Cache Artist/Album Images?

[shadow.8]

hakko,

First, I want to thank you for all of your work. This really enhances Subsonic and I like where this project is headed. Personally, I want a pure music server, without all of the video stuff. Music Cabinet is the perfect solution. Thanks!

I did have a question though. Currently, I'm at work and Last.FM is blocked here. When I'm looking at an artist page (AFI for example) the images for the artist and albums all show broken images, because Last.FM is blocked. Is there a way to cache these images locally? I looked through the settings but I couldn't find an obvious switch. Am I missing something?

Also, a quick thought: I had trouble figuring out how to enable the Genres Cloud until I found a post stating that I needed to edit the tag settings. It might be helpful to show a small message stating that you need to enable some tags instead of a blank page. Maybe even include a link to change the setting. Just a thought.

Again, great work!

[hakko]

I'm glad it's being useful! It's a bit of a niche product, but I couldn't find any other free software occupying that space.

There's one setting in Settings -> MusicCabinet, at the very bottom called "Prefer last.fm artwork". It's not exactly what you're looking for but the closest option. If set to "No", album artwork is taken from embedded artwork/cover.jpg etc if available, before getting it from last.fm. It won't help for artist images though.

It would be technically possible to set up a script that goes through the Postgres database (music.artistinfo table), fetching artist images from last.fm, storing them on a domain you have access to, and replacing the image URL in the Postgres database. That would make it work. But it's such a special requirement so I don't think I'll prioritize writing it right now. Isn't it possible to set up a proxy somehow? Access last.fm directly by IP number? When I've been working behind corporate firewalls, I've sometimes set up tunnels to make my way out. You could make your hosts file redirect last.fm calls to a server that you control, that fetches the artwork for you etc.

You're right about showing a warning when no tags have been selected. I thought I had that in place, maybe it's gone wrong somewhere, I'll look into that.

Thanks!

[shadow.8]

It's not something I would expect you to begin working on. I mostly wanted to know if there was already an option for this that I was missing. Not a deal breaker by any means.

I've considered setting up a proxy but it's more work than I care for, especially just for artist pictures. It's an interesting idea though.

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate your responsiveness, especially considering Sindre still hasn't responded to the whole android ads non-sense.