Animated Album Art on Apple Music

[githubyzer]

Describe the problem

I've seen other Apple Music Rich Presence achieving this. Both the Mac and Windows version show animated album art.

[ungive]

Hey there, I'm happy to add this, but as far as I know it comes at a cost of registering an Apple Developer account, which I do not have right now and which costs about 99 USD that I don't have to spare for such a small feature. Such an account is needed for access to the Apple Music API to get a URL to the animated cover.

If you know of any other way to retrieve the animated album cover for Apple Music songs, let me know though!

I've seen other Apple Music Rich Presence achieving this.

Can you send some links to those?

[ungive]

I should mention, there's always the option to donate: https://donate.musicpresence.app

The Apple Developer subscription costs me about 8€/month (but in the form of ~95€ upfront, if I'm not mistaken). If one or more Apple Music users are willing to support the project with a monthly donation, I would most definitely register for such an Apple Developer account! This would allow me to do the following things:

• Add animated covers for Apple Music, but also
• Sign macOS builds of Music Presence, so that they are not flagged as malicious or "quarantined" by macOS anymore (this seems to happen even more frequently and is harder to work around on macOS Sequoia)

I might be able to publish Music Presence in the App Store at some point in the future then too, but right now that's not possible as Music Presence uses a so called "private framework" on macOS to detect media.

[ungive]

Found this:

• Make an API request to the publicly available iTunes API: https://itunes.apple.com/search?media=music&entity=song&term=The%20Emptiness%20Machine%20-%20Linkin%20Park ("The Emptiness Machine - Linkin Park")
• Find the track URL that links to Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-emptiness-machine/1766137049?i=1766137051&uo=4
• Download the HTML of that page and find this: <amp-ambient-video class="editorial-video svelte-1jqlzwi" src="https://mvod.itunes.apple.com/itunes-assets/HLSVideo221/v4/58/41/70/58417048-7210-0104-390f-b6db4942b43e/P915447347_default.m3u8" playing="false" data-playing="false" data-testid="ambient-video-player" aria-hidden="true"></amp-ambient-video> which contains the animated video cover as an m3u8 file, which could be converted to a GIF for the Discodr status: https://mvod.itunes.apple.com/itunes-assets/HLSVideo221/v4/58/41/70/58417048-7210-0104-390f-b6db4942b43e/P915447347_default.m3u8

Downsides:

• Includes 3 (!) network requests to show an animated album cover in your status. That means quite a bit of overhead but more importantly a lot of delay. At the very least 250ms for the iTunes API (limiting it to 1 result, which isn't very useful, ~500ms for 5 results, multiple seconds for all results) + >500ms to download the HTML of the Apple Music page + at least a couple seconds to convert the m3u8 video to GIF using the video conversion service that I made (https://github.com/ungive/video-conversion-service) and which would need to be adapted to be able to convert m3u8
• Doing that many requests introduces a lot of potential points of failure, making this a bit infeasible
• And of course Legal: https://performance-partners.apple.com/search-api

(i) is placed only on pages that promote the content on which the Promo Content is based; (ii) is proximate to a “Download on iTunes” or “Download on App Store” badge (as approved by Apple) that acts as a link directly to pages within iTunes where consumers can purchase the promoted content; (iii) includes attribution indicating the Promo Content was “provided courtesy of iTunes” if such Promo Content includes song or music video previews;