Harmony grabs the wrong Apple Music release in cases of different issues

[Ser-Erate]

When multiple versions of the same album appear on streaming, Harmony sometimes gets the Apple Music link for the wrong one, even when they have different labels and GTINs. For example, the album First Frost by the Lucksmiths has 3 versions; One released worldwide by Lost and Lonesome, with GTIN 3617665701011, one released in Europe by Fortuna Pop!, with GTIN 5060044170546, And one released in the Americas by matinée, with GTIN 884501048293. When putting any of the GTINs into Harmony, however, it grabs the iTunes link for the Fortuna POP! version, unless I specify the region.

This seems to be similar to #45 however perhaps more concerning, as there's no warning (Aside from "Failed to extract GTIN from artwork URL", which very often occurs even when it does have the right link), So without seeing contradictory information (Like the record labels, in this case), or manually checking the GTIN on Apple Music with something like ToadKing's Apple Music Barcodes/ISRCs userscript, it would be hard to spot and could very easily result in Apple Music links being added on the wrong MB release page, or an MB release page being created with information from two different versions.

[kellnerd]

Interesting, I thought this would be essentially the same as #10, but here the iTunes API doesn't even return multiple results from which it picks the wrong one (because of missing GTINs).

Since there is no way for Harmony to know this, showing the "Failed to extract GTIN from artwork URL" is all it can do until someone implements an Apple Music API provider😔

As you said, you have to set the correct region to get the expected result.
This is something which you should always do IMO to get the most meaningful region-specific Apple links, but most people only seem to change this field when they get no result otherwise.

[kellnerd]

Example by chaban where the cover art URL even contains a wrong barcode, the one of the other release result:

An anecdote on barcode extraction issues:

Currently Harmony tries to extract the barcode for Apple Music releases from the cover art URL for confirmation but this is not reliable. Example:
https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/release?gtin=190295820954&itunes=&region=GB&ts=1744273271

Yet Harmony sounds convinced (except for the subtle warning) it’s 190295820954 when it’s actually 190295795986 per Apple Music API. This can be a serious problem when people rely solely on Harmony to add data that’s otherwise “invisible” to them.