon to always prioritize cover.jpg as the main artwork?
Also, could you please check your import settings under Settings > Library > Import Settings and confirm whether “Artwork” is set to “Prefer File” or “Prefer Roon”?
I expect Roon to default to cover.jpg when Artwork → Prefer File is enabled in ALL cases. If there is no cover.jpg, naturally I would not fault Roon for picking another image if one were to exist, but I definitely do not want Roon using anything else if I HAVE given it an image to use. I believe it should follow this rule even when there is a larger but otherwise identical version of the cover art in the Scans folder.
The current implementation will prioritize the highest resolution image named (or containing) the substrings folder,cover, or front. But as @BlackJack mentioned, Roon will technically scan all PDFs that are exposed within a Watched Folder.
Some users have long felt this cover art priority overlooks their curation style. Here’s a an old feature request that actually still generates considerable internal discussion on the Product team. If you feel strongly, please create a new #featurerequesthere.
The best workaround for now would sadly be the laborious one - remove the unpreferred, higher resolution file from the artwork or album folder where Roon is finding it, leaving only the cover.jpg file.
