To understand my question please consider the context:
- I am an english speaking developer and iTunes user
- I hold an Apple Account in Taiwan, where I live.
- My devices use english as primary or sole language in settings.
- I am aware that because I hold an account in Taiwan some content will appear in Chinese (although, I think that isn't a great approach to localization, I did at least get a warning for that. Only, the situation is getting worse)
In what looks like recent (April-May 2017) changes to the iTunes store, it looks like Apple are aggressively localizing artist names, notably with respect to music. So where I used to see artist names in English, increasingly they appear in Chinese on my phone...
... but still appear in English on my Mac(???)
Coincidentally, I started working on a music player (a replacement UI for the Music app). I was horrified to notice that, in many cases, my albums have been split in two, with say, 11 items with product ID A, and artist name in english, + 1 item with product ID B, artist name in Chinese. For example:
REP: Alternative Light Source / Leftfield & Tunde Adebimpe | 11693673391181066788
REP: Alternative Light Source / INVALID_CHARACTERS_OMITTED | 7369897907466417977
(removed chinese characters since this is invalidated by the forums UI)
Even more disquieting, how this translates in my music library (Music app generic UI) is that one item is missing from many albums. Removing and re-adding the album "Fixes" the issue but leaves me with Chinese-only names.
Now, here comes my question. Given two album IDs referring the actual same album (see example above) is there a way I can programmatically get a localized (by which I mean: matching my phone settings) name? Or at least the original, untranslated artist name? (some album names also look automatically translated)
Thanks for reading, and any help available with this.
