[kiboy6]

Thanks so much for the detailed reply - everything is much clearer now and at least I understand my issues perfectly without wondering at what strange gremlins were in my system!

afraid not, it depends on if you're using dharma or eden and if your media is stored locally or on a smb share.

eden + smb + python may even be impossible due to the lack of smb support in python.

No worries - It will be laborious but possible to do it manually.

when the script is downloading images, it checks if a new song has started after every downloaded image. what happed is it took over 7 minutes to download some Beres Hammond image. during this time you started (and finished) Etana. so when the Beres Hammond image was finally downloaded, the third song (Voicemail) was already playing and the script starts to download images for that artist.
in case you haven't seen it, this may be an interesting read:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=814...stcount=20

Ahhh, it all makes sense now. So my funky performance is directly down to the internet connection being crap +/ congested. Would it be impossible to make xbmc force refresh the slideshow every, say, 30 seconds to stop this ever happening to anyone with internet woes? Some artists have 100s of pictures, so an auto refresh (if possible) would ensure that there is always a slideshow going.

i wouldn't worry about xbmc converting your images to dds.
shouldn't have any effect on the script.

Cool - although that conversion seems like a waste of CPU time and disk space as the slideshow is perfectly fast with the .jpgs from last.fm. I wonder if the ArtistSlideshow folder could be somehow exluded from the "useddsfanart" setting. I'll check into that elsewhere...

i'll check if i can add an option for that. ;-)

That would be awesome. If it's possible to even have a few different generic images, so that there is a slideshow of generic images anytime you're waiting for last.fm +/ during playback of an artist with no last.fm images, that would be even more amazing. Here's a link to some generic pics I've been using locally: http://imageshack.us/g/803/colorofmusic.jpg/ - don't know if you might be able to / want to incorporate them

Thanks so much again for this beautiful addon