Discow

Helper script for Discogs

Introduction

It's 2020 and we're in this crazy Covid pandemic where we're stuck at home most most of the time. Naturally, as an angineer, I always try out new things. So I started collecting vinyl and mixing EDM. It didn't take me too long to land on that extensive website discogs.com. The website is absolutely great and I'm glad it exists. However, I also found room for improvements. Especially when it comes to handling the wantlist. I found ou that discogs has a REST API, so it didn't take long for the first couple of python lines.

This script is mainly aimed at developers and it's not perfect. If it only serves as an example to get a quicker entry point into the discogs API, I'm happy.

Here's a short list of what it can do so far:

• Print all master releases of the wantlist (not just all versions/releases)
• Add all versions of a specific format (e.g. Vinyl) to the wantlist
• Get a list of sellers offering something from my wantlist (not via API)

Dependencies

These are the python modules used:

• requests
• json
• webbrowser
• getopt
• browser_cookie3
• pprint

API access

Discogs offers private/simple use of the API. To get a key navigate to https://www.discogs.com/settings/developers create a personal access token and add it to the config.py.

If you want to build an actual app for multi user access, I also added some example functions in the script for the three step authentication used.

Querying the market marketplace

... is not part of the API, unfortunately. However, I was able to scrape interesting information from the website. If you go this road, you'll quickly run into the problem of cookies. I tried multiple solutions I found online, including wget and curl both using exported cookies from firefox/chrome. Those didn't work at all for me and for this case. I ended up using the browser_cookie3 module like so:

browser_cookie3.chrome(domain_name='.discogs.com')

to create a requests session using the cookies from chrome. Don't know if this also works with different browsers. But you'll get the idea.

Usage

The script has a usage function. Simply call

$ ./discow -h

for the help.

Examples

• Add all vinyl versions of "Insomnia" by Faithless to the wantlist:

  $ ./discow -a 55716 -f Vinyl

• Display all masters of the wantlist:

  $ ./discow -w

• Check if API access is working

  $ ./diwcow -c