[pkscout]

So there have been major changes made then, to how the nuts and bolts all work inside the add-on ?

I'd categorize them as somewhat major. Just short of actually being major changes. I stripped out all the functions that used urllib or urllib2 and started using requests instead. The requests module seems easier to use and provides better feedback (from what I can tell).

I just played the artist "The Smiths" and noticed there are some strange text characters in the similar artists area.

Looking in the Userdata\addon_data\script.artistslideshow\ArtistInformation\d11af12e folder and looking at the lastfmartistsimilar.nfo file, I can see the same characters in there. so maybe its just something coming from Last.FM for this particular artist?

Looks like it. When I access Last.fm in my browser using this url:

Code:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?autocorrect=1&api_key=afe7e856e4f4089fc90f841980ea1ada&method=artist.getSimilar&artist=The%2BSmiths

I get that same garble of artist information back. That's the exact URL Artist Slideshow would use to find the similar artists to The Smiths, so I can only assume that there is something funky going on at Last.fm with regards to their API stuff. If you go to The Smiths at the "normal" Last.fm page and check out the similar artists, a rather normal looking list is returned.