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**pkscout** · (This post was last modified: 2013-02-17, 06:59 by pkscout.)

That's a change at last.fm. I noticed it today myself.

I just checked, and it looks like that the API now returns the first 300 characters (or first paragraph, whichever is smaller I think) instead of the full bio. There doesn't appear to be a replacement call to get the full bio, so the best I can do is try and filter out the tag line at the end.

This is unfortunate, but I don't there there is going to be a reasonable way to get th full bio any longer.

weeone · (This post was last modified: 2013-02-18, 22:18 by weeone.)

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**pkscout** · 2013-02-17, 09:09

I suspect they did it to drive traffic to their site. The API access is free, so they need people to come to the site to get served ads and such. It is what it is. I looked into Wikipedia, but the API access looks more complicated than I want to get into. If someone else wants to take a crack at it, I'm happy to merge the code in later.

As for the READ MORE in the text, Last.fm does provide that as a URL, but the addon can't make it display as a link. That would be up to the skin (if such a thing is even possible). If there is interest from any skin developers, I can look at adding a couple of new infolabels to AS for the URL and text. Otherwise I'm just going to try and figure out how to filter that text out.

**pkscout** · 2013-02-17, 09:32

And that's fixed. I'm waiting to see about updated language files before I send in a pull request into the main addon repo, so it'll be a few days. If anyone finds it morally reprehensible to see the read more link, you can download the update from here:

https://github.com/pkscout/script.artistslideshow

This also includes the fix so that artist bio info will be downloaded even if you are using the override slideshow directory (assuming you have the bio download enabled in the settings).

weeone · (This post was last modified: 2013-02-18, 22:18 by weeone.)

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**pkscout** · 2013-02-18, 03:38

Just go ahead and post you tips here.

weeone · (This post was last modified: 2013-02-18, 22:13 by weeone.)

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**pkscout** · 2013-02-18, 06:24

That seems like an awful lot of work just to get full bios. AS already allows you to override the downloaded artist bio, so if you find bios you like better, you could just do that without having to do all the rest of what you noted.

weeone · (This post was last modified: 2013-02-18, 22:19 by weeone.)

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johnsills1 · 2013-02-18, 16:25

pkscuot,

Here is the link to the Log I pasted on Pastebin.....

I will describe what I did so you can track it in the Log

First, I opened XBMC and immediately started playing a playlist of music that I have created with the Playlist creator in XBMC

Notice, the first song was by Metallica
I skipped to a different song a few times and then hit the Tab key to make the display change so that I could see the Artist Slideshow

Red Hot Chili Peppers happened to be the artist when I switched to Movie Library view with the song still playing, I skipped the song a few more times and then went back to the Artist Slideshow screen and Red Hot Chili Peppers was still showing for each and every song that played from then on out. Hope that helps

http://pastebin.com/JZdshK9U

**pkscout** · 2013-02-19, 03:20

Nothing is jumping out in the log. What skin are you using? Also, are you sure the log you uploaded was from the actions you described? I ask because according to the log, the first song played was by Bush. After that was Eminem. I can't find any indication in the log that anything by Red Hot Chili Peppers was ever played.

johnsills1 · 2013-02-19, 03:26

I will have to try again. Maybe the log was not the right one. I remember playing the songs the first time I tried to get the log. I will upload another log and make another post here with a link. Sorry to have wasted your time with that log

**KevinSartori** · 2013-02-20, 15:37

I've started using Artist Slideshow on my Crystalbuntu AppleTV1 and I really like it! Thanks for your efforts!

I looked through the options, but didn't see a feature I'm looking for, so I thought I'd ask here. Is there a way to have the artist pictures displayed without cropping? I'll love to be able to see the whole picture and would prefer black bars to maintain aspect ratio. This would be especially nice for some of the lower resolution images.

Also, I was thinking, for the folks who prefer the cropping, I've noticed that the cropping seems to only happen from the bottom. I'm seeing a lot of foreheads! If possible, maybe it would make sense to equally crop the image from the top and bottom, so that the image is centered. Just an idea!

Thanks again!

msfc · 2013-02-20, 15:41

Thank you for looking into the problem. I hope that someone can help you to use a different scraper. I would have suggested trying the Universal Artist Scraper but I have some issues with it in Frodo.

I had no objection to the read more link. I think it might be better to leave it as it sort of explains why the bio is so short. An active link, if you can figure out how, would be an improvement but still not ideal as it will likely launch my web browser taking me out of XBMC.

On the earlier multiple artists issue, the way Music Brainz tags them is separating them with ';'. That is what their auto tagger tool does and what I have now done with all the relevant tracks in my collection. XBMC displays such tags separated with '/'. Since AS does not show multiple artists for this case, I'm guessing it is seeing the tags before XBMC re-writes the ';' to '/'. Please add ';' to the list of separators you mentioned?

gibxxi · 2013-02-20, 19:16

Not sure if this will help in your particular case, but XBMC supports defining a separator via the advancedsettings.xml file.

It would be added to the file with the following XML structure:

Code:
<musiclibrary>

    <itemseparator>;</itemseparator>

</musiclibrary>

XBMC may (or may not) pass this on to add-ons that use the music library (like Artist Slideshow).