Bandcamp/last.fm/Musicbrainz as an alternative to iTunes in Music Explorer

[fiso64]

Music explorer / artist view fetches albums and description from iTunes, which I don't use. In fact, many artists I listen to aren't on iTunes, rendering that part of the view entirely useless for me. In the cases where the artists are available on iTunes, I'd still much rather have links to purchase their albums on bandcamp.
It would be great to have bandcamp as an alternative source – the bio and additional albums can be easily scraped from the website, or retrieved via the underlying json API.

I would also be happy if the C# plugin interface was expanded to allow one to modify music explorer behavior, in that case I would implement bandcamp retrieval myself.

Edit: Since Musicbee already has last.fm and musicbrainz integration and they clearly provide apis for retrieving albums, it would probably be easier to use those instead of bandcamp. You can't listen to songs through these apis, but it beats having "Artist 'artist' is not available on the iTunes Store" for half of my library.

Edit2: I'm noticing that itunes retrieval completely stopped working for me, even for artists that are on itunes. Every single one shows up as "Artist not available on the iTunes store". Looking around a bit, some people seem to be having problems with the itunes api not returning results, e.g https://www.reddit.com/r/musicbee/comments/gfvfr0/artist_the_1975_is_not_available_on_the_itunes/ and https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=32785.0. Maybe another reason to add an alternative?

[aktor]

+1

[Steven]

does bandcamp have an api that lets you search artist/albums/tracks?

[fiso64]

Dang, this looks worse than I thought. They do have an API: https://web.archive.org/web/20160512171900/http://bandcamp.com:80/developer, but unfortunately they don't give out the keys anymore. There may be workarounds: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65085046/how-do-i-pull-album-art-thumbnail-from-bandcamp, and of course scraping is always an option, but I understand why you might not want to use this.

In case you don't want to deal with that, would you consider expanding the C# interface?

[The Incredible Boom Boom]

In case you don't want to deal with that, would you consider expanding the C# interface?

+1 to this

[fiso64]

Actually, even last.fm or Musicbrainz instead of itunes would be a huge improvement. You can't play the songs through these services but they offer apis for listing albums and retrieving a biography.