p2pnet - rss feed: Evanescence and mp3s
2pnet.net News:- Evanescence say their The Open Door will be on sale in stores from October 3 onwards. But, “Listen to The Open Door NOW!” - says the band on MySpace, going on, “right now, you can listen to the entire album at AOL Music | MSN | ClearChannelMusic.com.”
To digress, regular readers of p2pnet will remember Robert Chapin. This spring he discovered a very large hole in Yahoo’s at-the-time new music ’service’.
Strangely, Yahoo didn’t want to know.
Now, on the Evanescence release, “Unbelievable!!” This is, states Chapin, “a very interesting development for the industry. They’re either trying to promote sales by giving away free MP3s, or they’re under a mistaken impression about how their Internet servers are designed.”
He thought readers might be interested in a technical break down, so here it is:
Step 1, Web Browser
Web servers at clearchannelmusic.com have this new URL - //cc-common/mfeatures/player/player.html?songLink=sacrifice&folderName=evanescenceOD. Since the website owner’s name doesn’t appear on the website, I decided to check.
Domain Name: clearchannelmusic.com
Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Contact: Clear Channel Identity, LP
dns@clearchannel.com
According to clearchannel.com, this is a large US media company that owns over 1,000 radio stations, among other things.
Step 2, Media Player
When the Evanescence link opens in a Microsoft web browser, it loads a Microsoft media player and one of the songs from the unreleased album. A right-click takes me to the song properties of whichever track is playing.
The music is coming from a normal URL except that instead of starting with http:// it has mms:// at the front.
mms://a23.v18227d.c18227.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/23/18227/v0001/cchannel.download.akamai.com/18227/auth_!/music_ondemand/independent/windup/
Evanescene/Evanescence-Sweet_Sacrifice_160.mp3?auth=….
The authentication details are trivial at this point because the music is already playing, and according to the file properties, there’s no DRM involved.
If I close the web browser and paste the URL into a standalone media player, it’ll play the song again.
If anyone tries this part, I suggest looking at the Save As option in the File menu of Microsoft’s player. It’s grayed out. Why?
Step 3, Download
At this point, if I open up any other program that can download files from the Internet, I’ll have no trouble with the Save As feature. The only thing I have to check is support for the MMS link.
Even though the file was recorded at 160kbps quality, the transfer throughput is just under 1 Mbps. The download speed can be changed up or down depending on the program options I set.
50 seconds later I have a file named Evanescence-Sweet_Sacrifice_160.mp3
Step 4, Play
This particular file will play nicely in Microsoft’s player. With other players, results are mixed. Why?
Step 5, Rename
In this case, detective work reveals this MP3 file is actually encapsulated in ASF. I’ll change the name to Evanescence-Sweet_Sacrifice_160.asf for clarity.
It’s still in MP3 format, but there are some extra bits of formatting in the file that some players don’t recognize. This wouldn’t be a problem, but Microsoft has threatened other companies that tried to implement ASF, because it’s patented. Nevertheless, ASF is clearly documented on Microsoft’s website, so there are plenty of programs in the wild that can play, convert, and burn ASF files as you please.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/asfspec.aspx
To satisfy my own curiosity, I used these specifications to remove the non-mp3 parts of this mp3 file.
Step 6, Play Some More
I now have the original mp3 from clearchannelmusic.com and it sounds great.
I’m a big fan of Evanescence, so I admit this makes me want to buy the CD. So ho hopefully, they’ll set a good price on it! : )
Enjoy
Robert Chapin - Chapin Information Services
Also See:
very large hole - Yahoo Music Unlimited hack, September 27, 2006
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