Comment by KomoD

4 days ago

Where the magic actually happens: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

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.

  • I have a feeling they didn't use premium accounts since they downloaded at 160kbit/s, which is the highest quality that free accounts can get.

    Premium gets 320kbit/s (or lossless)

    • to use this method of scraping, logging in with a premium account is required.

      so either they found a way around that lock, but not the quality lock, or they just decided 160k is good enough (it generally is), and decided to stick with that for filesize & bandwidth savings

Seems like librespot is not directly suppporting the fetching of audio to files, and intentionally so, in order to not get targeted by Spotify. Obviously you can dump the audio to file as it "plays", but that would be be very slow.

So I suppose if one wanted to use librespot for archiving, one would have to modify it to support this use case.