While not supported by Harmony (yet 
), other streaming services existed earlier. Bugs! (streaming service) - Wikipedia Since 2000 Melon (online music service) - Wikipedia since 2004. (I mostly deal with KPop)
2 Likes
It feels like this issue has been brought up a dozen times already, so I am not going to repeat all the previous ideas from various threads.
Nothing has changed, Harmony is still open source and nobody considered this to be important enough to implement it so far.
(The wishlist of open issues is long, and it doesn’t even include my own most wanted wishes… except in the two initial braindump issues maybe 
)
Just a few thoughts which I had in mind for this in case anyone is interested to pick this up:
- Harmony should not censor source data, the doubtful dates should still be displayed but not seeded. Otherwise I fear that people will either think that Harmony failed to get a date or just copy the doubtful date from somewhere else.
- The current date objects could be extended with a new optional property which explains if/why a date is probably incorrect and will not be used. Maybe we even need an additional “quality” flag because dates from some providers can’t be relied on in general (like iTunes always using the original release date, which is only correct if the digital release happens to be the first release).
- Placeholder dates like January 1st should probably be auto-corrected while still being transparent about this behavior. Not sure if/how this should be combined with the new “explanation” property, maybe this should only happen at the merge stage when the placeholder date is the only remaining plausible date candidate.
6 Likes
One of the issues with this for MusicBrainz is “first released” date for a release group gets adjusted to (i.e) 2003-01-01. Over-riding the correct “first release” date
Wish my coding skillz was up to a quality to work on Harmony. Too rusty to trust it.
Did not mean to restart the debate in this thread, was just curious if Harmony was planning to handle it as Atisket never did.
1 Like
Seems like filtering out too-early release dates wasn’t even a ticket yet, I have made one now: Don't seed the release date if it's before the source service existed · Issue #101 · kellnerd/harmony · GitHub
4 Likes
Follow up with an example on why using ToadKing script vs. cover art:
”Down IV, Pt. I - The Purple - EP” álbum de Down en Apple Music, ToadKing script says barcode is 016861762704. Harmony is reporting it as 16861762728, which is what is found in the cover art .jpg filename. So, it won’t let me update Release Actions – Harmony.
Are you sure that the ToadKing script is actually using the Apple Music API? I’d be surprised as it’s not a public API. I can see all this information by using “inspect” on the Apple Music page. Listening to the network on inspect, it says the upc is 016861762704, not 16861762728.
Update: The iTunes Collection match file (iTunes UPC Database) and it also shows barcode of 016861762704. So, definitely not what the .jpg file shows.
Ah yes, I’m slacking with the announcements again
With the last release I finally turned the Release Actions into a proper browsable page which shows you an MBID input instead of greeting you with an error when no release MBID has been specified. For convenience it accepts release URLs in addition to just the MBID.
The same MBID input has also been added to the home page, which has been enhanced with short descriptions (as shown above).
But the most important change is probably the new settings page:
- Preferred provider and region settings have been moved here. Here you can set the default values of the lookup form and for external tools which are directly starting release lookups. (Previously they remembered their changes everywhere except on active release lookup pages, which was a bit confusing and hence this feature has been removed now.)
- You can now choose whether you want to include copyrights and (Bandcamp) release credits in the annotation.
- It is finally possible to configure the release seeder to open in the same tab.
- If you really want to go directly to the freshly imported release, you can disable the redirect to the release actions page. (I would strongly recommend not to do that as there should always be more useful data to import. But at least it is a bit easier to get there without the redirect, see above.)
Now that there are settings I have also added the controversial option to include available/excluded regions in the annotation which some editors regard as important, others as redundant.
The format is a very basic comma-separated list with flag emojis (or country codes, depending on your browser’s font) and region names so far.
If a list would be empty or redundant with the release events, it is omitted regardless of your setting.
I didn’t want to overcomplicate this for a first version (both in terms of annotation layout and settings), so please let me know if you need anything else and why.
Last but not least, ended URL relationships are now ignored on the release actions page.
13 Likes
That’s unfortunate, but as long as nobody with access to the Apple Music API implements a better provider, there is nothing I can do about this.
At least these cases are rare (since it is the first I’ve ever heard about) and usually easy to discover when there are other providers (which return a different barcode).
You can still get to the Release Actions by excluding iTunes manually for now, simply append &deezer&spotify&tidal to the actions URL. I plan to automatically skip incompatible external links in the future: Graceful release merging · Issue #98 · kellnerd/harmony · GitHub
Are you using Apple Music? Maybe you can answer this (unrelated) question:
2 Likes
Okay. I wasn’t sure if it was his script had access using the Apple Music API or some other way. As I said, all the information using his script is visible on the page when you look up the info on “inspect” mode. I always check the page using his script, so I’m okay. Still way better. And the improvements on it recently got me to using it more than a-tisket. I still run a-tisket for the annotation, but I’m starting to import using Harmony more.
As for your question, I stream videos all the time without downloading anything. I even watch them from the Apple Music app on my Roku.
1 Like
I’ve been getting this today “Tidal:
Too many requests queued, please wait and try again” all day.
1 Like
Aint astiket’s the same as harmony’s?
No. a-tisket gives you an annotation to what countries are available or not. Harmony only gives copyright information. Harmony tells you the countries, but doesn’t give an annotation to copy for it.
1 Like
I think this changed in the latest release:
check Settings – Harmony
1 Like
Thank you! I didn’t realize this.
1 Like
is there a way to add extra info to an existing release via harmony in stead of creating a new release?
If the existing release has a supported URL or a barcode, you can use harmony to do a lookup using either of those and then copy any extra info over to that release.
I recently wrote a userscript that helps with copying info, since I tend to update releases very often!