Hackszine.com: MySpace Archives

Archive: MySpace

January 26, 2008

HOWTO: download MP3s from MySpace

There are a lot of sites that provide little Flash audio widgets that allow you to listen to a tune but make it difficult to download. MySpace, for example, has a player that a lot of bands use to promote their music. Songs are downloaded to the player in normal MP3 format, but each time you load the player it is given a special token that it can use to access the audio. This token is passed back to the server in the query string by flash when a file is requested, which authenticates the download. Once the download has completed, the token is invalid for future downloads. Essentially, this protects people from figuring out the song URL and then hotlinking to it from another site.

What it doesn't do is protect you from downloading and saving a copy of the MP3 to your own machine. The Flash widget makes finding the URL a bit of an annoyance, but it's easy enough to discover that you can initiate your own download before the player has completed. Here's how:

Wait for the page to finish loading and then play the song you want to download.
Open up the Activity Monitor window in Safari, or use the network activity monitor in FireBug for Firefox.
You'll be able to quickly find the MP3 url. It's the one with the heinously long query string, probably a few MB in size, and the only thing still downloading.
Double click the URL to open it in a new window.

At this point, you have the song URL in your browser's address bar and the Flash player is still downloading the file. Depending on what browser you are using, opening the MP3 may have started downloading the file to your download folder. If that's the case, you're done!

Safari will try to play the MP3 inside the browser and doesn't allow you to save, though. That's okay—we'll use the command line instead. Just cut the URL from your address bar, hop over to a Terminal window, and type in the following:

curl -b nada 'http://paste_long_url_here' >out.mp3

Just make sure to put the single quotes around the URL that you've copied. If you execute this before the Flash widget's download has completed, curl will begin downloading the audio file and dumping it into out.mp3. If you were too slow, you'll get a 404 error. You'll have to replay the file, get the new URL, and try again. It usually takes a half minute for the file to finish streaming in, so you shouldn't have trouble getting this to work.

April 15, 2007

Using Google as a Proxy (or HOW TO: View MySpace at School)

Normally when you view a web page, your computer's browsing software makes a connection to the destination server, downloads the page's data, and displays it for you.

This would normally be the preferred way of doing things, but occasionally you'll find yourself on a work or school connection that disallows you from connecting to certain web sites. In these scenarios, what you need is a proxy. A proxy is a server or service that will connect to the blacklisted server on your behalf and send you back the results.

Now, you still need to directly access the proxy server, so it's important that it's not on the blacklist itself. It's very interesting that Google, a host unlikely to end up on most blacklists, has a couple of tools that can essentially act as a web proxy!

Google Proxy Trick #1
The first tool is Google's translation service. This service will dynamically download and translate any web page you request, and if you specify the "to" launguage as English (or your desired language), Google Translate will just spit out the destination document, acting as a simple proxy. Note that you used to be able to set the "from" and "to" language both as English to ensure no translation, but this feature seems to have been removed. However, I've found that if you specify Chinese to English (or anything to english) on an already english document, you usually get the exact text. The bonus of using the Chinese filter is that you can hover over any text and it'll give you the exact original text.

Just replace www.myspace.com in the URL below with a blocked site to see:
http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=zh%7Cen&u=http://www.myspace.com/

The only problem with this is that it doesn't proxy any of the images for you. Those are still coming directly from the destination server, so they will likely be filtered and all you'll see is the page text.

Google Proxy Trick #2
The second Google tool that can be used as a proxy service is the Google Wireless Transcoder. This service was designed to make web pages viewable on mobile phone browsers. It will download a destination site's web page, including images, and rework the entire page, on the fly, to fit into an average cell-phone's screen space.

To try it out, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n and enter the url you'd like to view. You'll quickly see that most of the page formatting has been stripped out, leaving a very simple, single-column page. You'll also notice that all the images are scaled down to mobile phone optimized size. It's a bit of a downside, but google is actually downloading and sending the scaled versions from a google server. So, if you're on a blacklisted site, you'll still be able to view images - they'll just be smaller than usual.

On the plus side, I've found that 99% of MySpace templates look better using the Google Wireless Transcoder.

Update (my poor memory):
I have the long term memory of a goldfish. It looks like Brian Sawyer wrote about this back in January -Link. He also linked to another article on the topic of bypassing a blocked myspace connection, which I've also included below. Thanks, Brian!

Related:

January 3, 2007

Use Google to View MySpace or Any Restricted Site

A year ago, a reader with the handle of bigthistle posted one of our favorite hacks to hacks.oreilly.com, describing how to access restricted websites using the Google Translate feature. Acknowledging that our readers often have better ideas than we do, we recently asked Wei-Meng Lee to take a closer look at this technique, and he wrote up this awesome HOWTO based on the original submitted hack.

If you have a hack on any topic that you'd like to share, let us know by using the "Suggest a Hack" form from the sidebar of this page.

UPDATE: The MySpace Hacks blog has a roundup of related ideas in How To Use MySpace If Your School Or Work Blocks Access.

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