Someone else already posted the same issue at their github, so I will comment there. At least that part is covered.
I can fully understand your lack of motivation with these things; one of the things I hate about third party APIs is this. All changes fast and you can never rest, at any time something changes or is deleted, and everything gets broken.
Hope it can be solved somehow, have been using harmony in hundred of releases lately and it’s a great tool to seed not so well known artist and releases.
I suppose you are already doing something like that to get releases from other platforms.
Not that it actually fixes tidal support but at least tidal links would work as input. That’s important, so the user could still enter the tidal link and use the web (missing some bits of info from tidal), even if the API is not fixed yet. That’s a compromise for sure I would gladly accept meanwhile.
Since the Tidal disaster did drag me into Harmony development already, I finally found the time to finish testing a few small improvements which I had already implemented around the end of year holidays.
Here comes the first release of 2025, which doesn’t fix the Tidal provider but shows a better error message at least.
Among the other improvements is also the long-standing issue of merging artist credits:
This has been solved now and should also lead to more external links being suggested for artists on the release actions page.
Done. The original message became a bit redundant now that edit notes can finally be seeded with MagicISRC, so I combind both descriptions.
Oh, the last feature just made me realize that it’s been a while since I gave the last status update in this thread, so here are all the changes since December.
Other noteworthy changes include the ISRC search links (thank you @reubot!) and my first attempt at documenting the supported providers a bit.
Additions to the sparse documentation are very welcome!
Going through the feedback here which hasn’t been addressed yet:
I don’t think it is a good idea to pollute the main release lookup page with even more things which already have a good home on the release actions page. (Ideally the lookup page should even be stripped back a bit to make it easier to get an overview, especially as I plan to add more pre-processing options in the future.)
There are multiple other things which a user might want to do for a release which already exists on MB, and this is exactly why the release actions page exists.
Adding missing links to artists (and labels) to improve matching is even more important than adding ISRCs in my opinion, so I definitely want users to go and review that page rather than adding this feature to the main page just to save people which are following this “a-tisket habit” a single click.
I am still dreaming of also showing release credits on this page and seeding them to the release relationship editor one day
Is there any reason to show the same image multiple times?
I am not even sure why a-tisket does this, other than for a few edge cases where this is another indicator that matching of the correct release failed this seems useless to me.
Especially as you can only add cover art once you have imported the release already.
This also doesn’t scale well since Harmony already has more providers than a-tisket’s three.
So the release actions page is the better place to show alternative cover art as well, see above.
Scraping is very unlikely to happen for a single field of minor importance.
Extracting EP from the description may work for this case, but I’m not sure whether it is generally worth it. There will be false positives when descriptions talk about previous EP releases, for example.
Effectively Harmony is a more advanced implementation of the same idea:
It does not only aggregate links (and cover art), but all metadata of the release. And you can export all that data to MB.
Matching is based on a (usually) unique barcode/GTIN, whereas Odesli / album.link seems to match based on title and artist. IIRC I had seen cases where Odesli matches items which would belong into the same MB release group, but are not necessarily the same MB release.
I had already thought about integrating Odesli into Harmony to get more external links, but their API has a very low rate limit:
We’ve stopped giving out API keys for the time being. You can still use our API without a key, albeit with low rate limits (10 requests per minute).
That is where I stopped and decided to focus on bringing more provider implementations to Harmony itself, which should be more accurate and hopefully faster than the Odesli site.
I’ve found a few cases (tho fairly rare) where a release with the same barcode will have different cover art across multiple platforms, whether that be different aspect ratios, an “Explicit” label, or something along those lines. since different cover art is a release splitter, it seems fairly important to have (even if it’s a fairly rare occurrence)
since Harmony has more providers (and will have more), maybe show a primary cover art with smaller thumbnails from the other providers?
I have another use case for showing all the provider’s album art in Harmony, albeit in conjunction with showing the image dimensions:
I often used atisket to see what storefront had the highest resolution artwork, including for existing releases (e.g. I’m not getting to the post-addition screen). Otherwise I’m opening a few tabs and adding a bunch of them (with the Enhanced Cover Art Uploads script), to see which one’s the biggest by trial and error. Especially now that it’s possible to get the max image from Spotify as well.
Would it be useful to add a ‘collapse’ button for these, so that only users who are interested in seeing them can see them, and not clog up the interface?
On that note, I have a UI request: If a release is worldwide, can Harmony collapse all the country icons by default? Still with a expand button. In that situation the detailed information is redundant, and the page can be simplified.
These are pretty much the exact reasons I still start with A-Tisket; it really does help in quite a few instances to see where something is going to go wrong, like an API issue serving up a completely different release from one or more DSPs. Apple Music (though not the sole offender) will sometimes conflate an instrumental release with two non-instrumental releases from Spotify + Deezer.
Additionally, when I’m cleaning up a release, I will sometimes just load it into A-Tisket to see which DSP has the highest resolution, as opposed to having to load each one into MB using ECAU and seeing what comes back for each, like @aerozol mentioned.
On the final page (where it asks if you’d like to Go to Release / Add Link Rels / ISRCs / Cover Art summary) can all of these links open in a new tab by default please
Unfortunately we can’t have both, at least not until user settings become a thing in Harmony
The arguments against opening them in a new tab by default have been convincing and it isn’t too difficult to force links to open in a new tab (Ctrl+click, shift+click or middle click, depending on your browser/OS settings), so this will stay as is for now.
I would like to have this, and it shouldn’t be too hard to implement this with a bit of HTML/JSX and CSS. Contributions in this area are very welcome, but I don’t feel like doing frontend development right now.
It is simply eating too much of my spare time which I’d rather spend doing important and long overdue behind-the-scenes changes which nobody else can do or wants to do.
Please note that the image dimensions are not a feature of a-tisket, but a userscript feature (as are the links to directly import cover art).
The solution for both requests is to implement another seeder for the Enhanced Cover Art Uploads script.
I had hoped that someone else would volunteer to do this, it shouldn’t be to difficult (but as I said, my time is limited).
Hmm, having another collapse button for a section which is already collapsed by default sounds not very useful. We are not really saving space by doing that in the current layout, are we?
But I could imagine combining the Availability and Unavailability rows with the Release events row, so that there is one expandable section for (un)available regions just below the short release events list. Is it that what you meant?
P.S. It would be great to have fleshed out GitHub issues for these UI improvement ideas, having more simple issues might attract more contributors?
Any chance of extending support for spotify audiobook? It seems like for some reason, spotify marks them as a “show” in the URL, I don’t know if it’s possible to distinguish them from other podcasts. Of course, support for podcast episodes would also be amazing
Good news for everyone who was missing the Tidal support: @outsidecontext once again volunteered to implement the Tidal provider for the v2 API, which is now live!
Old permalinks should continue to work, as we didn’t remove the v1 API implementation. Thanks to that API being gone irrevocably, we can cleanly choose the correct lookup implementation based on the timestamp.
Unfortunately the new API has a much worse rate limit, any attempt to send more than two requests in 10 seconds fails sooner or later… (Previously we managed to do two requests in 1 second most of the time!)
At least this should only affect bigger releases with more than 40 tracks, since we finally found a way to load 20 tracks with all the data that we need per request.
And there is still hope that the rate limit improves once the Tidal v2 API is no longer in “beta” testing.
Audiobooks should be supported already when they are uploaded as “album” on Spotify, which seems to be the case for all audiobooks which I have seen there so far.
That link doesn’t work for me, probably region-locked. What do you see there? Are audiobooks equivalent to shows and chapters to episodes? Does this look like an intended use or just some person/label uploading audiobooks as podcast?
In any case, podcast support in Harmony is currently very unlikely to be implemented, as the data doesn’t fit well into the schema and I’m still not sure how I would enter a podcast into MB… (the current guidelines feel very confusing/unnatural for me).
Understood. Hmm, it seems like the audiobooks that need to be purchased are listed as a show, whereas any available to stream audiobooks are listed as albums. I’m sure there are some edge cases, though.
Good idea, I should probably have an official page for these parameters
Ideally with parts of it (like the default values) being dynamically generated to keep them up to date. Maybe I should add this to the about page and finally write an introduction which explains how Harmony works in general.
I would like to suggest a couple of minor corrections for your wiki page, but it is not editable, so I will post them here:
Specifying XW as the region has no meaningful effect because the region will be filtered against each provider’s list of available regions. What happens is that some providers will use their default region (US), others are not region-specific.
Tidal is also a default provider (again, after the v2 API has been implemented).
Spelling and capitalization of the category values is important (it should be all and preferred), non-existing categories will use no additional providers.
You don’t even have to perform a search to change your preferred providers, it is sufficient to tick the checkboxes of an empty lookup form (on the landing page / or under /release).
Yeah, I definitely threw the page together a bit quickly, github wikis should totally accept community edits, lol. I made all the changes you suggested, thanks for replying! Adding a spot on the about page where this information could dynamically update would be nice.
the fact that it says “Audiobook” above the title makes me think this isn’t a hacky way to get audiobooks on Spotify (and also the addition of the purchase option and price)
