Qball's Weblog

Amazon Fun

Tags General  gmpc 

I use amazon for fetching album info and cover art in gmpc. There been problems with fetching cover art for artists like: Arvo Pärt. Cover art is available if you look it up on amazon.com (but you do seem some utf-8 errors. :D )
I checked the forum for the  webservice, and saw that latin was probably the right encoding to use (utf-8 query doesn’t work, even though the result is utf-8). So converted it using glib did the query and it didn’t find it.

So looking at the resulting xml, it nicely sees  “Arvo Pärt”, but no result. If I search for  Arvo Pãrt , it does find the result.

This off course is just completely absurd.  Playing a bit more, I found out it does accept utf-8 in the keywords parameter, even more absurd.

So I thought, I convert it to the newer api that amazon offers, this api is indeed alot nicer. But still the same problems.

The only way to improve it, but certainly not error-proof is to try to convert ä->a. A way todo is, call g_utf8_normalize, then convert to string to ascii. This works reasonable ok, expect for stuff like æ and ß. If anybody has a better way todo this? please let me know.

There is also another (old) problem I have in gmpc, if I update a plugin (the .so file) while gmpc is running, gmpc will crash. Is there anyway to avoid this?

Qball