Feedback and support thread for the Pulsewidth a-tisket instance

Found two links for seemingly the same album on itunes:

This one works in the website: ‎KAF+YOU KAFU COMPILATION ALBUM by Various Artists on Apple Music

this one doesnt: ‎KAF+YOU KAFU COMPILATION ALBUM by Various Artists on Apple Music

tested this as well, the first one (ID starts with 16) shows available in all 169 countries iTunes/Apple Music is available, and doesn’t pull a UPC (because recent iTunes release). the second (as said) doesn’t pull any results, even though it’s seems to be available on Apple Music.

I’d just like to add that maybe the best way to move forward until there’s like previously discussed a [internet] country tag or the like maybe be to put the excluded countries from streaming under annotations with a date stamp (like you can right now) and then put worldwide as country tag?

Info is saved if anyone would be interested in that in the future and there isn’t a dumb list of like 200 countries which noone has any use for bloating the pages.

And again, it makes no sense to keep that list. What if Russia for example is added to spotify again? Make a new release with 201 countries in the list? Web releases are not static like a physical release and treating it like so is insane. Adding to that even if barcode is different or missing usually for example a bandcamp/deezer release is identical to each other so the same release in the sense that the exact same files made available through the internet is still available to people whose country has been blocked in a specific vendor. We’re not making a database of spotify, we’re making a database of the music

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This is surely easily solved. When Spotify starts sales into Russia on, for example, 9th May 2025 then that single date could be added to all of these lists. It is a separate release date for the country. And then these lists would be interesting. This is a failing at the moment as you see countries like India with 2016 release dates even though the service did not start there until 26 Feb 2019.

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I’ve noticed a weird quirk when seeding Apple Music releases. Not only does UPC lookup work once again, if there is more than one version of a release available a-tisket will compound the tracklists of all available versions into one if only the UPC is provided (as opposed to both a UPC and an Apple Music/iTunes ID).
Similarly, if I seed a release from Spotify or Deezer, sometimes I’ll get a hit from iTunes as well, but its UPC won’t always match.

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The iTunes UPC lookup API recently changed to also return related releases with a different barcode than the one the user provided. It’s very weird.

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It gets even weirder. Seeding ‎The Waterfall by My Morning Jacket on Apple Music returns a different barcode than its source code contains!

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iTunes ID lookup stopped working for me :confused:

I just did a bunch of a-tisket-ing as well, and had an Apple Music release not show up a couple times. had to look them up a third time to get it to show up (see previous post about issue):

did Apple break a-tisket again? :melting_face:

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It just started working again on my end. It was probably a momentary hiccup. Could be on either end.

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It would be great if you could use this to update existing releases with more info, for example if a release only has a bandcamp page but it’s clearly the same release.

Or at least if it already has release tied to the barcode but it’s missing some store links.

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I am new in the community, but over two decades involved in music as both a hobbyist and a radio professional. My main occupation being an IT developer, I would like to offer a hand regarding bug fixing and further development of the existing A-Tisket PHP script. I’m a seasoned PHP developer and have experience with both APIs and other data fetching methods for Apple/iTunes, Deezer, Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz, Napster, Amazon Music …

Just ping me if needed …

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Congrats for a good collection of online tools on your website.

I already have a suggestion how to improve your “iTunes Artwork Finder”, there are links with even better quality cover image available from Apple, namely the source image scan which can be over 150 MB in size … I’ll send you that info on your github issues page.

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Is this “source image” any different from what the Image Max URL tool returns?

welcome to the community, btoplak~ good to have another developer interested in A-tisket!~

I believe @atj is currently maintaining and hosting the Pulsewidth mirror, and @marlonob wrote the original code and is still hosting their older unmaintained version

a common combination several editors—myself included—use is A-tisket + @ROpdebee’s Enhanced Cover Art Uploads userscript. you might take a look:

some example edits from Amazon and Apple Music, and it works with many other storefronts and streaming services.

that said, I believe the links supplied on A-tisket are the high-resolution images in question… I could be mistaken tho~ :melting_face:

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In some cases, the “original image” generated by a-tisket is either not the highest resolution or is a different image format (Apple Music supports PNGs, but a-tisket doesn’t extract them as such, whereas ECAU does).

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@UltimateRiff, thank you for the warm welcome!

If I understand correctly, the source code of A-Tisket is actually not public and available for forking and extending its fuctionality?

Thanks for that userscript repo link, I’ll research what is already available

The A-Tisket creates a dynamic URL for the Apple Music cover image which instructs the Apple’s image servers to actually resize the image to the highest JPG quality (100). Example for one album:

A-Tisket outputs this link: https://is2-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music122/v4/e3/3e/0e/e33e0eae-1a23-2693-1341-338c0cbeba01/196589189479.jpg/9999x9999-100.jpg → the filename pattern here (9999x9999-100.jpg) actually instructs the image server to provide a JPG format image (original could be PNG too) with the highest resolution and the maximum JPG quality (100). Alas you get the (quality) resized image

The actual source file link is this: https://a1.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/063/Music122/v4/e3/3e/0e/e33e0eae-1a23-2693-1341-338c0cbeba01/196589189479.jpg

99% it will be the same as IMU resolved link, but I have found another link format which works if the IMU one doesn’t…

Yes exactly, some covers are PNG and most scripts I’ve seen (apart IMU) use the same link modification as A-Tisket, pushing the image server to convert PNG to JPG

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It gets even juicier: some releases have TIFF images for covers, but the Cover Art Archive doesn’t support those yet unfortunately.

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Ohh? Tnx for a headsup. I didn’t know about the existence of TIFF covers but it makes sense, it was a default output format from many desktop scanner software for quite some time

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Maybe this was mentioned before but with all the issues concerning UPC codes for itunes, this userscript for coverart can somehow extract direct links to art from itunes and those links always shows an image that has a filename that contains the exact same UPC code as the release somehow: https://github.com/ROpdebee/mb-userscripts#mb-enhanced-cover-art-uploads

Maybe this website could utilize this method somehow to fix the extraction of UPC codes?

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