[pkscout]

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.

OK, I think I've fixed this. 1.8.8 is now available in my repo, so anyone using that will get it soon. I've submitted 1.8.8 to the official repo as well. I suspect that will get updated in the next couple days. One thing to note. This fixes AS for Kodi Helix and later. If you feel like we need to go back further than that, I'll have to find a copy of the older version and do the modification (I was a bad programmer and did not branch my git repo when I made major code changes for Helix).