Why am I often not getting artist pictures on the "Now playing" tab?

[Sigma]

Your tags look correct and seeing as we're talking about fairly popular artist which seems to be fetched for other MB users, it feels more like a connectivity issue to me. I'd stand by my initial suggestion of making sure this issue persists over a period of time to rule out a temporary glitch.

Out of curiosity, what type of internet connection do you use? Are you running any P2P-software or streaming services? Do you have any active AVs and/or software firewalls?

I have a 220 Mbps cable connection. The PC is wired to the router. I'm not running any P2P software nor streaming services. The only AV/firewalls that are active are the stuff that's built into Windows 10.

Everything was working fine until a few days ago. I'm not having any other browsing/connectivity issues on any of the devices I use, and I have no issues loading up Last.FM or fanart.tv in my web browser.

@Pinky - Are you also a Virgin Media user from the UK by any chance? You're the only other person that's replied so far to say that you're having the same issue. Also, which version of MusicBee are you using?

EDIT - As of right now, 9:36 PM UK time, I am not getting any new backdrop pics for any artists whatsoever, even though when I go to last.fm or fanart.tv in my web browser, both sites pop up instantly as normal and are fully functional.

[Tybot]

EDIT - As of right now, 9:36 PM UK time, I am not getting any new backdrop pics for any artists whatsoever, even though when I go to last.fm or fanart.tv in my web browser, both sites pop up instantly as normal and are fully functional.

I'm having a similar issue at the moment. Yours is regarding the backdrop images, which are dynamic. I have issues with another element in theater mode which are supposed to show static images of the current playing artist and right now it looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/B74MqbQ.jpg

I don't know where my images are fetched from but going off of stevens answer I would assume these images also comes from last.fm and fanart.tv. I don't think there's much you can do about it to be honest, sometimes it work and sometimes it doesn't which means there's no surefire way of reproducing it and fixing it.

[Steven]

it does sound very strange. Let me know if you will run a debug version

edit:
try this version and it will log info to the end of the error log.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ac45gpjyqesw5ch/MusicBeeDebugWeb.zip

[Pinky]

Your tags look correct and seeing as we're talking about fairly popular artist which seems to be fetched for other MB users, it feels more like a connectivity issue to me. I'd stand by my initial suggestion of making sure this issue persists over a period of time to rule out a temporary glitch.

Out of curiosity, what type of internet connection do you use? Are you running any P2P-software or streaming services? Do you have any active AVs and/or software firewalls?

I have a 220 Mbps cable connection. The PC is wired to the router. I'm not running any P2P software nor streaming services. The only AV/firewalls that are active are the stuff that's built into Windows 10.

Everything was working fine until a few days ago. I'm not having any other browsing/connectivity issues on any of the devices I use, and I have no issues loading up Last.FM or fanart.tv in my web browser.

@Pinky - Are you also a Virgin Media user from the UK by any chance? You're the only other person that's replied so far to say that you're having the same issue. Also, which version of MusicBee are you using?

EDIT - As of right now, 9:36 PM UK time, I am not getting any new backdrop pics for any artists whatsoever, even though when I go to last.fm or fanart.tv in my web browser, both sites pop up instantly as normal and are fully functional.

Yes I am a Virgin customer in the U.K. and have had this 'problem' since I first installed MB version 3_1_update3 a few weeks ago. I'm a very new user so only just beginning to find my way around. I earlier had an issue with MB not finding the SD card on my Galaxy mobile and was sent a link to a patched version (http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_2/MusicBee32_Patched.zip) which addressed the problem. (Thank you Stephen).
A few days later I got myself into a muddle and tried a re-install but that didn't help. MB just returned to the way it was. As is often the case, using Windows control panel to uninstall leaves all sort of detritus behind. I did eventually find MB's own uninstaller which helped a little but had to resort to poking around in Windows registry to totally clean up and manually removing the folders it created in my music folder. I also took the opportunity to clean up my music library with Mp3tag making sure all tracks had the album cover(s) buried in them along with all the relevant information.
While at it I checked for the latest version and found MB v3_2_6693 which is now installed. MB did an excellent job with my now 'squeaky clean' tracks.  I haven't overlaid the patch yet as the problem of Artist backdrops still exists and I wanted a 'clean' installation to see how it would pan out and how others were getting on with the problem.
I'm running Windows 8.1 - with 'Classic Shell' overlay which seems rock solid.
I'm on Virgin fibre (the cabinet is the other side of my front garden wall) and enjoy a consistent 100Mb connection.

[redwing]

It seems Fanart.tv API server (different from their website) has some issue since a few weeks ago. Often it takes ages to download a picture or it gives 404 error for popular artists.

One problem from MB side is that when an API call has no response, it sometimes fails to switch to another provider (like last.fm) and shows no picture for the artist. For instance, currently you get 404 error for Oasis via Fanart.tv API server, then it sometimes switches to last.fm and sometimes fails to do so, ending up showing no pictures.

[Sigma]

It's working OK for me right at this moment, although in same cases it is taking quite a few seconds to pull in a backdrop.

I tried using the debug version and I clicked on about 20 artists that I had no backdrops for and it found pics for all of them. In the log, there were a few 404 entries for Fanart though and it seems it pulled the pic in from Last.FM instead, despite pics being available from Fanart (I manually checked).

I will continue testing this to see if it breaks again. Perhaps it's a time of day thing, based on server load. I dunno, but the issue was intermittent when I reported it too, so it seems like it's something to do with Fanart's server sometimes not responding and giving a 404.

@Pinky - Thanks for the reply. I'm 99% sure this has nothing to do with Virgin Media now, cos the sites where the pics are being pulled from are reachable at all times.

I will post back with more info later and the full log file if/when this issue rears its ugly head again.

[Steven]

One problem from MB side is that when an API call has no response, it sometimes fails to switch to another provider (like last.fm) and shows no picture for the artist. For instance, currently you get 404 error for Oasis via Fanart.tv API server, then it sometimes switches to last.fm and sometimes fails to do so, ending up showing no pictures.

That should not be the case as the web requests are independent and run in parallel but looking at the code i can see a circumstance that when fanart.tv times out that the last.fm results could sometimes in rare cases be discarded, so i will change that for the next update

edit:
to be clear, i dont think the change i am making was causing the issue

[Steven]

I have bumped the timeout from 20 secs to 30 secs. I wont spend any further time investigating this
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_2/MusicBee32_Patched.zip