This is where things are at and what I am planning to do:
- Currently MusicBee exceeds app level rate limits by 10x ie. the requests would need to be reduced to 10% of current usage. Scrobbling is not affected for existing users, but new users cant reliably make the first connection to log on.
- I have identified track love, play count sync, similar artists and artist biographies as key functions that could be kept without exceeding the limits.
- However even when the new MusicBee version is released it will take many months before the reduced usage takes effect because older MB versions will still be in use. So last.fm usage will be unreliable for a long time without some other action.
- I have proposed to last.fm that MusicBee be allowed to use a new API key and the existing key revoked after a period of time, so allowing users of the new MB version to reliably use last.fm and eventually forcing all MB users to the new version.
- last.fm have not responded to this proposal and for now my working assumption is they will either ignore or decline it. I am not planning to get a new API key without their approval.
- So on the working assumption that last.fm will be unreliable for a long time, I have started looking at alternatives to last.fm:
- Already done is artist bio retrieval from Wikipedia
- For similar artists a rough working version using Spotify has been done. The downside is you will need a Spotify account to make use of it
- For playcounts and scrobbling, forum members have suggested listenbrainz. I haven't looked at this yet but it sounds promising. The downside is users would need to export their last.fm playcounts to listenbrainz.
- For other functions like artist picture retrieval my offer is to provide an API if someone is willing to write a plugin