[pkscout]

Can I ask how the metadata site lookup works for TheAudioDB?

Just looking at the statistics.... Artist.slideshow is hitting our site over 1.5 million times over a 24hr period on the searchtrack, searchalbum, album-mb methods. Thats over 6 million hits a day if you include all api methods using that api key.

That seems like a lot and i'm wondering if it can be improved in some way by calling the API less. I'm not sure its sustainable in the long term to have this much API usage for a single add-on. Am I right in thinking it downloads the artwork every single time as well?

What about caching or using the musicbrainz id only?

Yikes. That does seem high. Here's how it's suppose to be working:

1- AS gets the musicbrainz ID either from Kodi or by finding it on MusicBrainz. That is cached in a file, so after the initial lookup it'll never look that up again. If AS doesn't find one, it will try again in a couple of weeks.

2- If the user has selected to use TheAudioDB (and it's off by default), then AS asks for the artist bio (via artist-mb.php), albums (via album.php) for the given MusicBrainz ID (if no MusicBrainz ID, then AS does not query TheAudioDB). It then caches the artist bio and album info. AS won't check again those for updates for 2 weeks.

So far, so good. But I think I found the problem. AS is asking for and downloading a list of images every time. I could've sworn that it was honoring the cache timing for the bios and albums, but it is not. Let me look into fixing that.

I'm really sorry about this. I try to be a good API citizen, but in this case I flat out fell down on the job. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.