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Recent track feed with artist thumbnail?

 
    • nerstu said...
    • User
    • 18 Apr 2008, 23:04

    Recent track feed with artist thumbnail?

    In the top artist feed the thumbnail of the artist is in the feed. Is there any feed about recent played tracks/artists that contain the artist thumbnail info?

    Thanks in advance!

  • No, though people have created script workarounds that scrape the data (the url of the artist image) directly off the artist's Last.fm page.

    Edit: Try this.

  • Unfortunately, that artist info is really hard to get to on-demand. There's no info feed for artists, so even though you can get Similar Artists, Top Fans, Top Tracks, Top Albums, Top Tags, and Current Events, you can't get a simple artist detail.

    I'm thinking that if you pull the similar artists feed, pick the first artist in the list, then pull that artist's similar artists feed, you should be able to spin through those artists and find the target artist. Depending on how last.fm builds those relationships, that may or may not be 100% reliable. I'll give it a try and if it works, add it to Zen Radar recent tracks feed.

    EDIT:
    OK, this method does work, but does not seem to generate matches for all artists, so there are some blanks here and there. I've got a cron job running to update all of the artists that are already cached in our DB (around 1100) with the image data, it should be done by this time tomorrow. Any artists not already in our DB will have their image data saved as they come in on the last.fm recent tracks feeds.

    ZenRadar recent tracks feeds now have small and large artist images in the artist nodes, like this:

    <artist mbid="">
    Sound Tribe Sector 9
    <url>http://www.last.fm/music/Sound+Tribe+Sector+9</url>;
    <image_small>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/50/86460.jpg</image_small>;
    <image_large>http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/160/86460.jpg</image_large>;
    </artist>

    Which will give you:




    Artists that we haven't found images for will have the last.fm default "no artist" images:


    http://cdn.last.fm/depth/catalogue/noimage/noartist_50px.jpg


    http://cdn.last.fm/depth/catalogue/noimage/noartist_140px.jpg

    I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions.

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