Fallback for streaming-only Apple Music releases

[dwei30]

Hi I'd like to clarify on whether this is something you’d want in Harmony before opening a PR.

I've been adding Apple Music streaming-only releases (mostly DJ Mixes) using harmony iTunes Search API and it has always returned with no tracks therefore, I always had to add the tracklist manually with a custom script.

However I came accross this script
https://github.com/ToadKing/apple-music-barcode-isrc
which uses the same catalogue API as the Apple Music website (amp-api.music.apple.com) with a MusicKit token from the page, and can return the tracklist, ISRCs, and barcode even when iTunes Search has no songs.

I prototyped that as a fallback in Harmony’s iTunes search. The search still runs first, and AMP is only used if Search returns no tracks. It’s unofficial (not the documented Apple Music API), so I wanted to ask whether you’d want this upstream or if it should stay a personal fork.

Would you be open to this, or would you rather people used a real Apple Music developer token / api.music.apple.com if anything is added at all?

Happy to drop it if this is out of scope. Thanks.

[kellnerd]

Hi, I really would like to have support for Apple Music in Harmony, but rather as a separate provider implementation than as a fallback in the iTunes provider.

Ideally such an Apple Music provider would work with (and encourage to use) the official API, but also give the user (i.e. the person running a Harmony server) the chance to use AMP API credentials instead. The APIs seem to be quite similar, you may want to read #159 and some of the linked resources for details.
I haven't really found the time to look into this myself, so I would appreciate if you could rework your code into an independent provider. Then we can see how close we are to supporting the official Apple Music API and figure out how to route lookups to the new provider (if credentials exist) and keep the old iTunes provider as a fallback.