I almost hesitate to post this, for fears that I will get my ass DMCA-ed, but let’s hope the readership of this blog is small and discreet enough as to not attract unnecessary attention…
So, lots of music label / artist sites post up a little Flash audio player that streams previews of tracks to your browser while you’re looking at the page. Warp does it, Biirdie does it… Hell, even MySpace does it. And the thing about all these audio players is that, based on the nature of Flash, the easiest way to code them is to just pass in a series of URLs in ActionScript and stream the audio directly to the Flash Player.
This used to be not such a big deal, since sites would only post up the first 30 seconds or so of each track, so even if you figured out where the actual MP3s were streaming from and downloaded them directly, you’d only end up with the first few seconds of each song. More recently, however, many sites have been posting up *entire* songs to stream via their Flash players, entire *albums* even.
Of course, most Flash programers are aware that this makes downloading the MP3s much more attractive, and so each attempts to obfuscate the location of the files in his or her own unique way. The best tricks involve passing encrypted URLs with JavaScript, autogenerating unique directory names on the fly, or even hardcoding the URLs into the source of the Flash file.
Most of these methods are a sufficient pain in the ass to decipher that it’s hardly worth the effort unless you are willing to sit up for an hour or two picking apart some crazy-ass code just to download one album for free. Occasionaly, however, a coder will (intentionally or otherwise) make it almost criminally easy to locate the original MP3 files.
This evening I stumbled across just such a case.
Thrill Jockey Records, based in Chicago and home to such artists as Bobby Conn, Tortoise, Trans Am and the Lonesome Organist, has traditionally had a pretty crummy homepage. It had remained unchanged for the last several years and was just pretty unappealing to look at, generally. (That being said, their tour and album release info always seemed shockingly up-to-date!)
Anyway, I surfed into the site tonight while looking into an artist (Aki Tsuyuko) Momus had mentioned in an old post on his site, and I was pleasantly surprised to notice that the whole site had undergone a pretty nice redesign! Not only that, but each album page in the catalog had a Flash player with full-length previews of every song!
I was kind of bored, so I thought I’d take a look at how they’d gone about protecting the source MP3s from prying HTTP clients. It turns out that they haven’t really done so at all. The MP3s *are* being hosted on a server called “beta” however, so I suspect that this state of affairs may not last forever. In the meantime, here’s how it works:
- Go to the Thrill Jockey web site
- Navigate to the album page of whatever you want to download. The URL should look something like this: http://thrilljockey.com/catalog/?id=100364. Note those last six numbers.
- Roll over the track titles in the “Preview” player with your mouse pointer. Note that URL for each link ends with a nine digit number.
- Visit the following URL: http://beta.thrilljockey.com/assets/audio/100132/100001348.mp3, but replace the six and nine digit numbers in the URL with the ones from your track.
- Repeat. Enjoy. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us by writing a script that does something horribly abusive like downloading the entire catalog.
Thank you, that is all…