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Biographies missing

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:35 pm
by Munger
I have quite a large number of artists whose biographies are present on last.fm, but for whatever reason musiccabinet isn't picking them up. Is there any way to force a re-scan for particular artists by removing records from the database? My collection is tagged directly from musicbrainz, so I don't think spelling of artist names is an issue here.

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 10:39 pm
by shadow.8
Munger wrote:I have quite a large number of artists whose biographies are present on last.fm, but for whatever reason musiccabinet isn't picking them up. Is there any way to force a re-scan for particular artists by removing records from the database? My collection is tagged directly from musicbrainz, so I don't think spelling of artist names is an issue here.


What version are you running? This should have been fixed in 0.7.19.

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Thu Jan 17, 2013 11:16 pm
by Munger
"Subsonic, originally written by Sindre Mehus. Built with MusicCabinet plugin, version 0.7.19, on January 13, 2013."

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 7:01 am
by hakko
Here's what I'd to:

If you've just installed MusicCabinet, read this thread: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10457

Check the database:

Code: Select all
-- When was biography fetched?
select invocation_time from library.webservice_history h inner join music.artist a on h.artist_id = a.id where a.artist_name = upper('Nirvana') and h.calltype_id = 5;

-- Do we have a biography?
select ai.biosummary from music.artistinfo ai inner join music.artist a on ai.artist_id = a.id where a.artist_name = upper('Nirvana');

-- Delete the biography:
delete from music.artistinfo where artist_id in (select id from music.artist where artist_name = upper('Nirvana'));

-- Delete the history of looking it up, to force reading it again on next scan:
delete from library.webservice_history where calltype_id = 5 and artist_id in (select id from music.artist where artist_name = upper('Nirvana'));


Verify what it looks like on last.fm: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?metho ... f908927d06

Post the name of the artist here, so that other people can verify if it's consistent (it might happen that last.fm was down last time you tried to fetch biographies, there's no absolute guarantee that it'll always work).

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Fri Jan 18, 2013 12:38 pm
by Munger
Looks like it's simply the size of my library causing it. I'll try a few more updates and report back if there is still a problem. Thanks.

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2013 7:40 pm
by Munger
Here's one that simply won't fill in the artist biography although it does find similar artists and play artist radio successfully :-

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=artist.getinfo&artist=The+Tragically+Hip&api_key=84466020d5f199bd5544a7f908927d06

Incidentally. Is there any way to retrieve the full bio or does that require parsing the last.fm wiki?

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Sun Jan 27, 2013 8:31 am
by hakko
OK I added them to my library and got a biography, so it doesn't seem there's some like something's wrong about them. It does happen though that last.fm is down or returns variants of "unavailable", and then the database is set to "no biography available, check again later". Can you run the two first sql statements above and report the output? And to force reading a bio, run the subsequent two and then scan?

The full biography is fetched too, you can see it when going to the "Details" page.

Re: Biographies missing

PostPosted: Mon Jan 28, 2013 8:59 pm
by Munger
I finally managed to get all the biographies to download, but only after re-creating the entire database. I tried the steps you outlined to delete the specific records to no avail. I suspect something was fundamentally broken on my initial install. All is well now ;-)