Tag lookups asked by MusicBrainz id whenever Lidarr had one, which is always.
The reasoning was that an id cannot be ambiguous the way a name can. In practice
Last.fm's mbid index is stale and partial, and it answered "the artist you
supplied could not be found" for Devo, Escape the Fate, Blasterjaxx, Frank
Carter & the Rattlesnakes and a long tail of others -- artists whose Last.fm
pages plainly exist and carry precisely the tags the moods are built from. Devo
is tagged new wave, post-punk and 80s; Escape the Fate is tagged post-hardcore,
screamo and emocore. Both were skipped.
Ask by name first, which is the index Last.fm's own site runs on, and keep the
id only as a fallback for a name Lidarr spells differently.
Failures were also being dropped without recording the attempt, so every one of
those artists was re-queried on every subsequent pass, indefinitely. They are now
distinguished: an artist that neither key resolves is recorded as fetched with
no tags and not asked about again, while a genuine failure -- a rate limit, a
bad key -- is deliberately left unrecorded so the next pass retries it. Telling
the two apart needed the service's own error number, so LastfmError now carries
it.
Emma Thorpe