This is too user facing and too easy to modify for DRM circumvention (if it isn't already doing that)
Whether it dies through a DMCA takedown or harder DRM measures remains to be seen.
I'm always sad to see people investing lots of time into creating great software that exists in a legal dark grey zone and will inevitably be nuked.
And yes I'm also not happy with the standard Spotify client
Is that even possible for Spotify at this point?
The OP project is speaking to Spotify servers through the same means that official clients are, but the official clients are not just on iOS, Android, macOS and Windows.
There’s official Spotify clients on almost every platform imaginable. Everything from PS4 to built into TVs. And even a lot of stereo systems have Spotify Connect built into them.
Spotify Connect works by having these other devices streaming and playing the media, and your computer or phone acting as a “remote” for choosing the songs to be played. See https://www.spotify.com/us/connect/
Basically they’d have to break a lot of official clients, many of which probably cannot be updated, if they were to change their DRM scheme. How do you update a receiver for example? Well, you might be able to flash a new firmware with a USB stick. But for regular people, they are not going to do that. And the DRM scheme, at least as of yet, would be defeated by the reverse engineers as DRM always is. And hopefully continues to be.
So at least as of yet I think they would hurt people with official clients more than they would hurt anyone using an unofficial client.
And even people using unofficial clients are probably paying customers.
Besides what’s the point anyways, everyone knows that if you really really want to rip audio you don’t need to circumvent any DRM at all. You can play the song on your computer or your phone and take the analog signal that is going to the speakers and digitize it again and make an imperfect but still good copy of any audio. Admittedly it doesn’t scale anywhere near as good as automatically stripping DRM though.
In order for Spotify to have any decent user experience, they need to nip any DRM bypass as scale in the bud before the publishers find out, through cease and desist or worse. If better DRM becomes the only solution, everyone loses.
The difference between official and unofficial clients is that Spotify can have some (contractual) power over the official clients, like demand that music is cached encrypted, demand a certain limit for cached music, etc. Unofficial clients aren't bound by any contract, so the developers could easily do something they shouldn't be doing according to the terms and conditions Spotify lays out (or the terms and conditions of the copyright holders that Spotify must uphold).
Spotify are using Widevine on their web client, which is considerably more annoying to deal with than the encryption method used in the files fetched by Psst.
Nothing is stopping them from only serving files from the endpoint that serves Widevine protected files.
Then again, Widevine L3 has been broken[0], Google just keeps rotating the private keys used in the content decryption module.
Spotify is built on bringing your music library with you everywhere. If your car or five year old stereo stops being able to play spotify songs, why would you still pay for a Premium account? 2% loss doesn't sound like much, but at Spotify's scale, that would mean loosing 2 million paying customers. If they pay $5 /month, that's not pocket change.
What's more, media-oriented devices like smart tvs or game consoles usually have those requirements.
I've looked it up a few years ago, so this may have changed, but at the time you couldn't just ask Spotify for the SDK / docs to build your own Connect client. I don't remember the details, but you'd have to jump through some hoops, at which point I stopped looking since I wasn't about to build anything industrial. I expect some terms would be that you'd at least try to protect the keys.
If it weren't for all the legal agreements with copyright holders, I feel like spotify would already have an open playback API.
But if you could get the original file from Spotify's servers and decrypt it yourself, you could automate downloading your entire library, offline forever at source quality DRM free. Unfortunately, that is illegal and Spotify is going to dick them with lawyers. Pretty sure that's what happened to this project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017167
History: after the developer decided to pivot from only being a tool to scrape the encryption keys needed to decrypt an individual song, the developer decided it would be a good idea to build in automating the downloading and also decryption of those files, instead of letting people develop that as a separate tool.
Developer and project has disappeared shortly after that decision.
Spotify does at most MP3 320kbps, source quality would imply something like lossless FLAC/AAC
> This app uses the Web API from Spotify, which doesn't handle streaming itself. So you'll need either an official Spotify client open or a lighter weight alternative such as spotifyd.
How?