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Comment by reassess_blind

3 days ago

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.

10 comments

reassess_blind

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KomoD  3 days ago

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)

  • tayiorrobinson  1 day ago

    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

grishka  3 days ago

I haven't looked at the code but I would be surprised if the premium account "requirement" is anything more than an if statement that can be commented out.

  • squigz  3 days ago

    Pretty sure that requirement is server-side?

    • grishka  3 days ago

      What do you mean? You can still stream any song with a free account. It's just that there will be ads. Additionally, in mobile apps, there will be ridiculous artificial limitations to make sure your experience is as miserable as it could possibly be.

      My understanding is that the premium requirement is there to avoid having the repo taken down.

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