Lag on Banshee due to empty track info + amazon cover downloading

[Wolter HV]

When you are using Banshee and you manually change the song, CoverGloobus suffers from a short lag (of about 5 seconds) and then reacts to the change. For the more technical of you, the terminal output [INFO] Song changed: (...) is displayed after the 5 seconds.

However, when the song is changed naturally --as in when the previous song ends the next one starts playing-- CoverGloobus exhibits a perfect, normal behavior and changes the cover (along with other metadata) instantly.

So I tried to fix the problem myself to write a patch, but while troubleshooting the players/Banshee.py module I found out what I explained in the paragraph above, and then I had no clue where the problem would be. I believe, however, that the problem is located where CoverGloobus interacts with the designated player.

[Wolter HV (wolterh)]

Ok, I have found there is a debug flag one can enable, and I found as well that the problem occurs because there is some Amazon cover downloader that is called when the cover is not found. This implies that the problem resides in that the object CoverGloobus.track.cover is not working properly when Banshee is selected as a player.

However, the solution consists of two steps:
1. Make the CoverGloobus.track object work when Banshee is selected the player.
2. Make the Amazon cover downloading function asynchronious.

[Wolter HV (wolterh)]

Well, it looks like if this was my personal journal for fixing this. Obviously there is a short way, for those of you who suffer from impatience, which is disabling the Amazon covers from the general tab in the configuration window of CoverGloobus.

[Wolter HV (wolterh)]

Ok, I finally came up with a temporal fix, which needs no patch, because its just one line.

Make the first line of the function change_song in the module ./covergloobus.py be:
self.track = self.player.get_track ()
That's all there is to it.

My brief explanation:
The change_song function was looking for a cover in Amazon because ---needless to say, the Amazon covers option was enabled, and-- the self.track variable wasn't defined. My solution simply makes the script define the track (by getting its info from the current player) and then attempt to find its cover and other information. This way, covergloobus never attempts to download a cover, unless the current track has no cover.

[Wolter HV (wolterh)]

So... all there is to do now --which I will not do-- is to implement the asynchronious Amazon cover downloading, which on purpose, hasn't worked for my coverless songs.

[Alexandr Grigorcea (cahr-gr)]

just disable Amazon covers from configuration window

so the problems are:
1. banshee sends a lot of signals, some of them make cg think that playback is stopped, so it removes all the info
2. requests to amazon block cg (we need to make it threaded)