Continuation of the Python Discogs API Client

Hey everyone!
I am pleased to announce that J0J0, Lambengolmo and myself have been working hard to set the basis for what we hope to be the main active fork of the "Official Python Discogs API Client". This was born out of the news that the official Python client maintained by Discogs has been deprecated, see here for more info: https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/820127.

Our repo is https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client - and the newly updated PyPI package is here: https://pypi.org/project/python3-discogs-client/

We are committed to keeping the fork active and maintained. We really welcome new PRs, and would like to kindly ask users to resubmit old PRs that were not merged into the official one. As maintainers we will also be looking to make changes to the client to keep it up to date with the official API spec. These are some of the things we've worked on and released already:

- Support adding releases to the user's collection folders.
- The "Discogs ratelimit headers" are now accessible through the client, which enables developers to take care of limitting requests to the API accordingly and thus prevent "Too many requests errors".
- Support "Discogs lists" (https://www.discogs.com/lists), either through direct access or through the user model.
- Packaging for Debian-based Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Ubuntu Studio, ...). Package name: python3-discogs-client and the link to package is: https://packages.debian.org/sid/python3-discogs-client

Release notes:
- https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.1
- https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.2

To install the client use:
pip install python3-discogs-client

Any questions are welcome either here or on the Github repo in the issues section: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/issues
We will be around to answer them as quick as possible.

Many thanks and hope to see some PRs soon!

Joalla Python Discogs API Client Maintainers

Lambengolmo, J0J0, alifhughes

Hi ADO16,
I redirected your question here, so we have all the information in this thread.

ADO16
How compatible is the new python client? could it effectively run as a drop-in replacement? what changes are you planning to make?

Yes, the “new” client is 100% compatible with the original one and can be run as a drop-in replacement.

usage of the module did not change, eg you still import like this:

import discogs_client

as for changes, our first goals are to get the existing unmerged PR’s of the original repo reviewed and merged. best if original submitters resubmit to us but if not we would do it ourselves, in an order we think it is useful/essential.

please have a look at discogs original client repo and look through unmerged prs. if you think something should be priorized, give us a note here and let’s discuss it 😀

Please consider adding a changelog.

hi mjb, please find the changelog following the posted git release links.

Ah, I see. https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases
Thanks!

It is official now: Our package was accepted into Debian unstable on Wednesday this week:

https://packages.debian.org/sid/python3-discogs-client and it should be installable using:

apt install python3-discogs-client

This is the basis to bring the package into further Debian-based Linux-Distributions. Eg Ubuntu has it's next "Import Freeze Date" around end of August, which means it's very likely the package will be available in Ubuntu 20.10 stable (October 2020 release) and all other Distros that derive from it. That's great news! :-)

And some more great news: A colleague at work just yesterday told me that he found the following in Alpine Linux (it's a minimalistic OS mostly used to build docker containers from):

- https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=*discogs*&branch=edge
- https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/10552

It seems like this merge-request brings in version 2.3.2 of the "Joalla Client" into the distribution.

Thanks a lot to the maintainer of Alpine Linux package py3-discogs-client.

alifhughes since your gh-repo is a fork, the issues feature isn't enabled by default.

Ganjoe_Rood
alifhughes since your gh-repo is a fork, the issues feature isn't enabled by default.

Hi, thanks a lot for the hint. I enabled it now.
Jojo

Hi Jojo,

I would be interested in contributing to this effort - initially as a tester / documenter as I am a programmer with many years experience but new to python, so this would be a great way for me to get involved in something that enables me to improve skills, contributes, and also satisfies my passion for music.

Bruce

Hi bruce.diesel,
thanks for reaching out! Sure, pull-requests to the documentation are very welcome. The documentation in README.mkd is lacking a lot of stuff that is possible with the module. If you'd like you could start there, get to know the module a little closer and write it down. Just send the pull as usual and we will review and merge. Thanks!
If you have any other ideas on which end documentation could be improved, you are very welcome to propse them here :-)
all the best
Jojo

Perfect, I am writing python scripts to help me manage my music library, and keep it in sync with Discogs. I will document things as I go along.

i wanna suggest that rather the docstrings should be worked on and to use Sphinx to generate most of the docs. if i may assist you i your efforts, just make yourself heard on GitHub, i'm watching that repo (but not this forum).

Hi Ganjoe_Rood, we would be glad if you'd assist with docstrings and Sphinx. I can't speak for the two other project members but fo me this would be new-territory anyway. I hope you get this message. I can't reach you on github directly. So for now, please send a pm here and let's discuss further steps or just submit a pull-request including your suggestions. Or just open an issue on github and let's talk there. Thanks!

Cool! Will this now let us search beyond 10,000 records from a seller's inventory? Or is that something still enforced by discogs?

Hi faraz12inch45rpm,
I was not aware of a limitation like this. Where exactely are you experiencing it? In you program that's using python3-discogs-client or in the search function on discogs.com?

The limitations of the API itself (controlled by Discogs, obviously) are documented here: https://www.discogs.com/developers#page:home,header:home-rate-limiting

Also the following chapter about pagination might be worth reading.

Recently python3-discogs-client v2.3.3 was released: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.3

The biggest change is that, as our repo name implies, we now removed Python2 support and continue focusing on supporting current Python3 versions (3.6 to 3.9)

Thanks to contributors https://github.com/funkyfuture and https://github.com/JKatzwinkel for making this happen :-)

As usual use your favorite package manager to install/update the package:

pip install python3-discogs-client

Keep those PR's coming and all the best from
Joalla Discogs Client Team

J0J0
Hi faraz12inch45rpm,
I was not aware of a limitation like this. Where exactely are you experiencing it? In you program that's using python3-discogs-client or in the search function on discogs.com?

The limitations of the API itself (controlled by Discogs, obviously) are documented here: https://www.discogs.com/developers#page:home,header:home-rate-limiting

Also the following chapter about pagination might be worth reading.

Thanks, I was experiencing it with the previous python discogs client. I upgraded to your python3-discogs-client and now I get this error when searching a seller with 97,000 records in his inventory:

Pagination above 50 is disabled for inventories other than your own

Another minor thing is when upgrading to the python3 discogs client I had to change my print statements from:

artist.encode('utf-8').strip()

to:

artist.encode('utf-8').strip().decode('utf8')

Otherwise it prints the string with 'b' before each string, implying it is some byte thingy... Just a heads up.. I am open to any more elegant solution rather than what I use now ( artist.encode('utf-8').strip().decode('utf8') )

Hey faraz12inch45rpm, sorry you have to do that! Thanks for letting us know, I’ll look into it this weekend and see if there is anything I can do to fix it. I’ll report back here with any findings, thanks!

faraz12inch45rpm
Another minor thing is when upgrading to the python3 discogs client I had to change my print statements from:

artist.encode('utf-8').strip()

to:

artist.encode('utf-8').strip().decode('utf8')

Otherwise it prints the string with 'b' before each string, implying it is some byte thingy... Just a heads up.. I am open to any more elegant solution rather than what I use now ( artist.encode('utf-8').strip().decode('utf8') )

Hey faraz12inch45rpm, sorry for slight delay but I've had a chance to catch up with this. So do you know why you need to encode it? As far as I can see I think the .encode('utf-8') is unnecessary and that is the the bit that is actually encoding it into byte code, which is why the b'...' is showing, which is why you need to add the subsequent .decode('utf-8') on the end. The string is already encoded in utf-8 so I don't believe you need to do it yourself, in your example, artist.strip() should suffice. See example below

>>> s = 'Hello world'
>>> s.encode('utf-8')
b'Hello world'
>>> s.encode('utf-8').decode('utf-8')
'Hello world'
>>> s
'Hello world'

If you have anymore questions, let me know! If you think I've missed something, raise an issue here: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/issues and I'll get too it. I took references from here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6224052/what-is-the-difference-between-a-string-and-a-byte-string

Hey shodisc I'll try this out and get back to you

J0J0
...
The limitations of the API itself (controlled by Discogs, obviously) are documented here: https://www.discogs.com/developers#page:home,header:home-rate-limiting

Also the following chapter about pagination might be worth reading.

faraz12inch45rpm
Thanks, I was experiencing it with the previous python discogs client. I upgraded to your python3-discogs-client and now I get this error when searching a seller with 97,000 records in his inventory:

Pagination above 50 is disabled for inventories other than your own

Hi again faraz12inch45rpm,
which version of discogs_client where you exactly using back then (and what was the error with that version) and which version are you using now? I'd like to do some research in git history to find out if something's changed in these parts of the code.

The message "Pagination above 50 is disabled for inventories other than your own" is definitely not produced by discogs_client, it is the response of the API itself.

Also a snippet of your code would be helpful, perhaps somebody could think of a workaround to achieve your goal with searching within huge sellers inventories. Thanks! :-)

BTW there were two maintenance releases recently and the latest available version of python3-discogs-client currently is: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.5

As usual it's also available on PyPi:

pip install python3-discogs-client

Furthermore this version was packaged for Debian/GNU Linux:

apt install python3-discogs-client

https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/python3-discogs-client
https://packages.debian.org/sid/python3-discogs-client

and Alpine Linux:

https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=*discogs*&branch=edge

Hey folks, sorry if this is a crazy obvious question, but I can't find the Catalague Number, or Date Added To Discogs endpoints in the releases result, can anyone point me at them?

also having problems accessing the image URL in releases.images

(sorry I'm new to python, but i think i have all the other endpoints i need sorted out)

No it's actually not crazy obvious. The catalog number is surprisingly hard to find. Give me a minute.... I think I described this in some post on this forum already. Need to search for it.......

In this post I generally describe how to "search" for things in the api client using the dir function. The path to the cat no is described explicitely in one of my examples: https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/820098#8141812

I hope that helps :-)
All the best and feel free to report your progress here so others (including me) can learn from it.
Jojo

That helps for Catalogue Number, but i've tried the Data block for Releases and still can't find the Date it was added to collection.

Thanks in advance

J0J0
No it's actually not crazy obvious. The catalog number is surprisingly hard to find. Give me a minute.... I think I described this in some post on this forum already. Need to search for it.......

In this post I generally describe how to "search" for things in the api client using the dir function. The path to the cat no is described explicitely in one of my examples: https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/820098#8141812

I hope that helps :-)
All the best and feel free to report your progress here so others (including me) can learn from it.
Jojo

also, i keep hitting the 429, API rate limit when I'm pulling specifically box sets of Various Artists, is there a way to access the header information for API calls remaining, so i can build in some wait time (sleep)

Hey Dex, yes you should be able to access that information, the change was made here: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/pull/1

DexVinyl
also, i keep hitting the 429, API rate limit when I'm pulling specifically box sets of Various Artists, is there a way to access the header information for API calls remaining, so i can build in some wait time (sleep)

Hey folks, I'm having a somewhat strange issue, I'm coming up against a 404 error when hitting Unknown Artist I had the same issue with Various which i got past with if release.artists[0].id is 194 but using the same statement if release.artists[0].id is 355 does absolutely nothing neither does if release.artists[0].id is 194 or if release.artists[0].id is 355 with the last, 194 is processed according to the if

any help please?

DexVinyl
That helps for Catalogue Number, but i've tried the Data block for Releases and still can't find the Date it was added to collection.
Jojo

Interesting I don't know by heart and am surprised that it's so hard to find. Proably I will need this once too. Did you try the dir() function on everything as suggested? Or did you already find it by now?

DexVinyl


also, i keep hitting the 429, API rate limit when I'm pulling specifically box sets of Various Artists, is there a way to access the header information for API calls remaining, so i can build in some wait time (sleep)

This is a quick & dirty solution to use the exposed headers alifhughes just mentioned and handle the rate limits. It's not good but maybe it's good enough for your needs. Have look: https://github.com/JOJ0/discodos/blob/2c0fbd32b92d306c5b97a32b843cf052e4f7ac19/discodos/models.py#L979

DexVinyl
Hey folks, I'm having a somewhat strange issue, I'm coming up against a 404 error when hitting Unknown Artist I had the same issue with Various which i got past with if release.artists[0].id is 194 but using the same statement if release.artists[0].id is 355 does absolutely nothing neither does if release.artists[0].id is 194 or if release.artists[0].id is 355 with the last, 194 is processed according to the if

any help please?

maybe those artists are somewhat special and don't return the same as regular artists do from discogs.com api itself. I would like to see if I get those same errors when I use it in DiscoDOS. Thing is I use a more release based approach there. You have some release id's for me that use eg. the Various artist (sorry too lazy to search for myself now).

Also some example code of yours would help. I know posting code here is tedious, we just enabled discussions on our github repo. please post some snippets in the "Support" section: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/discussions/categories/support

And if it's really an issue with the python module itself we can easily create an issue from there.

thanks!

hi iordanougiannis,
I guess it was you who fixed this issue himself already, right? :-)))

https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/pull/23

Thanks again!

DexVinyl did you fix your issues or do you need further assistance? As mentioned already, best you file them on the discussion board: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/discussions
HTH Jojo

J0J0
hi iordanougiannis,
I guess it was you who fixed this issue himself already, right? :-)))

https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/pull/23

Thanks again!

That was actually me, haha.

iordanougiannis
Hey, thanks for the fix.

I was trying to get all the releases of a specific artist and the results I got seem to include not just the releases but the appearances too and maybe other things.

Is there a way to get just the releases ? Thanks.

Hey iordanougiannis, if you could open an issue on github here: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/issues/ with some examples that would be great. We'll then take a look at it and see if it is a problem or something we can implement. Thanks!

hey, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but how do i get the catno of a release? thanks.

Hey esocid, would you mind opening a support request here? https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/discussions We're trying to centralise knowledge about these types of questions to help people in the future too, hope that is okay!

We've just released python3-discogs-client v2.3.13, have a look at the release notes: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.13

Also, since we didn't post updates in this thread for quite some time now, some things to be highlighted:

- Previous release notes: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases
- Great progress on our documentation hosted at https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/discussions is showing quite some liveliness in the project, which we are very happy about
- Great tools are using the library, some to mention are the mp3 tagging tools https://beets.io and https://docs.puddletag.net/

Thanks to all our library users, code submitters, documentation writers and everybody else contributing in any way to the project!

Thanx a lot!

Yesterday python3-discogs-client v2.3.14 was released, featuring some additions to handling collection folders: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.14

We just released python3-discogs-client v2.3.15, again with a handy new feature around collection handling. Also the documentation around the collection handling received a nice overhaul.

Release Notes: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.3.15
Docs: https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

python3-discogs-client v2.4 has landed, featuring a neat performance improvement change and support for fetching "community details" like "haves/wants" or contributors via the Release object. Note that we've changed our release numbering scheme with this release. Read about it in the release notes.

Release notes: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.4
Docs: https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

python3-discogs-client v2.5 is available. We improved the auto-generated docs and added some new attributes to Release, Artist and Label classes.

Release notes: https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.5
Improved models module docs: https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/discogs_client.html#discogs_client.models.Artist

esocid
hey, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but how do i get the catno of a release? thanks.

Thanks for your feature request back then and sorry that it took so long: catno is finally included directly in a Label object (when requested via a Release) without having to go around the data dict or the fetch method ;-) HTH!
https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/releases/tag/v2.5

Don't have a github account, so I'm asking here instead:
Is there a way to extract BaOI identifiers with this client?

Hi Sneerwell, what is BaOI, sounds like something with barcode, right? I'd need to check if we have support for that... MrJuusto or alifhughes you guys might know by heart?

Sneerwell did you look up which API endpoint is giving this information (should be easy to find out from the official Discogs API docs)

Hi J0J0, BaOI is discogs parlance for Barcode and Other Identifiers the section under the Notes section on a release page. That's where matrix numbers, SID codes, barcodes etc. are listed.

If I do a
print(dir(d.release(221824)))
to get a list of all the objects on the release page for Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up I get

['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_known_invalid_keys', 'artists', 'changes', 'client', 'companies', 'country', 'credits', 'data', 'data_quality', 'delete', 'fetch', 'formats', 'genres', 'id', 'images', 'labels', 'master', 'notes', 'refresh', 'repr_str', 'save', 'status', 'styles', 'thumb', 'title', 'tracklist', 'url', 'videos', 'year']

Ideally there would be an obect called 'identifiers' in that list, that would allow me to retrieve the data from the BaOI section.

According to this https://www.discogs.com/forum/thread/784744?message_id=7788891#7788891
the data should be available via the API, but I'm not sure.

I've added a request to build out a discogs app on pipedream. It's open source and free and appears to me, a non-expert, a good place to allow other non-experts to use the API. If anyone here has interest in helping to build it I'm sure many people would appreciate it: https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream/issues/5423

Sneerwell thanks for elaborating what BaOI means exactly!

You are on the right track. It seems we don't support "identifiers" from a Release object yet. It would be helpful if you could register on github and raise an issue for that so we don't forget to track that missing feature within the project or make it obvious to fellow discogs_client contributors that a PR adding this feature is a good idea.

In the meantime I have a solution for you to still get all the identifiers data using discogs_client. You can either

- Look what you find in the .data dict, or
- Use the .fetch() method as documented here to get it: https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fetching_data.html#using-fetch-to-get-other-data

For your further work with the Client it might help to get a list of what is ready to use on a Release object and what it's for: https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/discogs_client.html#discogs_client.models.Release

This part of the Python package documentation is a work in progress and by no means complete, so also here, contributions are more than welcome :-)

Hope that helps so far and have fun tinkering with p3dc!

Bit of a late reply, since I was busy with other things. Thanks for the hints, J0J0 ! That works like a charm:

Just an example for anyone struggling with it:

print((release.data)['identifiers'])

gives me a nice list of dictionaries ready for further processing:

[{'type': 'Barcode', 'value': '012394 144869', 'description': 'Text'}, {'type': 'Barcode', 'value': '5012394144869', 'description': 'Scanned'}, {'type': 'Label Code', 'value': 'LC 0316'}, {'type': 'Price Code', 'value': 'AF', 'description': 'D:'}, {'type': 'Price Code', 'value': 'RC120', 'description': 'F:'}, {'type': 'Price Code', 'value': 'BB', 'description': 'UK:'}, {'type': 'Matrix / Runout', 'value': 'PT 41448 A3 L 19090 [Lyra logo]TOPIA. M.S. DAMONT', 'description': 'Runout side A'}, {'type': 'Matrix / Runout', 'value': 'PT 41448 B2 L 19091 [Lyra logo]TOPIA DAMONT', 'description': 'Runout side B'}]

I'm currently experimenting with an unauthenticated client to cover the basics before I move to sth. a bit more elaborated.

Many thanks for keeping the code maintained!

This is what the identifiers of Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up look like in Pipedream

https://pasteboard.co/NmiXX7Td5qoL.png
https://pasteboard.co/95f5zxo7dTKz.png
https://pasteboard.co/6SpbREALPOR7.png

Way easier to read and use imo

The example I posted is just internal data, not screen output. Screen output looks entirely different, plus in my case the data will end up in an SQL database.

This topic is about the python discogs API client. That's a library which makes accessing the discogs API from within the python programming language easier and allows you to build your own client in whatever way you see fit.

theslutbunny Judging by your posts in this topic you seem have no idea what this is about. This is the part then, where I allow myself to gently remind you of the community guidelines:

What kind of behavior is expected at Discogs?
(...)
Stay on topic and post messages in the appropriate forum or group.

Thank you.

Sorry. Just taking an interest. I'll leave you to it.

Is there anyway i can fetch for example the user names that have 15343679 release id in there want/collection?

Hi all recent posters in this thread: Appologies for not being ablet to react in time to this thread. It is also hard to follow single posts in this very long thread and most of all often code posted in here is pretty unreadable since we don't have any formatting option with this forum software.

Therefore I suggest the following: Please head over to github, grab an account if you havent't already and post your ideas, issues, support questions _and solutions_ directly in the python3-discogs-client repo. Take a look there if maybe other people have asked your question before, you might be lucky :-)

Also I'd like to remind, that we maintain documentation pages at https://python3-discogs-client.readthedocs.org

I hope that helps and speak soon on https://github.com/joalla/discogs_client/discussions