[pkscout]

For music in the library, my position would be it should be the responsibility of the user to properly tag the music files with MBID. I wouldn't apply much computing resource in trying to fix what the user didn't or couldn't (or provide a setting switch to not search for MBID for music in the library). That leaves streaming music which I don't see an easy answer for.

OK, I have updated code that now behaves like this for music in the library:

1- ask Kodi for the MBID
2- if nothing, check and see if there is a MBID file from a previous version of AS
3- if there is no file, return an empty string

For streams AS still tries to find a MBID, although I'm thinking about dropping that. Why? Because with just the artist name you can still get artwork from htbackdrops and artist info from last.fm.

Having said all that, if I go this route, I think I need to change the default settings so that htbackdrops is the image site on by default (right now it's fanart.tv). That way someone who has no MBIDs in their music library will still get back some images. I also need to figure out how to put something in the settings to tell folks that if they enable fanart.tv or theaudiodb that their music files will need MBIDs.

This would be a pretty substantial change, so I'd really like some feedback from other folks on this. The advantage is that this completely eliminates the need to beat on the musicbrainz server to get the ID. And since I still look for the MBID file, folks upgrading don't necessarily have to add anything to their music. The disadvantage is for new users (or new music for existing users) there may be less information available without the MBID.