Frequently Asked Questions

I want to build a service who's goal was to help distribute band's music. Can I use TuneCore as my "engine"?

Yes. You can use TuneCore as a distribution system for your service and offer it under your own brand.

What kinds of business models are acceptable to use with TunecoreDirect?

You should run your ideas past our business development group when you apply for your API key.

What is a "Person"?

A person is a TuneCore account, identified by an email address and password. As a partner you will have many people, one for every account in your system. A person can have multiple albums, each from different artists or all from the same artist. If you don't specify an artist name when you create the album we will assume that the artist name is the same as the person name. For documentation on the person class see the SDK documentation.

Is Album.album_id autogenerated by TuneCore or do we set the value? What is the format?

album_id is an integer that is assigned by TuneCore when the album is created

At what point in the creation of a song and album is the audio track pulled down from S3? When Song.save is called?

After you've created the album and attached it to a song you will be able to indicate the S3 location of the audio asset. Currently the only way to get the audio to us is to use the flash uploader but I'm working on adding a method of getting the audio directly from an external S3 bucket.

Song.song_id, is that field generated by TuneCore? If not what value should I set it to?

song_id is similar to album_id, it's set by TuneCore when you create the song.

How do I get an API key?

Email alex@tunecore.com

What's the URL for the test tunecore server?

The URL for the test server is http://test.tunecore.com

What are the system requirements to use the Ruby SDK?

All you need is Ruby. The TunecoreDirect Ruby SDK only requires the standard Ruby libraries. The SDK is tested using Ruby version 1.8.6 on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).