[Banshee-List] Frustrations with cover art

[Damien Radtke <damienradtke gmail com>]

I apologize for the tone of this e-mail, but Banshee has for quite a
long time been simply unable to reliably download and display album
cover art. I am currently using Banshee 2.4.x (tested with both 2.4.0
from the repos and 2.4.1 built from source) on openSUSE 12.1, and from
what I can see, Banshee doesn't actually *ever* download album art.

To make sure I started with a clean slate, I first removed

    ~/.cache/media-art
    ~/.config/banshee-1

and started Banshee with

    banshee --debug --fetch-artwork > debug.txt

If I open the resulting file, I can find two lines like this

    [1 Debug 00:32:02.512] Starting - Downloading Cover Art
    [9 Debug 00:32:06.907] Finished - Downloading Cover Art

The start and finish debug messages are right next to each other,
which I assume means that no work was actually done. I even tried
starting it with

    BANSHEE_FORCE_COVER_ART_FETCH=1 banshee --debug > debug.txt

to see if that would help, but the results are exactly the same. There
is no change in the GUI to suggest that any album art was fetched.

What the hell is going on? Banshee apparently can find cover art that
is already stored in the music's folder okay, but for albums that
don't already have their art, nothing is done. At all. I've tried
everything I can think of, and nothing I do will get Banshee to
download the missing cover art.

I'm pretty sure that Banshee used to be able to do this, so what the
hell happened? I've looked at the source for the cover art extension,
and there doesn't appear to be any obvious reference to the internet
sources it supposedly uses if no local art is found.

Any information or advice would be greatly appreciated. This is
incredibly frustrating, and I can't find any information on this.

Thanks,
~Damien