Capturing MySpace MP3s
I find it a more than a little annoying that I cannot save MP3s being streamed to my computer through MySpace. They are after all, files on my computer. And if I don't plan to make any profit on someone else's intellectual property, then there should be no issue. I've tried out MP3Gopher, but that got canned before it could be useful to me. So I played around with several packet capture tools. Leave it to the Open Source community to have the best one on the market, "Wireshark". Here's how you do it.
- Start a packet capture session.
- Load song via http. This works for sites like hype machine as well as MySpace. All the service needs to do is stream audio over http (or any other protocol that wireshark recognises - a lot) and you're fine.
- There will be a bunch of stream continuations, but at the end of the download, there will be a packet that marks the stream as an "mpeg/audio". This is the last packet
- Now you select that packet and click "Analyse > Follow TCP Stream".
- Save the entire conversation somewhere on your machine as "SongName.mp3".
- Find a text editor that doesn't do weird encode/decode a file's bytes on read/write (I use vim) and open that file. Delete the HTTP request / response crap at the top of the file and save it.
- You now have your mp3. Try it out in your audio player.
Posted by Timothy Washington on 2008.06.01| Original post
#archive #frye #thebox