Why does it suck so bad?
So I am stuck with MA.
Sounds like a good way to get support. Try to rephrase your wordings a bit is always a good idea when you ask for help.
#fetching album art etc fails for the most part.
halcyon moss
Music Assistant fails to find artist tracks album art etc for 90% of it
Artist metadata or album metadata ? Please describe exactly what you are missing. If the artwork/metadata is present locally together with your files, MA will pick it up immediately. If the info is not present, currently we only load it very slowly in the background but this is heavy rate limited. The project has grown so rapidly that we are hammering those metadata API's too much and they don't like that. In the future we will have a proxy in place to solve this for the most part but for now it is what it is.
You can impact this by having the metadata locally present. Read our docs about this for tips how to tag your files and provide additional metadata. There are also tools you can run on your files, such as beetz.
halcyon moss
If the info is present in your local filestructure, there is nothing we have to fetch online and it should all show up automatically in the library with all that metadata present. Maybe post a few screenshots of your file structure so we get an idea how its setup and if we can find any clues what is wrong ?
If a refresh also doesnt recover the metadata (and not even from online sources, because that is also what will be triggered by doing a hard refresh) then something is really off. Lets start by that screenshots but maybe also share a full logfile so we can check if there are any errors.
royal coral
Do you have the artist thumbs as individual picture files in the artist folder?
halcyon moss
Like I said above, fetching the artist metadata from online sources is heavily limited. We will fetch it in the background but super slowly (like in the order of max 5 per day). We are a free opensource project and we dont have the resources to pay the large fees for those metadata services to give us unlimited bandwidth. Now that we're rapidly growing, this has begun to be a real pain as you noticed. We are discussing some options to make this less problematic but for now this is what it is.
If you are using local files and you want the artwork to show up instantly, make sure to store the metadata in your artist folders. See the docs how the folder structure should look like, we also support nfo files for extended metadata like artist bio etc. as well as fanart images.
You can look into a tool like beetz to scan your mediafiles and grab the metadata.
The fact that musicbrainz is throwing you so many errors is btw suspicious. It should be slow, not throing errors. You may be have some sort of (dns) internet filter blocking the requests ?