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artist avatars not working #121
Description
hey, what is euphonica looking for when searching for artist avatars? is it artist.ext in the artist folders? or something else?
because it didn't work for me until i just manually set the avatar by looking for the file. album cover art works fine.
enabling the option to download artist avatars doesn't actually work (album covers probably neither).
using euphonica 0.96.1 from nixpkgs
Activity
htkhiem commentedon Aug 7, 2025
Currently artist avatars are only provided indirectly via wiki articles linked to MusicBrainz profiles. These have very low hit rates. MPD itself only provides an interface for album arts and not artist avatars, so there's no way to provide your own via MPD itself.
Also, to avoid spamming requests (and getting banned) Euphonica will only try to fetch artist avatars for those you have clicked on. In contrast, album arts are automatically downloaded as I'm assuming that most offline libraries will have offline album arts already save for a few albums, unlike artists, for which no offline avatar will be available and 100% will have to be downloaded.
loxoron218 commentedon Aug 10, 2025
Would it be possible to fetch the artist images from last.fm/spotify?
htkhiem commentedon Aug 15, 2025
Apologies for the late reply. I've been snowed under with work lately :(
Last.fm artist avatars are unfortunately a no-go. I haven't checked Spotify yet, will investigate their terms soon.
ddevault commentedon Nov 15, 2025
Perhaps picking a random album art from that artist as a fallback would be reasonable?
htkhiem commentedon Dec 6, 2025
This sounds slightly off to me, especially given how we're displaying artist avatars next to the album cover in the album content view. That'll simply show a tiny copy of the album cover right next to the big one.
In the meantime, you can always download & set your own artist avatars. Will be a lot of work for larger libraries though...
wneessen commentedon Feb 4, 2026
Maybe fetching from https://www.allmusic.com is an option? I belive that's also what Plex is using. Or Discogs which has a Developer API: https://www.discogs.com/developers
Edit (regarding Discogs):
The user can generate a personal access token within their account to use the API without neededing the OAuth flow.
I tested it quickly and this would theoretically work:
I think they have a rate limit of 25 calls per minute, so the feature could be built in a way that only artist images are fetched when the user selects the artist page, maybe?
daniilrozanov commentedon Mar 7, 2026
I propose a fairly meaningful strategy used by VLC, which is to use the image of the first (or last) album as the artist image. This would be 10 times better than no image at all