artist-info plugin

[ochosi]

hey everyone,
i've been working on a plugin lately, it's supposed to display information on the currently playing artist.
the info is being grabbed from last.fm for now, it seemed to have to most consistent way of displaying e.g. artist-bio. (in comparison wikipedia is a mess...)
feel free to suggest alternative sources, i don't claim to have looked very thoroughly into all the choices out there.

right now the plugin can display information on the artist and upcoming events, feel free to give it a try (with gmb_1.1.x). you can grab it from http://github.com/ochosi/gmusicbrowser.
for adding it to a layout you basically follow the same routine as with the lyrics-plugin (most of my code stems from that plugin anyways):
* either add the tab (right-click on a tab -> add context page -> ArtistInfo)
* or add it directly to the layout (e.g. "VBAbout      = (tabtitle="Info") ArtistBox _PluginArtistinfo")

of course you also have to activate the plugin in gmb's settings dialog (and if you just grab the raw file from github you also have to save the plugin to gmb's plugin folder, usually /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/plugins).


if you have questions and/or suggestions to the way it looks now feel free to comment!
(also see the screenshot attached if you're too lazy to try it ;) )

[Satoshi]

Will test it as soon as I finish compiling webkit.

[ochosi]

great.

a few more things i forgot to mention before:
* the code is still a bit crappy (and messy), i'm aware of that, i'll try to clean it up as soon as possible
* the plugin has no additional dependencies
* amongst planned features is also support for locally saving the artist-biographies

[Satoshi]

It is working as expected here.

Thanks a lot!

If I encounter any issues, I'll let you know.

[ochosi]

updated the artist-info plugin to use last.fm's api (now that they support redirecting), which makes it all a lot faster and more consistent.

short changelog for version 0.2:
* optionally automatically locally save your artist-bios (custom path)
* customizable artist-picture size
* customizable format for events (example in the wiki)
* right-click context menu on the artist-stats
* extra page with weblinks for the artist
* code cleanups

planned features for future versions:
* make the event-headers hyperlinks (would open the respective event's page on last.fm in your browser)

you can try the plugin directly from git (it's really straightforward), check the instructions in the >Installation part of the wiki.

[ochosi]

made another update today and implemented the hyperlinks on events (including tooltips).

available now both in git and for ubuntu users in our shimmerproject ppa (version ppa18).

[aboettger]

I've added the ability to obtain information from country to country and language specific.
https://github.com/aboettger/gmusicbrowser/commit/53ac6a3a17e483a0136b3c3ffbcab3a5e74d478f