Banshee cover art lookup at musicbrainz

Since some days I am using banshee music player in version 0.13.1 for simple playing my music at ubuntu gutsy. True, it’s a nice simple player and even the default plugins like “Metadata searcher” and “Music recomendations” are not that bad.

But did you think of where the informations are coming from? Everytime I play a new music file the banshee is doing some HTTP-requests to some webservices like musicbrainz to get the album art and for example to last.fm to get the music recomendations. OK, there is a cache thought banshee would not lookup everytime you play the same song again.

I grant you that im a quite little paranoid. I do not really want to push the information of what music I am currently listening to the internet.

So I started to disable the plugins … at first “music recomendations” … ok, no problem – no more requests to last.fm. Next I tried to fix the lookups to musicbrainz by disabling the “metadata searcher”. No way … even after a restart of banshee there are still lookups to the musicbrainz hosts.

After some searching on my filesystem I found the configuration files at ~/.gconf/apps/banshee. Like the %gconf.xml files told me the plugins are truely disabled and even after watching at all other files in this directory I found no misconfigurations.

Until now I could not find anything out in the net to change that behaviour. Any ideas out there?

At next i’ll try to take a look at the source code to find out what’s going on there…

UPDATE: I just checked out the subversion repository:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/banshee/trunk/banshee/ banshee

After some research I found the method FindAsin() in file

src/Core/Banshee.Services/Banshee.Metadata.MusicBrainz/MusicBrainzQueryJob.cs

That method queries the following URL:

http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release/?type=xml&artist={0}&title={1}

The method is called by the Lookup() method everytime when the artist is set in the file, the cover does not exist and the network connection is available. musicbrainz.org is only called to get an identity string. With that string the URL

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/{0}.01.SCLZZZZZZZ.jpg

gets called to finally fetch the cover image from amazon.com.

It seems there is no way to disable that by configuration even in current svn revision. Maybe there is some deeper in the code but I don’t think so…

My understanding is that the arts should be fetched by the “plugins” – when the plugins are disabled the arts should not be fetched. Well if that interpretation is not correct there should be at least some configuration option to disable that.

Seems like someone should drop a change request, bugreport or something.

UPDATE 2: Whoops … ticket added.