Cover Fetching Data Source

[Casey Link]

I think everyone would agree that album art auto-fetching being
enabled by default wouldn't be such a hot-button issue if there as a
high likelihood of accurate covers being retrieved. So, we should be
working to improve the reliability of the fetcher before we discuss if
the auto fetch should be enabled or not.

I sent the following back in June in an attempt to speed up the
dropping of amazon as a primary data source. Since then last.fm
released a new API, so I've updated it with the current API methods.
Lets discuss this, and come to a decision on whether we are going to
keep amazon, or switch (and what to if that is the case).

Amazon has no way of targeting album searches for a particular artist.
The problem? Try finding a cover for a "Greatest Hits" album in
Amarok, you'll almost always get back some artist that wasn't the one
you wanted. Last.fm provice

With last.fm we can make targeted queries by searching the Artist and
Album fields. Basically you make a request like this:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=album.getinfo&api_key=b25b959554ed76058ac220b7b2e0a026&artist=<ARTIST
NAME>&album=<ALBUM NAME>
and in the returned xml there is:
<image size="small">http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002NYC.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg</image>
<image size="medium">http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002NYC.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg</image>
<image size="large">http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002NYC.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg</image>
<image size="extralarge">http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000002NYC.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg</image>

See: http://www.last.fm/api/show?service=290

A disadvantage is the clause stated in last.fm's TOS:
"You will not make more than 5 requests per originating IP address per
second, averaged over a 5 minute period, without prior written
consent."

For more legal/licensing issues see http://www.last.fm/api/tos

So, what are your thoughts on switching from Amazon to last.fm as a
data source for cover fetching? Please, don't bring up "Make cover
fetching a plugin", that is irrelevant to this topic. Amarok will
offer some default cover fetching mechanism, and I think it should use
last.fm.

Casey