GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 310795
Covers not being fetched from Amazon: SoapException
Last modified: 2008-12-03 11:05:08 UTC
Distribution/Version: Gentoo Simply fire up Muine with some tracks that don't yet have cover art associated with them. Result: cover art isn't downloaded from Amazon (the tracks get assigned a blank image as their cover art). Expected: cover art to be downloaded from Amazon. Other details: By adding in some extra, code, it seems like the call to search_service.ArtistSearchRequest in CoverGetter.DownloadFromAmazon is failing with a SoapException. Calling e.ToString() on the exception gives me the string "We encountered an error at our end while processing your request. Please try again". Here's the entire ToString output: System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: We encountered an error at our end while processing your request. Please try again in <0x00469> System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol:ReceiveResponse (System.Net.WebResponse response, System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapClientMessage message, System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapExtension[] extensions) in (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol:ReceiveResponse (System.Net.WebResponse,System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapClientMessage,System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapExtension[]) in <0x0026d> System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol:Invoke (System.String method_name, System.Object[] parameters) in (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol:Invoke (string,object[]) in <0x00049> Amazon.AmazonSearchService:ArtistSearchRequest (Amazon.ArtistRequest ArtistSearchRequest) in (wrapper remoting-invoke-with-check) Amazon.AmazonSearchService:ArtistSearchRequest (Amazon.ArtistRequest) in <0x003f1> Muine.CoverGetter:DownloadFromAmazon (Muine.Album album) in <0x00072> Muine.CoverGetter+GetAmazonThread:ThreadFunc () Any ideas? Carl
Forgot to mention, this is with either 0.8.3 or CVS (as of writing of the bug report).
I have noticed this bug as well. Maybe amazon has changed something about how they store albums online?
I think they are not serving requests without a valid amazon developer ID any longer. Up until recently, you could just leave the developer ID tag blank and you'd still get a reply, but that doesn't seem to work any more. Cheers -Tim
Is there a way to refresh album covers that failed in being downloaded?
Scott: you can manually drag-and-drop images from your web browser to the albumn in Muine to replace individual images, or delete ~/.gnome2/muine/songs.db to attempt to refetch all images. I've just tried inserting a valid subscription ID into the space marked "INSERT DEV TAG HERE" in CoverGetter.cs. Images are now being fetched as normal. You can register an ID at http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/registration/registration-form.html, although I must admit that I haven't read the small print to confirm that the licence is reasonable.
Caching images for more than 24 hours is explicitly forbidden. They might be ok with muine refreshing the images daily if muine has access to the amazon web site. If amazon stops offering a listing for a cd, muine has to delete the user's copy of the cover image when it does the daily refresh. Muine would have to include a link to the product page for each cd. The link doesn't have to be the image, so it could be hidden in a context menu for the album. The albums can't be linked to the web page of an amazon competitor, but muine could link the albums to informational pages. They reserve the right to crawl or access the application to verify that the images are being linked properly and to circumvent any technical measures to prevent access. This seems to refer to ignoring a robots.txt, but it is worded fairly generally.
FWIW, as a quick experiment I just went to google's image search and entered the artist/album titles of several selections from my very eclectic collection (turkish rap, russian rock, french lounge and electronica, vintage punk, etc) and it found 8 of ten right off the bat. A couple came back ambiguous, but choosing the first *square* image on the page proved adequate in every search that returned results. BTW this is my first exposure to muine... great job!
Unfortunately, the Google search API only supports the regular web search, and not the image search, so to use Google to get the images you'd need to screen-scrape the results pages. This is against Google's terms of use (http://www.google.com/intl/en/terms_of_service.html).
*** Bug 322404 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This has been somewhat resolved in CVS, where we first use MusicBrainz for cover fetching if possible, and then fall back to using amazon with a devkey from gconf if that fails. The question remains if we need to abide by the cover cache restrictions of the dev key if we ourselves aren't registering/using a key, but the user is. Just my initial reaction/question to this, it definitely need to be looked into more though I think.
Amazon has "deprecated" (read: removed) the web service that muine used for cover fetching. How about we just remove the amazon fetcher for now as it is not working anyway and the new one requires devkey stuff...
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 563101 ***