Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Album art downloading and Amazon

[Jonathan Matthew <notverysmart gmail com>]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:32 AM, Bastien Nocera<hadess hadess net> wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-07-25 at 19:13 +0300, Erik Houghton wrote:
>> What are the plans for handling "album art fetching" from Amazon once
>> the 15th of August passes?
>
> What's so special about that date?
>
>>  As I understand it, Amazon is going to
>> require some sort of API account (?) or something of the sort in order
>> for the art to be able to be fetched? Is there an alternative in the
>> works, such as a plugin to fetch it from Last.fm? Just wondering,
>> because in my experience Rhythmbox's ability to get it's art from
>> Amazon has been very useful to me (CDDB and MusicBrainz have failed to
>> find my music often), and one of the several key reasons I keep coming
>> back to it as my favorite audio player.
>
> I haven't heard anything about Amazon changing their ToS for this
> stuff...

I hadn't heard anything either, but after some digging through their
forums and developer documentation (they seem to be trying to hide
this API for some reason), I found this:
http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=444 ..
from August 15 on, clients will need to sign API requests using a
per-account secret key. As far as I can tell, we will no longer be
able to use Amazon as a cover art provider, since once you've included
a secret key in some GPL source code, it's not really a secret any
more.

Implementing a new cover art provider will probably fit somewhere into
my pile of things to work on, but given my current lack of hacking
time and the amount of other stuff that I'm more interested in working
on, I probably won't get to it soon.