Artist pictures

[redwing]

not sure about "Musician" - in my tests its throwing up some unassociated artists so I may undo that after more testing

It doesn't improve much for classical music artists since it's restricted to large pictures. Feel free to undo it if you don't think it's working well.

[jasongnome]

The only change Steven made was this:

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

You won't see much differences with your example artists as you could imagine what Google image search would show with "A House + music".

@Steven;

As I suggested before, if artist name starts with an article, try adding "band", which would produce better (more music-related) results at least for those artists.

That would make sense. Just been in Google images with some of the artists causing problems.

"wire music" gives mainly pictures of piano wire.
"wire band" gives images of the band "Wire"

"Whistle music" is also not an improvement, but "whistle band" gives one picture of the band, but the rest are still garbage.

Rapeman was improved with both searches. (Btw, research shows the odd picture was a screenshot from a Japanese film called "Rapeman 2").

Nothing's going to work for every band though, Loop (80s indie band), give rubbish results in all 3 scenarios. (Loop band gives pictures of some wierd excercise device)

It's a difficult one.

[jasongnome]

There's a better way. MusicBrainz Artist query returns artist type.

e.g.

<artist id="d73596bb-a8f8-4aae-a323-d881f5245149" type="Group" type-id="e431f5f6-b5d2-343d-8b36-72607fffb74b" ns2:score="100">
<name>Black Box</name>
<sort-name>Black Box</sort-name>
<country>IT</country>

Add the returned artist type to the Google search term.

It has six kinds of types (https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Artist)

- Person: just "Music"
- Group: "Band"
- Orchestra: "Orchestra"
- Choir: "Choir"
- Character: "Music"
- Other: "Music"

Nice one, that would work for a lot more artists.

[jasongnome]

BTW, Steven and Redwing, thanks for looking at this. The huge level of support, from both creator and community, is one of the big things that makes MusicBee better than any other player.

[redwing]

Nothing's going to work for every band though, Loop (80s indie band), give rubbish results in all 3 scenarios. (Loop band gives pictures of some wierd excercise device)

"Loop music band" returns better results. But I'm not sure it will do good or harm for other bands. Probably it will depend.
BTW in case you're not aware, the patch file gets constantly updated and all the things discussed here were already implemented to the latest 3.3 patch.

@Steven;

I did some more tests. For big name artists, any conditions work, so they are not a problem.
For obscure artists and classical music artists, current restriction of "large" and "wide" certainly drops a lot of good artist pictures for them.
You might want to try with "larger than 800x600" with no aspect ratio restriction.
Also dropping either "Music" or "Musician" from the search terms for a person-type artist seems working better. The exception is some cases where the artist name is also used by other celebrities.

[Freddy Barker]

Since the Last FM API change decided to deprive MB of Artist Pictures, the TM Gallery now seems to be delivering  mostly good results from the current configuration.

Does anyone know if the current search criteria for Artist Pics is 'user configurable' or hard coded into MB?

I thought it would be beneficial to suggest implementing any minor improvements where possible...
 
• Exclude pics with the "ALAMY Stock Image".
• If and when no matching image is found, then resort to the Default Rotation images folder.

Regards: Freddy

[Freddy Barker]

Since the Last FM API change decided to deprive MB of Artist Pictures, the TM Gallery now seems to be delivering  mostly good results  
• Exclude pics with the "ALAMY Stock Image".

Regards: Freddy

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