These change every time you load the page and are pulled from my new site http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org

<?php include(“http://artists.trivialbeing.org/thumbdisplay.php?random=1&num=30″); ?>

For my new dark XP theme I wan­ted a sultry sexy night time ambience, this high reso­lu­tion screen cap from Lost in Trans­la­tion was the per­fect choice. It came in a 1280x960 reso­lu­tion so I have twea­ked it a little to fit my 1280x1024 screen, you shouldn’t notice a thing.

Oh the joys of JD and Turk. Alas my Scrubs marathon hath commenced.

A big fea­ture I wan­ted to inc­lude in my foobar2000 music pla­yer was artist ima­ges, i.e. pic­tu­res of the per­for­mers. If I had the ima­ges this would be pos­si­ble using either the track info mod (which I now favour) or the album art panel. The trou­ble was, unlike album art, there was no ser­vice that offe­red image down­loads and the only web­site that offe­red a com­prehen­sive artist image data­base was last​.fm. My first approach to this pro­blem was to create a local C script that would, in a very roun­da­bout man­ner, obtain the artist image url from last​.fm and then down­load it. This pro­ved rather slow and buggy due to various artist names, timeout pro­blems and image crea­tion, yet it suf­fi­ced for the majo­rity, lea­ding me to a collec­tion of 2000 artist ima­ges which I pos­ted earlier. 

Still not happy, I loo­ked into crea­ting a web ser­vice, based on hydro­ge­nau­dio forums mem­ber Chronial’s efforts and ulti­ma­tely we deve­lo­ped an online resource for down­loa­ding artist ima­ges. I do not plan to make the code public, mainly at Chronial’s request. I have crea­ted this ser­vice here: http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​A​R​T​IST where ARTIST is the performer’s image you are loo­king for, for instance: 

http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​the mic­ropho­nes
http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​b​l​o​n​die
http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​r​a​d​i​o​h​ead

Ima­ges are first sour­ced from Last​.fm before being cached so as not to cause any undue strain on last​.fm’s ser­vers.

To make things more use­ful you can append the URL with &outputmode=img,
e.g. http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​?​a​=​b​l​o​n​d​i​e​&​a​m​p​;​o​u​t​p​u​t​m​o​d​e​=​img
and a wrap­per of sorts is avai­la­ble via http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​p​i​c​/​A​R​T​I​S​T​.​jpg
e.g. http://​artists​.tri​vial​being​.org/​p​i​c​/​b​l​o​n​d​i​e​.​jpg
which can be used on forums:


or in an artist down­load script. I use the URL2File com­mand line appli­ca­tion with this command:

URL2File http://artists.trivialbeing.org/pic/%1.jpg  C:\artistimages\thumbnails\%1.jpg –o 60
00Where %1 is the first para­me­ter pas­sed to the batch file and 60 is a one minute timeout. 

Using a cus­tom run com­po­nent I can call this batch file using foo­bar and a key­board short­cut or but­ton; when pas­sing the artist (%artist%) to the batch file you should take care to replace cha­rac­ters that can­not be used in crea­ting win­dows file­na­mes. Foreign cha­rac­ters work too, as do spe­cial cha­rac­ters such as the artist “Why?” or “Wham!”. 

When using image out­put, if no artist is found the script returns this image:

With regards to copy­right issues, Last​.fm’s uploa­ding policy sta­tes:
Because copy­righ­ted ima­ges tend to be very res­tric­tive about where they can be used we ask that you only upload ima­ges which are public domain, or that are expli­citly licen­sed for pro­mo­tio­nal use. There are a num­ber of pla­ces you can find ima­ges open to public use. First, try to find out if the artist has any pro­mo­tio­nal pic­tu­res on their offi­cial home­page (they usually do). 

For those without foobar2000, I give an exam­ple of an alter­na­tive use. I took the recently pla­yed tracks RSS feed, pla­yed with it a little using mag­pierss and create a page that shows recent tracks along side artist ima­ges, an exam­ple can be found here:
http://​fofr​.tri​vial​being​.net/​p​a​g​e​.​p​h​p​?​p​=​n​o​w​p​l​a​y​ing

Oceans 13, Shrek 3, Rush Hour 3, Pira­tes of the Carib­bean 3, Bourne Ulti­ma­tum, Harry Pot­ter X, Spider-man 3, Evan Almighty, Fan­tas­tic Four 2, Hills Have Eyes II, Hos­tel 2, Die Hard 4, White Noise 2, Young Han­ni­bal. Oh well, at least we can all rely on Michael Bay’s Trans­for­mers movie to be a stea­ming pile of crap that isn’t a sequel.