In article ,
Mike  wrote:
>In article , Pete 
wrote:
>
>>To satisfy my curiosity, in the end I did some tcpdumping, and found
>>that vlc is querying 'mb.videolan.org' (aka goldeneye.videolan.org)
>>for the data.  The query it sends uses the 'Artist' and 'Title' tags
>>I supplied when I created the file.  The answers seem to come back
>>from musicbrainz.org.`
>
>Ah, I see why my VLC has never done that to me (it only shows artwork
>physically embedded in the mp3 as metadata) :-
>
>Tools/Preferences/Interface
>
>"Privacy/Network Interaction"/Album Art Download Policy
>
>[x] "Manual Download Only"
>[ ] "When track starts playing"
>[ ] "As soon as track is added"
>
>Either I switched that off on first install, or the default was "don't do
that".

Yep.  (I think) I've verified that it doesn't do any database queries
if it's set to 'Manual...'  It seems to need restarting to change a
preference setting, which was fooling me a bit yesterday.  But I'm
pretty sure it was set to "When track starts playing" when I first
looked, and I'm also sure I never set it before.

I was also puzzled by there not being any apparent download of the
art, but of course it's being cached (~/.cache/vlc/art/arturl).
I still haven't figured out what the IDs in that directory connect
to -- they aren't visible in any of the other downloaded data.

I'm much happier not having all my music selections broadcast to
the cloud (:-/), though I guess they're only actually being used
to locate the cover art.

 -- Pete --

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05