Authors: Simon Steinbeiß and Pasi Lallinaho
Maintainer: Simon Steinbeiß

This plugin displays artist information, partly from within gmusicbrowser itself, but mostly retrieved from last.fm via its api.

After activating this plugin you can either add it to your layout either by adding the widget PluginArtistinfo to your layout-file (usually stored in ~/.config/gmusicbrowser/layouts) or if by right-click adding it to your layouts context-tabs. E.g. in the Lists, Library and Context layout you can add the plugin-tab by right-clicking one of the existing lists (Playlist, Queue, Album, Lyrics etc.) and choosing Open Context page > Artistinfo.

The new widget/tab will display artist information from gmusicbrowser on top, meaning statistics (number of albums, songs and rating) and a picture if set. You can set the artist-picture by right-clicking the artist's statistical information and choosing either Set Picture for a locally saved picture or Search for Picture for finding one on the internet with the Picture finder plugin.

Below this section the plugin displays information retrieved from last.fm, the biographical data, the upcoming events and in a separate tab weblinks to search different webpages for the playing artist in your browser. The biographical information can be saved locally (settings below), the events will always be retrieved live as they are always subject to change.

In the settings dialog of this plugin, you can change whether/where local data should be stored (only for biography) and the artist-picture size (as seen below in the screenshots' upper left corner).
Furthermore the event-format can be customized by using the tags from last.fm's artist.getEvents api with a leading “%”, e.g. “%title” or “%city”. For more tags check out this sample. If you want to add a linebreak, use “\\”. All in all, a custom format could look like this:

%headliner playing at %name\\%attendance people attending\\in %city (%country), on %startDate\\\\

sample output:

Devendra Banhart playing at O2 Arena
143 people attending
in London (United Kingdom), on Wed, 01 Dec 2010


Devendra Banhart playing at Cardiff International Arena
122 people attending
Cardiff (United Kingdom), on Thu, 09 Dec 2010


...

The only additional dependency are the icons needed for the weblinks page. (Source and license information.)

Alternatively you can use the elementary icon-theme which already contains these icons.

You can download the latest version of the plugin from its git repository: http://github.com/ochosi/gmusicbrowser

You can also use this link to download the file directly: artistinfo.pm

After downloading the file, move it to your gmusicbrowser-plugins-directory, either in /home/$USER/.config/gmusicbrowser/plugins - or, if you want all users in your operating system be able to use the plugin in /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/plugins. (You might require superuser rights for the second option. E.g. “sudo mv artistinfo.pm /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/plugins” or use “su”.)