vgmdb-client

A typed, sync + async Python client for vgmdb.net — the community database of video-game and anime music. It fetches and parses albums, artists, products, organizations, and events into validated pydantic models, with its own clean-room HTML parsers.

• Documentation: https://technophile-musicfan.github.io/vgmdb-client/
• Source: https://github.com/technophile-musicfan/vgmdb-client/

Features

• Sync and async — Client and AsyncClient share the same typed API.
• Typed models — Album, Track, Credit, Artist, Product, Organization, Event, search results — immutable pydantic v2 models.
• Cloudflare-aware transport — manual cf_clearance + User-Agent injection, typed errors that distinguish a Cloudflare challenge from a real 404, retries, and a politeness throttle.
• Auth helper — paste a browser "Copy as cURL" and Credentials.from_curl extracts the cf_clearance + matching User-Agent pair for you. (It assists with the token; it does not defeat the Cloudflare challenge — you solve that in your own browser.)
• Optional enrichment — pluggable backends (deterministic rule-based, or an OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoint) to extract per-track credits from freeform album notes.
• No heavy dependencies — just httpx, pydantic, lxml, and tenacity.

Installation

pip install vgmdb-client

Quickstart

vgmdb.net is behind Cloudflare, so a request needs a valid cf_clearance cookie paired with the exact User-Agent it was issued for. Solve the challenge once in your browser, open devtools, copy any request to vgmdb.net as cURL (bash), and hand it to the client:

from vgmdb_client import Client
from vgmdb_client.auth import Credentials

curl = """curl 'https://vgmdb.net/album/4' \\
  -H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 ...' \\
  -H 'cookie: cf_clearance=<your-token>; ...'"""

with Client.from_credentials(Credentials.from_curl(curl)) as client:
    album = client.get_album(4)
    print(album.titles.default, album.release_date)

    results = client.search("final fantasy")
    for hit in results.albums[:5]:
        print(hit.catalog, hit.titles.default)

The async client mirrors it:

import asyncio
from vgmdb_client import AsyncClient
from vgmdb_client.auth import Credentials

async def main() -> None:
    async with AsyncClient.from_credentials(Credentials.from_curl(curl)) as client:
        album = await client.get_album(4)
        print(album.titles.default)

asyncio.run(main())

When a token goes stale you'll get a CloudflareChallengeError; grab a fresh cURL and re-apply it without rebuilding the client:

from vgmdb_client.transport.errors import CloudflareChallengeError

try:
    album = client.get_album(4)
except CloudflareChallengeError:
    client.set_credentials(Credentials.from_curl(fresh_curl))
    album = client.get_album(4)

See the documentation for the full API, authentication, entities, and enrichment guides.

Attribution & use

Data comes from vgmdb.net and its contributors. This is an unofficial client; please use it responsibly — keep the politeness throttle enabled and respect vgmdb.net's terms.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.