TrueJournals

It's only a matter of how much effort you will have to put in to download the file, not a matter of if it CAN be done. As soon as I saw that blogmusik had opened back up, with the ability to stream music for free, I thought about this. With a little bit of work, you CAN download music from Deezer, however, at the moment, it is quite a bit of work. Perhaps I (or someone else) will work on an easier way to do all of this.

The basis is simple: use a packet sniffer to find the address of one of the files. Done. I found Weird Al's Bohemian Polka at http://proxy-0.blogmusik.net/encapsulation.php?ID=46a4f541-5db0-ff08-c65b-3e74d647b672 However, I was disappointed by the URL a bit. I was hoping that finding the URL, it would turn out to be some standard thing, but instead they use a unique ID for each song. Which only delays progress a little. Next, I wanted to see if I could hijack the "Search" function to find Song IDs. Then I hit a road bump.

The whole website is done in flash, and the search function is done with flash remoting. Unfortunately, Ethereal, the program I was using to packet-sniff, cannot decoding flash remoting communications. So, I had to find what could. I quickly found ServiceCapture, which claims to be "the only tool of its kind to deserialize and display all Flash Remoting or AMF traffic in a simple-to-use interface." I'm staying with service capture for now because there is a 15 day trial, however, this marketing sentence is written in such fuzzy wording that it's hard to tell EXACTLY what they mean. Anyway, I fired up ServiceCapture and was able to capture the Flash Remoting traffic VERY easily.

I found out that it sends a call to www.deezer.com/flashservices/gateway.php to the service rp_search_release2, the method search, with one parameter: the string you are searching for. The response I found contained an array (0 > serverInfo > initialData) with all the songs returned from the search. The ninth element of each item in this array contains the unique song ID. Choose any one you want, and you can easily use the URL http://proxy-0.blogmusik.net/encapsulation.php?ID= with your own ID, and download any song. Just a warning though: the songs are MP3s at 64kbps. This is really more of a proof-of-concept than something you would actually want to do.

Hope you enjoyed this. I shall now try to work on a PHP script to automate this. Wish me luck!

[edit]OK, thanks to the AMFPHP project, I was able to create a PHP script that automates this. Since this project is meerly for educational purposes, and I do not condone the use of this for illegaly downloading music, I'm not putting a link to a usable version on the web, I will only post some download mirrors. The zip file contains everything you need. deezerd.php is the script that actually does all the work, the rest is all AMFPHP stuff. Here are the mirros:
http://rapidshare.com/files/50663739/deezerd.zip
http://filevip.com/pages/download.php?id=8053488139
http://files-upload.com/files/452548/deezerd.zip

If a link goes down, let me know.

Instructions: Search for a song just like you would normally on deezer.com. The results will be shown after a little bit (it takes some time to search). Simply right click on the title of the song you want to download (album - artist are shown below the song, and album art to the left of the song title and ID#), and choose "Save Link As...". In the box that pops up, choose "All Files" for file type, and type in (...).mp3 for the file name (replacing (...) with whatever you want to call the file).

[edit2]I reported, based on a couple songs I tested, that the MP3s are 64kbps. However, I looked more into how deezer works, and know have a different answer for this after finding a song that was 128kbps. Deezer's MP3s are uploaded by users. Whatever bitrate MP3 the user uploads, that is the bitrate you will get. You may or may not get ID3 tags either.

Sub-title: And, presumably, other community-based open-source projects.

For those of you who don't know, Rockbox is my favorite open-source project. It's an alternative firmware for a wide range of MP3 players, and I eagerly installed it as soon as the H10 code was committed. Since then, I have been watching the project and have even started making my own build. I'm always excited to see when there's something committed, because it's usually something good.

Now, I was recently looking at the Golden Quotes page on the Rockbox wiki, and I decided to look at the origin of one of the quotes. Specifically, "I got Rockbox because i expect more out of them, and i have a right to expect more" ... "Now make me proud and make these updates i ask for done ASAP, by tomorrow or even this weekend would be great" -- From http://www.misticriver.net/showpost.php?p=518385&postcount=9. I decided to read through the thread and realized that there's a lot people do not understand about open-source. There should be a list of what people need to know before using a piece of open-source software. Let's see what I can come up with:

1. Committing something to SVN/CVS is NOT the same as releasing it. Releases for Rockbox do not happen that often. The last release of Rockbox was at the end of 2005. For those of you who still don't get it, a release is when the Rockbox developers decide that Rockbox is at a very stable stage for all current targets. They will introduce a "feature freeze" before an actual release is made. A feature freeze is a period of time where only bug fixes, and not new features, are committed to the code. A SVN revision number is NOT a release version.
   
   
2. Rockbox developers have lives. Seems obvious doesn't it? They don't just sit around at home all day thinking of ways to slack off from coding for Rockbox. They go do their jobs so they can get paid and continue living like they do. If they have free time, they will try to use it for developing, because (as far as I know), they usually enjoy it. Rockbox developers, unlike developers for corporations such as Microsoft, do NOT get paid for developing (Rockbox). You can never know when a feature will be released because it's hard to say how much time the developer of that feature will have.
   
   
3. YOU DID NOT PAY MONEY! Meaning, you can not demand features. You have a right to demand features from (using my previous example) Microsoft, because you paid money for their projects. Yes, there is a DONATION button on their site, and as far as I'm aware, donated money goes toward server bills, and other various expenses. If you pay one of them $100, I'm sure they'd be glad to develop a feature for you (assuming it is possible). Don't quote me on this though... I don't want them getting angry at me
   
   
4. Don't yell at the developers. Once again, they are not there to please you specifically. If you are told, "It's being worked on," don't ask "ETA?" If you do, they'll most likely say something along the lines of, "It's hard to say." After this, drop it. Don't pester them. The best thing you can do at this point is offer to help them in any way possible. Respect that they are doing this project in their free time.
   
   
5. As Daniel Stenberg put it, "first you R, then you go over to T while slowly considering F and the adjacent M" (for those of you who don't get it.. RTFM = Read The F***ing Manual). Unlike manuals by corporations, open-source manuals are surprisingly easy to understand. They are written for people, and by people who use the product. If you see something in the manual you don't understand, bring it up in the IRC channel, forums, or whatever and ask. People will be glad that you at least read it. Perhaps someone else will read it and say, "You're right... that doesn't make sense. I'll fix it." And fix the manual so you no longer have a problem, and everyone else no longer has a problem. Helping with the manual is one of the easiest and best ways to help with an open-source project.
   

OK, that's three things you should know before using an open-source project. I think it's a pretty good list. Think I'm missing a major point? Please comment and let me know!

The team-dsx podcast should be coming underway sometime in the next... year.... seriously though, we should have it soon... (right after we record it..)

Anyway, in other podcasting news... it seems that Brian was on the wii60 podcast... and he'd be glad to tell you about it But, he told me that the wii60 podcast people want to interview the team-dsx erm... team.. in their next podcast! Should be pretty cool, and good advertising! Imagine, 30 members from one post... what could happen in a podcast

In my life news, I'm going to get my schedule today ! Finally, a week before school starts, they decide to give them to us! Well, I'll be telling everyone and hoping I have classes with people I KNOW!