Its just standard. All music Apps have bubbles for artists/composers: Apple, Spotify, Qubuz. Audirvana, Primephonic… You name them…All bubbles.
We got bubbles in our contacts App on the phone since 10 years. Nobody complains about those. The authors of my favourite newspaper articles show at the bottom in bubbles. Its just standard.
All Roon needs to do is get the algorithms right to extract meaningful bubbles from full pictures and that whole thing is done and dusted. And for those with spare time, they can still use the themes designer tools t create beautiful octogons…
Maybe market research showed that having squares was considered “weird”** and an obstacle/impedance for Roon adoption by new users?
bbrip is right, most everything uses Circles. Do I agree with it, no - I do prefer squares, but, I understand the reasoning. (actually, i think squicles are going to be the next UI trend for contacts).
Roon is a business. If they have identified a potential barrier to uptake due to UI choices, they are going to change the UI to increase market share.
Now, that being said, obviously the picture centering / selection needs to be improved to provide the best experience in using circles. That will take time, and until then, you can always add your own.
** That was the term used by my, then 12yo, nephew when looking at the square artist pictures. He, of course, preferred circles.
It’s pretty simple. If you are scrolling through rows of information (such as Recent Activity) you immediately distinguish/recognize the Artist vs Track/Album, for instance. I would imagine the design intent is to facilitate sorting these things out at a subconscious level. In essence, to make it easier to browse and digest. Roon also distinguishes Genres with another distinct cue (grayscale).
You might argue if that is a good trade-off, but I doubt it was hap-hazard. And as @rugby and others point out, if circle is becoming synonymous with artist, all the more reason to pick a circle.
Ya, only point being of course - again - that they should have taken that time prior to release. We wouldnt even discuss „butchered“ bubbles if it just worked…
I don’t get it. As a developer I know that my customers are not happy if I force them using a style they don’t like. Implementing a simple setting for round or square pictures is nothing complicated.
Remember, I am just a user like you. Roon has always been opinionated about their software. I preferred the pawmasher interface, but, that went away with out an option. People will always be of two sides.
As I’ve already said, I could care less if Roon uses circles or squares. Debating that choice is, IMHO, a waste of time.
The original point that launched this thread is to stop butchering photos of artists. The second point – which has been made by many others in this forum – are the thousands of empty circles with only initials.
It is the combination of circles with butchered photos and circles that are empty except for initials that results in such a large step backwards.
The point is NOT whether Roon should use circles or squares. At least that was never my point.
The issue is that Roon needs to do something that actually works – without butchered photos and thousands of empty circles with initials.
If they can accomplish that with circles, great. If that requires squares, then use squares.
And if that requires a change to the design due to a lack of metadata, resulting in empty circles with initials, then make the change to the design.
They just need to fix it. And not 6 months or 1 year from now.
It is simply astonishing that the management of Roon were looking at test pages of the new design, with these glaring shortcomings, and they launched the new version anyway, and had the hubris to describe it as the best release ever. The management of Roon were well aware of these issues, and they launched the new version with these egregious shortcomings. Maybe they should spend a little less time sending out videos that proclaim all of the new features, and spend more time fixing glaring problems prior to a new release.
Pete, I agree. I was reacting to the posts on the thread that oppose fixing this problem because some people believe it would mean an end to the use of circles. Turning this into a thread that debates circles versus squares is missing the point. It is also missing the point to argue that circles are OK because Spotify and others use them, when the examples posted above from Spotify and Qobuz are also butchered.
Speaking only for myself, I want to first and foremost end the use of butchered photos and empty circles with initials.
I have to admit that I like the initials better than the gray plaid pattern that they were using in 1.7 but neither should appear more often that a quality artist picture. I have been complaining about this for over a year now. There were just so many missing artist images. That got a little better, but most of the images were either very small, bad quality or both. On top of that, even if the images were large and hi resolution, they were often square which means no Artist banner image. Before I started correcting my artist images 2/3 of my artists had either no image, a small and crappy image, or a square image so no artist banner. Along with always having to change metadata, I spend way more time fixing my files so that they will show up somewhat correctly in Roon, which was supposed to take care of this stuff for me.
Very well said. Especially your comment that Roon “was supposed to take care of this stuff for me.”
I don’t have the time to correct Roon’s problems and mistakes, but I give you credit for investing many hours to do so.
Replacing the initials with a gray pattern is not what I would suggest. If Roon could design an algorithm that can simply utilize the existing artist image for all of the other variations on the same name, that would eliminate a very significant percentage of the empty circles with initials, as I explained in an earlier post and I provided two examples.
And if that is not possible, then they should consider a change to the design itself.
If the algorithm can’t get it right then just give the option to right click and let the user select the crop from the original photo. Or not even right click, just click and drag on the current circle until it’s aligned correctly. Not ideal but gets the job done.
You’re doing Roon’s job for them. This is not a non-profit poverty stricken community NGO serving the poor.
Roon is a for-profit company charging us for a service.
You’re gullible to be asking Roon for the ability to spend hundreds of hours of your time to correct their mistakes.
And it would take hundreds of hours just to correct the butchered photos. It would take far more than that to address the empty circles with only initials.
That’s about right. Roon knows, from experience, that if they stall, delay, and fail to respond, their critics will eventually either cancel the service, or stop posting.
That is what has happened here. Please see my next post. This is an outcome of an issue that came up 15 to 24 months ago.