A multi‐source seeder for digital releases

MusicBrainz
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527

Sorry but I’ve had enough. @tigerman325 please refrain from using my instance of a-tisket going forward.

I’ve tried to give you the benefit of the doubt over the last year or two, but frankly, I find you to be rude, arrogant and condescending. You have repeatedly made claims which are not only wrong, but easily verifiable, for example:

https://en.deezercommunity.com/deezer-catalogue-45/deezer-in-hong-kong-67687?postid=179248#post179248

At the moment, Deezer isn’t available in HK or mainland China. I’ll forward your feedback to our decision-makers here so that your suggestion has an adequate home.

You also demand that I should just add features like scraping Apple Music webpages for barcodes, as though it were trivial. This demonstrates that you have no understanding on a technical level, given that fetching, parsing and extracting structured data from a web page is much more complex and error prone than querying JSON APIs (which are specifically designed for this purpose). Adding this functionality would be time consuming on a well maintained and architected application, let alone a-tisket.

I stated right from the start that, given the state of the code, I would do my best to keep the site working, fix minor bugs and add minor features, but it was highly unlikely that there would ever be significant changes to the functionality. Being perfectly honest, the comments you have made on this thread have made me less motivated to work on a-tisket. Have you ever considered the idea that spending time and money running and maintaining something for others to use (for free) only to then be treated like an idiot would be quite demoralising? The phrase “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” comes to mind.

For other users reading this, I’m sorry that the iTunes / Apple Music functionality isn’t fully working at present. This is the result of a change made by Apple, and I believe that they may very well deprecate / retire / nerf the iTunes API in the short to medium term. It may be feasible to add support for Apple Music API in the future once things have settled down, however the new API does not support performing searches by barcode, so it’s highly unlikely that we will ever have the same level of functionality as we did with the iTunes API.

I think it might be a good idea to create a new thread specifically for comments and questions relating to my instance of a-tisket, and leave this one for those who wish to carry on using the original instance.

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528

I think you have missed to whole point on the Deezer issue. When a release on marlon’s atisket says it’s in China, but not your mirror, then it’s licensed there in the least. On digital, release countries are where a release is licensed, it’s not where it’s available only on Apple, Deezer & Spotify. If the Deezer API say it’s in China. Then it’s licensed in China. I’ve yet to go to Jaxta on these and look at a distribution list directly from the distributor and not be correct. Why can’t you just not delete countries that an API is giving? And I really didn’t think it was a big deal to ask to use the UPC that Apple is giving. How is a UPC currently found on atisket? It’s not by API, because their API doesn’t give it on any releases. Any release that has it in the .jpg it shows up. It’s because it is found by looking for it in the “.jpg” filename. When Marlon set it up, this was the only way to know a barcode on iTunes. UPCs have been available on the Apple Music pages in the view-source for over a year at least. I made a suggestion that instead of using the “.jpg” filename which may or may not be correct (it has been incorrect many times in the past) to just use the barcode that the “view-source” instead. So, a-tisket already is scraping the Apple Music pages. I’m not suggesting adding that feature, just change the way it currently does scraping of the pages. There should never be an instance anymore when one enters an Apple ID that a barcode isn’t found. If that is a big ask to fix. I’m sorry. You are right. I’m not tech savvy. But this is the first time you have said anything about it. You just ignored it. So, your claim that I’ve asked you to do something radical is wrong. If it’s not an easy fix, then ok. Seems like it would be, but whatever. I’ll just continue to use the “view-source” data. I never said anything about any other aspect of Apple Music pages other than the recent 2022 releases. I asked if we could search by ID instead of UPC, because the APIs can still be used looking up ID instead of UPC. That’s been addressed. While I think for the community, it would be worth a shot to just a least try to see what would would happen if you replaced in the code on the country lookups ID instead of UPC and see if it works. Have you done that? Doesn’t seem like it. All I see is a “well, Apple may do this in the future”. If it’s more detailed than just replacing a simple upc with itu_id, than fine. I feel I’m being attacked because I pointed out flaws, that I know you aren’t 100% responsible for but you ignore. I really, thought you just never looked at this anymore. Why wouldn’t I? You didn’t respond for almost a year. I’ve never treated you like an idiot. If you took it that way, it wasn’t my intent. Not sure why or how you could ever think that. You are obviously very smart. I’ve liked every update you’ve made here. I respect your abilities and if I seem arrogant or condescending by just asking questions or making suggestions, then I don’t even know how to respond to that. That’s all I’ve done. All I’ve said that may remotely sound like an attack is that you’ve ignored suggestions. Which you have. I’ve never made any demands on anyone; I’ve done nothing but ask questions and make suggestions. Once again, thanks for all you’ve done.

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529

hey! i just wanted to add a bit more insight on the curaçao issue.

i recently pulled my own release from russia and israel (purposely), and it is now suddenly not available in curaçao either. before, it was worldwide, including curaçao, but it’s just been removed with no explanation. i did not exclude curaçao when i pulled them, but spotify just removed it without telling me.

this doesn’t seem to be done by atisket, because it shows up as excluded through the isrc-submit site, too.
https://d.ontun.es/#/explorer/album/1VlH9dYgcC1MFUlH8xFYKg

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530

Is there a way to associate an imported digital release with an existing release group? The importer seems to make a brand new release group instead of adding a digital release to an existing group.

Edit: Oh I’m stupid, there’s an option on the first page that I overlooked.

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I’m not sure if the tool is behaving weirdly or if it’s always been like this, but I’ve come across a release that’s available on all 3 platforms, if I enter the iTunes link in the search form it will say that China, Japan and South Korea are excluded. Using the Spotify or Deezer link instead, it comes back as Worldwide. I personally checked the same album on the Chinese, Japanese and Korean Apple Music and they have indeed a different UPC there. Also searched the album on Spotify API and the Korean release has a different one as well. So why is a-tisket returning a Worldwide release? And why does the first link added to the form change the list?

Also, have multiple countries been unlisted from those platforms? Updating the country list from 2 years ago on MB, I actually got a shorter list and that’s including new countries where it wasn’t available before.

532

It’s related to the (weird) recent iTunes API change which now returns related releases which might have a different barcode than the requested one:

Your first search does the country lookups by UPC (for which the iTunes API also returns a result for the CN/JP/KR release with a different UPC) while the second search does lookups by Apple ID (which only returns the exact match which of course is not available in CN/JP/KR).

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533

the country formerly known as “Swaziland” now goes by the name “Eswatini”. this has been updated in musicbrainz: Eswatini - MusicBrainz

but has not yet been renamed in either atisket instance. i hope this will be updated as eswatini was their name historically, and swaziland was the name chosen by british colonists.

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534

queue the “Apple Music ruined everything again” music, lol

apparently Apple Music has started linking different versions of albums together, and it’s had some interesting effects on Atisket… namely, it appends the Deluxe Edition to the Standard Edition:

note the link on the bottom of the Apple Music page. I was able to counteract this by manually entering the Apple Music ID into Atisket.

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535

That’s been going on for a while. You have to enter both the ID and UPC in order to prevent it from loading all versions in one tracklist.

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536

a trick i use to make sure it’s the right one is go to the itunes page source and use ctrl+f to search “upc”. the very first result is the correct one.

(this seems like something not too hard for the developers to implement into atisket btw)

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537

Thank you for creating and maintaining this! I’ve been using it a lot in combination with various browser addons to import information sourced from other pages into MB. It’s great. :slight_smile:

I did not read through all 500 posts in this thread, so I don’t know if this has already been reported, but I’ve been having an issue with some Spotify albums (singles, actually), that have IDs longer than 22 characters. The form does not allow me to submit them. I tried removing the pattern attribute on the input element and just submitting them anyway, but the resulting page stays blank. Examples of albums with longer IDs are here and here (both 23 chars).

538

As of today, Apple Music has changed their source code and you cannot longer find UPCs for releases unless they’re embedded on the cover art URL. RIP.

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539

ARRRRRRGGGGH. Why??? This sucks. Well there is still that barcode/UPC text file. That’s just dumb. I don’t know why these companies act like that’s something that should be secret.

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540

Totally killed the toadking script. No longer lists any audio traits, barcodes, anything. This really is disappointing. I hope Daniel still can get the collection match files at least. They are usually a few months behind, but are great to have because it has all releases, even ones no longer on Apple Music.

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541

Seems ISRC’s are also not listed in the source - unless I’m missing something. What is this barcode/UPC text file you speak of @tigerman325?

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Yeah, and ISRCs too. Man they are killing a lot of good info. Hopefully it’s only temporary. So far the ones I have looked up this afternoon have it in the jpg file but as we know many don’t or haven’t.

544

Record Labels are gone also, sigh.

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545

Sorry to hear of the challenges with all of the scripts.

I am not seeing any change to my access or the underlying files I typically pull. I just uploaded an out-of-cycle updated database set so you can test if anything has changed from the underlying data set. Please give it a couple minutes to get published to Google Drive, though.

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547

Since the Apple Music website uses it’s own MusicKit JS, it’s fairly easy to reverse engineer the API calls using the browser’s developer tools. And there’s no need to register a developer account to get a separate token- you can extract the token used by the website from one of the javascript files (currently https://music.apple.com/assets/index.65215e1b.js).

Example of album lookup:

curl 'https://amp-api.music.apple.com/v1/catalog/us/albums/980592714' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0' -H 'Accept: */*' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5' -H 'Referer: https://music.apple.com/' -H 'Authorization: Bearer eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCIsImtpZCI6IldlYlBsYXlLaWQifQ.eyJpc3MiOiJBTVBXZWJQbGF5IiwiaWF0IjoxNjY2MjA5MTY4LCJleHAiOjE2NzM0NjY3NjgsInJvb3RfaHR0cHNfb3JpZ2luIjpbImFwcGxlLmNvbSJdfQ.txDAv_8oy4G8zaens4enLYtADkP_zwcVLfT4NKW9l6Bt9KEyaYj566gtchMPJ-5cj7xxxrFsbd6wJcPbNvBRCg' -H 'Origin: https://music.apple.com'
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