[hoschilo]

I've been thinking some more about the issue of theaudiodb.com going offline due to heavy usage. I want to share my ideas about one way I can address this and get everyone's thoughts on this.

AS is open source software licensed under a GPL license. That means I can't (and don't want to) really charge for it. I'm not even the original author of the script, so keeping it open and available is important to me (and seriously, out of my control). What I can "charge" for is access to me. So I'm thinking about requiring that to get an answer from me on something you must provide me evidence that you are monetarily supporting either fanart.tv or theaudiodb.com (probably via DM). Any amount would get you access to me for 1 year. I'm not going to guarantee any kind of response time or have any kind of contract. I'm doing this in my spare time, and sometimes that means I won't be available. Questions (and their answers) would still be posted here for everyone's edification, and others are welcome to step up and support those who opt to not support one of the two sites.

I'm also hoping the original author and others on the Kodi team might chime in on this. I clearly don't want to do anything contrary to the community norms here. I'm just trying to find a way to encourage people to support the sites that make AS possible. I suspect this will be a pain in the ass and make many people unhappy if I do it, but you'll be equally unhappy when the sites that provide the images are gone too.

Thoughts?

Some thoughts from my side. I’m more or less a newbie in this area so some or even all of my considerations might be wrong:
Kodi along with all those addons and Skins is getting better and better and sometimes I wonder how long it can “survive” independent in this money driven world. This is maybe also valid for community driven sites like TADB, FANART.TV and MUSICBRANZ. However looking at the sponsors situation we can see that attention is already there from some big players.
I have recently donated to all of them, unfortunately not all of them are handling donations in a proper way in order that for the next time I would spend money again without hesitating.

Personally for me best would be if you can buy API at the individual sites in order to access the database. The idea is available at Fanart.TV but it appears only for heavy users…. I guess the handling of such a system would probably end up in even more financial efforts as well maybe there could be possibly a problem with “property rights” of the stuff provided on these sites.

The traffic at least on TADB seems not really be a problem caused by AS if I understood DOCWRA #1901 correctly. I do also believe that the traffic should decrease once the stuff of all of users library stuff is downloaded. I guess it is similar for streaming services however the potential for more traffic is surely bigger there. Personally I do almost only stream – for most of the stuff I’m listening to the artwork is already available on my computer/NAS as I’m listening always similar type of music and therefore artists.

I therefore believe we should first try to minimize unnecessary traffic by downloading already available artwork as suggested by LEETWANKER. I realize that in my case the setting was set to “Remote frist” which is not really required as a lot of stuff already available on my “server”. Now I’m a little confused by the statement that only for "new installs" this would have an effect. If so this should be definitely changed. I don’t know the logic for downloading new pictures (I guess this causes most of the traffic) but for me it would be also fair if the database on the internet for a specific artists is checked only once per month or so if artist is already available locally.

Finally, for me AS and “connected” sites such as TADB and FANART.TV is really value adding for my media center. It would be really a pitty to loose this. I hope more people will be aware of this and would follow the request of PKSCOUT of supporting these sites. Looking at the donors table at FANART.TV I believe there is still a big potential.