Server Version#: 1.19.3.2852
Player Version#: 4.30.2
I’m really struggling to get music artist artwork working (I have embedded album covers, which work fine). I’d quite like to avoid embedding this, as I like the idea that an agent can show me different pictures over time.
With my library agent set to “Plex Music”, there seems to be no option to download artwork at all. There also seem to be no options to configure this agent under Settings->Agents (which seems to be by design according to Metadata Agents | Plex Support).
This makes me thing I have to use the last.fm agent, even though this is described as “deprecated” on Metadata Agents | Plex Support.
However, if I change my music library to use the last.fm agent, I still don’t get any artist artwork. In fact, it seems worse, because when I look at “Fix Match” under an artist, I now get zero matches.
For example, with Plex Music agent, “Tori Amos” has two matches, with the right one being scored at 100. With Last.fm agent, “Tori Amos” has zero matches.
Finally, checking the log files for last.fm agent, it looks like the reason for this is failure to get good JSON data back from the server. The log file reports:
2021-02-21 09:13:39,905 (802bf1600) : INFO (agentkit:961) - Searching for matches for {'artist': 'Tori Amos', 'id': '9248', 'year': None}
2021-02-21 09:13:39,930 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (networking:143) - Requesting 'http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/metadata/9248/tree'
2021-02-21 09:13:39,936 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:246) - Artist search: Tori Amos
2021-02-21 09:13:39,937 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:248) - Running custom search...
2021-02-21 09:13:39,938 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (networking:143) - Requesting 'http://lastfm-z.plexapp.com/2.0/?method=artist.search&artist=tori%20amos&page=1&limit=9&format=json&api_key=d5310352469c2631e5976d0f4a599773'
2021-02-21 09:13:40,185 (802bf1600) : WARNING (data:179) - Error decoding with simplejson, using demjson instead (this will cause a performance hit) - Extra data: line 2 column 1 - line 305 column 1 (char 5 - 1868)
2021-02-21 09:13:40,187 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:807) - Error fetching JSON.
2021-02-21 09:13:40,187 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:596) - Error retrieving artist search results.
2021-02-21 09:13:40,187 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:263) - Fetching additional artists for custom search...
2021-02-21 09:13:40,188 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (networking:143) - Requesting 'http://lastfm-z.plexapp.com/2.0/?method=artist.search&artist=tori%20amos&page=1&limit=30&format=json&api_key=d5310352469c2631e5976d0f4a599773'
2021-02-21 09:14:00,216 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:807) - Error fetching JSON.
2021-02-21 09:14:00,217 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:596) - Error retrieving artist search results.
2021-02-21 09:14:00,218 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (networking:143) - Requesting 'http://lastfm-z.plexapp.com/2.0/?method=artist.search&artist=tori%20amos&page=2&limit=30&format=json&api_key=d5310352469c2631e5976d0f4a599773'
2021-02-21 09:14:20,234 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:807) - Error fetching JSON.
2021-02-21 09:14:20,235 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:596) - Error retrieving artist search results.
2021-02-21 09:14:20,236 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (networking:143) - Requesting 'http://lastfm-z.plexapp.com/2.0/?method=artist.search&artist=tori%20amos&page=3&limit=30&format=json&api_key=d5310352469c2631e5976d0f4a599773'
2021-02-21 09:14:40,279 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:807) - Error fetching JSON.
2021-02-21 09:14:40,280 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:596) - Error retrieving artist search results.
2021-02-21 09:14:40,281 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (networking:143) - Requesting 'http://lastfm-z.plexapp.com/2.0/?method=artist.search&artist=tori%20amos&page=4&limit=30&format=json&api_key=d5310352469c2631e5976d0f4a599773'
2021-02-21 09:15:00,340 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:807) - Error fetching JSON.
2021-02-21 09:15:00,340 (802bf1600) : INFO (__init__:596) - Error retrieving artist search results.
2021-02-21 09:15:00,341 (802bf1600) : DEBUG (runtime:924) - Response: [200] str, 320 bytes
And a manual attempt to download it shows there is a load of junk surrounding the JSON:
famine@ubuntu:~/Downloads/plex$ curl 'http://lastfm-z.plexapp.com/2.0/?method=artist.search&artist=tori%20amos&page=1&limit=9&format=json&api_key=d5310352469c2631e5976d0f4a599773'740
734
728
71C
710
704
6F8
6EC
<snip>
3C8
3BC
{"results":{"opensearch:Query":{"#text":"","role":"request","searchTerms":"tori amos","startPage":"1"},"opensearch:totalResults":"5522","opensearch:startIndex":"0","opensearch:itemsPerPage":"9","artistmatches":{"artist":[{"name":"Tori Amos","listeners":"1326099","mbid":"c0b2500e-0cef-4130-869d-732b23ed9df5","url":"https://www.last.fm/music/Tori+Amos","streamable":"0","image":[{"#text":"https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/34s/1f3f38ebf6c71d07ec865d933578a62a.png","size":"small"},{"#text":"https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/64s/1f3f38ebf6c71d07ec865d933578a62a.png","size":"medium"},{"#text":"https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/174s/1f3f38ebf6c71d07ec865d933578a62a.png","size":"large"},{"#text":"https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/300x300/1f3f38ebf6c71d07ec865d933578a62a.png","size":"extralarge"},{"#text":"https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/300x300/1f3f38ebf6c71d07ec865d933578a62a.png","size":"mega"}]}]},"@attr":{"for":"tori amos"}}}
0
<snip>
In summary, I’m totally puzzled. The supposedly preferred modern agent doesn’t appear to support artwork at all, and the legacy agent doesn’t work. How does anyone get this working properly?
Any ideas / suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
