4 ms·

Incredible. > A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. They wont and shouldn’t divulge the details, but I imagine that would be a fun read

• bmikaili 10mo ago
  they're probably just using something like https://github.com/nor-dee/spotizerr-spotify https://github.com/nor-dee/spotizerr-spotify
  • WD-42 10mo ago
    No way, that would take far too long.
  • bigyabai 10mo ago
    Probably not, those tools don't actually download Spotify tracks at source quality.
    • sunaookami 10mo ago
      There are tools that actually download directly from Spotify (needs premium then) but yeah most of them just use the search and download from other sources like YouTube without mentioning it. I won't say which tools download directly out of fear that they get killed but they exist.
      • echelon_musk 10mo ago
        Sadly since zspotify was killed I don't know of any remaining tools.
        • spatterl1ght 10mo ago
          votify
• DUDOS 10mo ago
  How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.
  • eterm 10mo ago
    It's hard to imagine anything but physical egress for that kind of volume.
    • morsch 10mo ago
      50 free accounts continually streaming music rack up 20 TB in a month. So that would take about 1.5 years. Our you use 750 accounts and do it in a month. I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.
      • kefabean 10mo ago
        That’s if they pretend to stream the music. If they are using throwaway free accounts I imagine they can download the DRM-stripped files much more quickly.
        • morsch 10mo ago
          True, but I could see them rate limiting that much more aggressively than streaming.
          • sejje 10mo ago
            You can download playlists for offline use, it'll go pretty fast. I doubt they monitor it that hard.
      • monerozcash 10mo ago
        You can probably just buy a thousand hacked spotify accounts for not much more than $1 a piece
  • 10mo ago
• derkades 10mo ago
  It is not hard. But please don't misuse it and ruin the fun for everyone. It is nice to be able to use the music relatively easily for hobby projects. My music server has functionality to play tracks from Spotify this way: https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/spotify-sync https://codeberg.org/raphson/music-server/src/branch/main/sp...
  • KomoD 10mo ago
    Where the magic actually happens: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
    • reassess_blind 10mo ago
      I wonder how many premium accounts Anna’s Archive had to use to scrape the whole thing. Surely Spotify has scrape protection and wouldn’t allow a single account to stream (download) millions of separate tracks.
      • grishka 10mo ago
        I haven't looked at the code but I would be surprised if the premium account "requirement" is anything more than an if statement that can be commented out.
        • squigz 10mo ago
          Pretty sure that requirement is server-side?
          • grishka 10mo ago
            What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be. My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.
• bambax 10mo ago
  "at scale" could mean they had direct access to a server or to storage, maybe because they had an insider giving them access, or they found secrets that had leaked somewhere?