I've looked through the Wiki for foobar components, each of the top three 3rd party component sites, and done a fairly thorough search on the forums for a plugin or tool that will automatically search for new work by an artist (release, album, etc) when the artist is played. Alternatively, on load of foobar, it could search daily, weekly, etc for the whole Artist: tag.

Obviously something like Foo_uie_albumart is nearly as complex, and could probably be ported to do the task:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=29383&hl=

I can't believe no one has wanted/made such a tool, so... anyone know of one?

The first thing you would need is some database that lists new releases. A completely different component - although "nearly as complex" - is quite useless.

Displaying a JPEG in a panel is, like, just the same as querying a database for a new album release!

Is there a centralised source for every artist's releases and advances?

If not then it would be impossible to make something like this automatic.

I didnt look at the application closely enough, I thought it queried a database looking for Album Art like the LyricsDB plugin does.

However, I don't see where the sarcasm comes in, I never said the application uses were the same. I only used that example as the sourcecode is public.

Like LyricsDB, the application would need to:

• Retrieve Album/Artist from File Check/ID3 Check;
• Retrieve Album Cover from hdd if AlbumCover/New Release has already been found;
• If not found, check online database. AllMusic or GoogleMusic could do this;
• Display the album cover of the new release.

Music databases like freedb, foosic, or last.fm are quite exhaustive. Maybe these can be used for this purpose.

Personally, I can't see how what you're describing would be a very useful plugin. What I imagined as being perhaps a reasonable implementation of this would be something like:

Local database stores the most recent album you have of every artist in your media library. When you first run the plugin, it tells you about every full-length album in the online database (let's say freedb) which is the most recent release of one of your artists that you don't own.

Thereafter, it keeps track of which releases it has already told you about, and when you start foobar it queries freedb again for new releases. If there's anything new that it hasn't seen before, it lets you know.

This would only be plausible, though, if you can send off a few hundred queries to freedb in a short time without pissing them off. Is that OK?

Another way to do it would be to retrieve the source code of a page like this one using the artist tag :
http://www.last.fm/music/Venetian+Snares/+albums?order=date
Then parse its contents, looking for the album name, and then check if there are some newer releases from this artist.

I'm not sure but as afaik there's no component yet that fetches the html code of a webpage then parse it to gather informations about a title, relying to its tags. It could use a scripting lanuguage similar to the one used in david_dl's Coverdownloader does.
Anyone who would make such a component would really make my day.