Downloading Streaming Music Formats
Posted: 29 Apr 2026, 06:54
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:
The copy keyword here will make sure the audio is simply extracted without any extra re-encoding 
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
Code: Select all
ffmpeg.exe -i playlist.tts -vn -acodec copy output-audio.aac