Downloading Streaming Music Formats

[Moduvator]

Sometimes the websites do not store their music as individual files but instead have a web based player running in your browser to stream data to your computer in small chunks, similar to how YouTube or Spotify or many other services do this.

Obviously in this situation you can't just view page source and find the URL of the file to download as this is no longer longer one file, but rather a playlist (or "manifest") telling the client the names of all the chunks it has to fetch from the server. I am sharing here the solution that works for me and I didn't spend too much time looking, but please do feel free to chip in if you know better plugins for that!

Since I'm using Waterfox, I go with this version of Live Stream Downloader extension, but apparently it's available for all major players, such as Chrome and Edge. Once installed and open, go to the website of interest, open the music player and click on the interesting track. Observe the list in the extension window fill up as more chunks are fetched from the server -- you may need to push F5 to refresh the list:

• .ts are the small chunks that are being downloaded and played back one by one
• .m3u8 is the playlist file that tells client where to get them

It's a good idea to click the Keep M3U8 button since those are the files we're actually interested. Once you click Download, the plugin will fetch all the relevant chunks for that playlist and produce a .tts file that you will be prompted to save. Modern media players usually can play them back as is but you may want to extract the audio track stored within. One of the simplest instruments of choice for that is ffmpeg and example command to run might look like this:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg.exe -i playlist.tts -vn -acodec copy output-audio.aac

The copy keyword here will make sure the audio is simply extracted without any extra re-encoding