"cover art" and "cover art search" plugins do not seem to do anything (undocumented last.fm requirement)

[cometdog]

Running Rhythmbox as default install in 12.04 Beta 1, I didn't see album art for many of my albums. I found that "cover art" and "cover art search" were already selected in the plugins, but that did not seem to matter. No documentation appeared anywhere online or in the built-in help related to cover art. There were no menu options that I could see appearing or disappearing when enabling/disabling the plugins.

It was impossible to tell whether Rhythmbox couldn't find the cover art, if it wasn't looking in the first place. Furthermore the cover art was missing which was present in some cases with Banshee in Ubuntu 11.10.

I was finally trying to submit a bug report, ran
rhythmbox -d >& rhythmbox.log
and started searching through that log file. I finally happened upon this line:
(13:42:39) [0x1175690] [LastFMSearch.search] /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/artsearch/lastfm.py:303: can't search: no last.fm account details

That is the ONLY place I saw mentioned that a last.fm account might be related to cover art searching. While it's perfectly reasonable to require some kind of service to fetch album art, this requirement is obscure and invisible to the user.

There are a couple of bug reports about cover art fetching not working which could easily be a result of this.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: rhythmbox 2.96-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-21.34-generic 3.2.13
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-21-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Apr 1 13:32:46 2012
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/rhythmbox
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Beta amd64 (20120327.1)
ProcEnviron:
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SourcePackage: rhythmbox
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[cometdog (ericctharley)]

Hmm, I had edited the bug title when I realized that the problem was that I didn't have a last.fm account, but that edit seems to have disappeared. If anyone feels this bug should be renamed, feel free to do so (I don't know how or can't).

[cometdog (ericctharley)]

....ok, could edit after all...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Antoine-terracol (antoine-terracol)]

Same problem here, 12.04 64 bit

[Marcos V (marcosviv88)]

Found no info but this, experiencing same problem. Ubuntu 12.04 32 bits.

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running apport-collect <bug #> and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for rhythmbox (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]