TidalDiscordRPC

Show your TIDAL music on Discord.
A lightweight Windows tray app with album artwork and playback progress.

No login. No API key. Just play.

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Features

• 🎵 Automatic detection — reads the current track directly from Windows media sessions.
• 🖼️ Accurate album artwork — matches artists and albums using the iTunes Search API.
• ⏱️ Playback progress — displays track start and end times in Discord.
• ⏸️ Pause detection — clears your Rich Presence when playback stops.
• 🖥️ System tray integration — control presence and Windows startup from the tray.
• 🪶 Lightweight — runs silently in the background with no main window.
• 🔑 No TIDAL API access required — no login or API key to configure.

Quick start

1. Download TidalDiscordRPC.exe from the latest release.
2. Open the Discord desktop app and TIDAL.
3. Run TidalDiscordRPC.exe.
4. Play a song and enjoy your Rich Presence.

Tip: Enable Start with Windows from the tray menu to launch the app automatically.

Tray menu

Item	What it does
Track / artist lines	Shows the current song (play/pause symbol)
Presence enabled	Turns the Discord presence on or off
Start with Windows	Adds or removes an autostart entry (no admin rights needed)
Open config	Opens the optional settings file (restart the app to apply changes)
Open debug log	Opens the log file
Quit	Exits the app

If you move the exe, toggle Start with Windows off and on again so the new path is stored.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11
• Discord desktop app (the browser version does not support Rich Presence)
• TIDAL desktop app
• In Discord: Settings -> Activity Privacy -> Share your detected activity enabled, and your status not set to Invisible

Windows SmartScreen / antivirus

The exe is not code-signed. Windows may show "Windows protected your PC": click More info -> Run anyway. Some antivirus tools also flag programs packaged with PyInstaller by mistake. If you don't trust the exe, build it yourself from the source.

Troubleshooting

Right-click the tray icon -> Open debug log. It lists the media sessions Windows sees, each track, every cover lookup, and Discord connection errors.

Problem	Likely cause
Nothing shows up in Discord	Discord is not running (or only open in the browser), activity sharing is disabled, or the status is Invisible
Tray shows "Nothing playing"	TIDAL is not running or Windows does not see its media session
Wrong or missing cover	See the lookup lines in the log. The album may not exist on iTunes
App does not start after login	The exe was moved. Toggle Start with Windows off and on

Settings (optional)

Settings live in %APPDATA%\TidalDiscordRPC\config.json. The defaults work for most people.

{
  "fallback_image": "tidal",
  "countries": ["de", "us"],
  "match_threshold": 0.85,
  "poll_seconds": 2
}

Key	Description
countries	iTunes stores, tried in this order (e.g. ["us", "de"])
match_threshold	Minimum album similarity, 0..1. Lower = more covers, higher risk of wrong ones
poll_seconds	How often the Windows media session is checked
fallback_image	Art asset shown when no cover is found

Cache and logs are stored in the same folder: covers.json (cover cache) and debug.log (rotates at 512 KB, keeps one debug.old.log).

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How it works

Windows media session (GSMTC)  ->  track, artist, album, position
            |
            v
iTunes Search API  ->  cover URL (artist ID lookup + fuzzy album matching)
            |
            v
Discord Rich Presence (local IPC via pypresence)

Cover matching

A wrong cover is worse than no cover, so a cover is only used when it passes an artist and album check. Per iTunes store (default de, then us), the app tries:

1. Artist lookup: find the artist ID, fetch all albums of that artist and match the album name (normalized: accents and brackets like (Deluxe) or - Single are ignored; similarity >= 0.85)
2. Album search: search by album name only, then filter by artist
3. Song search: verify title, artist and album of the result

If nothing passes, the fallback image is shown. Found covers are cached in covers.json. Misses and network errors are never written to disk. iTunes allows roughly 20 requests per minute, so requests are throttled; the first track of an unknown artist can take a few seconds to get its cover.

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Development

Run from source

Requires Python 3.10+.

git clone https://github.com/LordMaddhi/TidalDiscordRPC.git
cd TidalDiscordRPC
pip install -r requirements.txt
run.bat

run.bat starts the app without a console window. To see errors directly, run python tidal_discord_rpc.py instead.

Build the exe

build.bat

Creates .venv if it does not exist, installs the dependencies and builds dist\TidalDiscordRPC.exe (single file, no console, icon.ico). Quit the running app first, otherwise Windows blocks overwriting the exe.

Discord application ID

The Rich Presence is sent through a Discord application whose ID is set in tidal_discord_rpc.py:

DEFAULT_CONFIG = {
    "discord_client_id": "...",   # Application ID
    "fallback_image": "tidal",
    ...
}

If you fork this project, create your own application and replace the ID:

1. Open the Discord Developer Portal and create an application. Its name is shown after "Listening to".
2. Copy the Application ID into DEFAULT_CONFIG.
3. Under Rich Presence -> Art Assets, upload a fallback image named tidal.

For testing you can also override the ID in %APPDATA%\TidalDiscordRPC\config.json with "discord_client_id"; values in that file take precedence over the defaults in the code.

Project structure

tidal_discord_rpc.py   main app (media watcher, cover resolver, Discord, tray)
requirements.txt       dependencies
build.bat              builds dist\TidalDiscordRPC.exe
run.bat                starts the app from source without a console
icon.ico / icon.png    app icon

Dependencies are kept small on purpose: pypresence, pystray, pillow and the winrt-* packages for the media session. HTTP and fuzzy matching use the standard library.

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Disclaimer

Not affiliated with or endorsed by TIDAL, Discord or Apple. Cover art is fetched from the public iTunes Search API and belongs to its respective owners.

License

MIT