a media player
Try VLC (VideoLan Client). Plays pretty much anything you can throw at it.
Even DVDs with libdvdcss2. Available on pretty much every OS out there.
Linux, Mac OS, Windows
www.videolan.org
Siphoning MySpace tunes using Safari
When it comes to protecting digital content holders from the hordes of naughty file grabbers, you'll be hard pressed to find a more zealous partner than Apple. So we were surprised to learn that Apple's Safari browser makes it easy to download MP3 files hosted on MySpace that are supposed to be limited to streaming only. …
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Saturday 25th August 2007 02:37 GMT Andy
Whoops.
Many's the time I've used the activity window to grab something I want to watch offline. Very useful feature - and as you said, a timely reminder that stuf on the net is pretty much public. Having said that, though, if you want to pinch the music it'd be pretty much as easy to grab a torrent.
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Saturday 25th August 2007 15:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeah well thank you
for putting up this signpost so sites can start finding ways to kill it... *grrr*
Also, as it was said, this is nothing of a hack, if is simply finding a file that is there in the first place, but obscured. *seesh*
@MahatmaCoat: Crawl back into your cubicle and reinstall your OS, will you?
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Saturday 25th August 2007 15:49 GMT Simn Lovatt
Opera does it too... for a long time!
If you play ANY tune from MySpace - Opera automatically downloads the file into your cache as an MP3 at a low bitrate and then it's yours for the taking.
By default your Opera cache is at
C:\Documents and Settings\Neo\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile\cache4
Except obviously change "Neo" for whatever your computer/login name is ;)
Have been listening to music like this for around the last six months without using Burp or other assorted tools *vbg*
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Saturday 25th August 2007 20:45 GMT Dan Goodin
Re: question really is... who cares?
Ian,
Good ole fashioned p2p may be more efficient, but it doesn't always offer the selection found on MySpace. Frequently, artists put exclusive content on MySpace that isn't available elsewhere, under the pretense that the files on MySpace can't be downloaded.
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Sunday 26th August 2007 16:05 GMT Jamie Jones
How do people think they can hear/see things on their computer without them downloading it ?
Michael explains the situation perfectly.
It is no 'bug' or 'hole'.
Bottom line, if it gets to your computer, you can save it, whatever it is. Even if you are not technical enough to save the original mp3 or stream, you can still do the equivalent of 'taping off the radio'.
Incidently, an easy way to save things which do actually stream (rtsp/rtp/pnm things like realaudio, and some windows media), use the "dumpstream" option on "mplayer"
That saves the stream in it's native format without you ending up with a large wav to re-encode (as you would with an audacity 'save all you listen to') - it also means you can save/listen to multiple streams at a time without the saved copy being a resultant mix!
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Sunday 26th August 2007 16:05 GMT John
err... you can do this in Internet Explorer 7
open your temp internet files,
sort by date last accessed,
find a song you want on myspace & add it to your own profile,
now view your own profile, and listen to the song.
Got back to the temp files window, hit f5, and there is your mp3...
has a silly obfuscated name, but one quick copy & rename later and you have your file
not really rocket science, and taking mp3s of myspace is definitely not confined to safari, or osx.
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Sunday 26th August 2007 17:56 GMT Nìall Tracey
@Michael
"If they 'closed the door', you wouldn't be able to hear any music."
MySpace music promises uploaders control over access to their music, and I think it's fair to assume that most people assume that they're using some sort of streaming tech to do so.
Real Media and Microsoft's streaming formats are now almost universally available and although trivial to hack, they do at least attempt to block recordings.
MySpace are putting MP3s up for download without making this clear to users, many of whom explicitly choose *not* to have downloads available (see the greyed-out "download" link in most players).
MySpace has skimped on the technology, failing to pay for appropriate measures. They should be more open and properly inform the artists who use their sites. After all, they're the ones who bring people to the site.
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Monday 27th August 2007 01:26 GMT Acidbass
The comic-book-guy technique
Personally I prefer to plug my opensolaris wristwatch into a promiscuous hub and packet dump the traffic as the other box streams it off myspace. I use a perl script to mark up the datagrams into xml then use this nifty safari plugin to filter out the ones belonging to the mp3, before reassembling the stream by hand using a set of emacs macros I wrote (in vi).
I don't actually listen to the audio, as doing it this way I feel I have a much deeper appreciation of the contents.
P.S. I hope you can supply me with an IP row-ter for my token-ring/ethernet lan config-yuration?
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Monday 27th August 2007 17:02 GMT Morely Dotes
@ Michael
"Oh please, what a bunch of nonsense. The door is open because people want you to listen to their music and so they upload it to the site."
Proper streaming software would be reading the file from a directory outside of the Web server's "sandbox." If that were the case, no URL would give you a direct link to the mp3 file; the Web server would not be able to access the MP3. It would have to rely on an external application to generate the stream.
MySpace has apparently chosen to use the "cehap and cheerful" instead of the "free open source software that's secure" route.
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This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
