forked from Keelrleek/SoulStream
KeelrLeek
4cb2c4c1b3
Popular is Last.fm's list now, so it routinely holds songs Deezer does not
sell, and a row built from MusicBrainz has no 30-second clip at all. Apple
carries some of them.
The fill is BY ALBUM rather than by track, and that is the whole design. iTunes
Search is documented at roughly 20 calls a minute; asking per track would spend
nineteen of them on one artist, while a single collection lookup returns the
whole tracklist with a preview on nearly every entry. The album is found in the
Apple catalogue the page has ALREADY fetched for release ownership, so the
search half costs nothing either. A page with no gaps makes no request at all,
and a page with gaps makes at most four.
Honest measurement, because my first one was wrong. I originally measured this
at 63% -> 87% coverage with Neutral Milk Hotel going 1/20 -> 19/20 and Slowdive
13/20 -> 20/20. That probe reimplemented `track_title_identity` and did it
worse, so it failed to match Deezer rows the app matches perfectly well. Read
back off the running app by preview HOSTNAME, the truth is that Deezer already
covers almost everything:
Slowdive 20 deezer 0 apple 0 none
Neutral Milk Hotel 19 deezer 0 apple 1 none
Queen 20 deezer 0 apple 0 none
Pond 20 deezer 0 apple 0 none
Crazy P 18 deezer 0 apple 2 none
Camping In Alaska 19 deezer 1 apple 0 none
My Bloody Valentine 5 deezer 0 apple 15 none
So this earns one row across seven artists, not a third of the catalogue. It is
kept because it is close to free rather than because it is transformative, and
because the gap it addresses widens as Deezer's catalogue thins.
It cannot help the case that prompted it. My Bloody Valentine's fifteen empty
rows are Loveless and Isn't Anything, and Loveless is absent from the iTunes
catalogue too — verified by both album search and track search. Nothing with a
public preview API carries it. The only source that could is Soulseek, which is
what the app streams from anyway, and that is a different piece of work: a
search and a partial transfer rather than fetching a CDN clip.
No other provider is worth adding. Probed against the residual gap, Audius, the
Internet Archive and Bandcamp returned nothing for any of it. Spotify needs
OAuth client credentials and has returned a null preview for much of its
catalogue since 2024, SoundCloud closed app registration years ago, Jamendo is
Creative-Commons only, and Genius, Discogs and MusicBrainz have no audio at all.
The previews button already reported partial availability off `track.preview`,
so it needed no change and still reads honestly — "5 of 20 available" on My
Bloody Valentine.