Author Topic: LastFM changes to API (02/05/19)  (Read 41069 times)

redwing

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Play Similar and Auto DJ still aren't working for me with the latest patch. I just get tracks by the original artist.

Working fine for me. Does it show similar artists in Music Explorer tab?

redwing

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Thanks for adding google as a source option and reducing the rotation period from 90 sec to 60 sec!

Spotify is definitely returning an album cover for those artists in place of the artist picture.
There isnt a way for MB to tell thats what has been done.
You can always paste your own artwork in place

Of course MB can't tell album cover from artist picture. But the problem is it is saving album cover as artist picture for some artists and there is no way to stop it from doing this. I don't think it's just me and probably people will start complaining about it after official release. For saving local thumb, I have lots of obscure artists and it would take months and I'd rather like to see my own cover as a fallback without saving a wrong cover thumb for them.
How about adding an option that would disable auto-downloading of artist picture? People have been requesting this feature regardless of this issue and I could use the option by only enabling it when updating artist pictures and then removing downloaded covers.

Steven

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I agree the artist thumbnail images are weaker than before. There is already an option to force album covers to be displayed and I think i will set that as the default for new users

Steven

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Play Similar and Auto DJ still aren't working for me with the latest patch. I just get tracks by the original artist.
try with the latest patch version:
https://getmusicbee.com/patches/MusicBee33_Patched.zip

redwing

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There is already an option to force album covers to be displayed and I think i will set that as the default for new users

I don't see how that can be a solution unless I give up displaying artist thumb altogether. Anyway I'll stop bothering you with this and just create a wishlist item.

magpy

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Play Similar and Auto DJ still aren't working for me with the latest patch. I just get tracks by the original artist.
try with the latest patch version:
https://getmusicbee.com/patches/MusicBee33_Patched.zip

That didn't fix it either, but I tried deleting my MusicBee folder in AppData and with factory settings it was working. I didn't want to have to set everything up again so I restored the settings and went through MusicBee3Settings.ini deleting every line that included AutoDj or LastFm, and after that it started working.

Diffing the two files after running MusicBee I found that "AutoDjSimilarityEnabled" was previously set to false somehow. Not sure if that's something I did accidentally or what. I haven't intentionally changed any preferences for months, and it was working fine until this these Last.FM API changes came about.
Last Edit: May 16, 2019, 11:07:21 PM by magpy

redwing

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I noticed all Spotify API calls are getting 400 Bad Request error with v3.3.7075.

[edit] Well, probably not all, since I only tested artwork retrieval.
Last Edit: May 17, 2019, 01:45:08 PM by redwing

Steven

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Thanks for reporting this as an unintended change made its way into the code.
Its fixed now

https://getmusicbee.com/patches/MusicBee33_Patched.zip

redwing

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I understand Google search can't be perfect. But it would be great if you can improve it to search more music-related pictures. Try these artists: Eagles, Scorpions, Genesis, Cream, Journey, Cars, Yes

Steven

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I feel quite uncertain about using google for artist pictures. I have tried appending "Band" or "Artist" which fixes it some cases and makes it worse in others. Also "Band" doesnt work well for single artists.
Having said that I am trying appending "Music" now and so far that seems to work better

redwing

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A lot of bands start with "The". Maybe you could add "Band" if artist name starts with "The".

Steven

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i have added "Music" into the search terms for google artist searches

frankz

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Not for nothing, but you can also add "site:last.fm" (or any other specific site or (I think) list of sites) to the google search and get only images from that/those sites.

Last.fm exposes their images to google search, so they must not mind this usage.

Steven

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Not for nothing, but you can also add "site:last.fm" (or any other specific site or (I think) list of sites) to the google search and get only images from that/those sites.
thats a great suggestion but trying now its returning a lot of album covers so I dont think that will work so well.
I will be interested to hear feedback from anyone on the tweaked search since this morning's change

redwing

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Great improvement! Now it mostly retrieves music-related pictures. Trying now with Eagles, Scorpions, Genesis, Cream, Journey, Cars and Yes, it no longer shows a football team, animals, automobiles, food, or travel images and most of the retrieved images are of the specific band. It still shows no band picture for Love, but I guess you have to use local pictures for some artists unless they are widely popular with a unique name.
By the way, after re-enabling google, it didn't work immediately and I had to restart MB to make it actually show images from Google. Is it expected?