Track fetched is not the most listened to/popular track on LastFM and therefore misses metadata

[kskrivankova]

What did you do?

I tried reading metadata after retrieving a track with specific artist name and track title (eg. Khruangbin, Maria También).

What did you expect to happen?

I expected to receive the track object describing the most popular track available, and therefore with the highest probability of containing all the metadata.

What actually happened?

The track I got in the case described (and others) is a lower search result found (checked by comparing listeners and scrobbles in the metadata and on the website). As a result, the track object retrieved via the API usually miss useful metadata, such as mbid or album.

What versions are you using?

• OS: Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
• Python: Python 3.8.10
• pylast: 5.0.0

Please include code that reproduces the issue.

The best reproductions are self-contained scripts with minimal dependencies.

@get_network
def get_track_metadata(network: pylast.LastFMNetwork, artist: str, title: str) -> dict:
    track = network.get_track("Khruangbin", "Maria También")

    return {
        "artist": track.get_artist(),
        "title": track.get_title(),
        "album": track.get_album(),
        "mbid":  track.get_mbid()
    }

[hugovk]

Let's see what's happening here.

network.get_track("Khruangbin", "Maria También") creates a Track object using those strings, with no network calls.

track.get_artist() returns an Artist object, created from those strings, no network calls.

track.get_title() returns the title string again, no network calls.

track. get_album() is the first network call, to track.getInfo and returns this, which doesn't contain any album info, so pylast returns None:

<lfm status="ok">
	<track>
		<name>Maria También</name>
		<url>https://www.last.fm/music/Khruangbin/_/Maria+Tambie%CC%81n</url>
		<duration>0</duration>
		<streamable fulltrack="0">0</streamable>
		<listeners>258</listeners>
		<playcount>1314</playcount>
		<artist>
			<name>Khruangbin</name>
			<mbid>aea4c9b9-9f8d-49dc-b2ca-57d6f26e8634</mbid>
			<url>https://www.last.fm/music/Khruangbin</url>
		</artist>
		<toptags/>
	</track>
</lfm>

track.get_mbid() also calls track.getInfo, and again there's no MBID data there, so pylast returns None.