Songza, The next big thing - or is it?
Kim Schulz, saturday d. 17. november 2007A little more than a week ago, Aza Raskin announced his new brainchild Songza. A brand new search engine for music. The users can easily find and listen to the music, but they cant download it - or can they?
Geat userinterface
The songza userinterface is great and simple (KISS consept at its best). You search for a song, select the song in the result list and click it. Then a nice little navigations box shows up where you can select to play, share, rate or add to playlist. Simple and easy. After selecting play, the music starts playing.
Here are a bit of screenshots.
The idea is briliant and you can find pretty much any song you like (I did some weird searches and got results).
This made me think! where do they get their songs from? In many cases the songs sounded like live recordings or just plain bad recordings so I was sure that it wasnt top-quality music they have gotten from the music industry
I couldnt find much info about this, so I decided to do a bit of digging into how it worked.
The music is not downloadable - yeah Right!
I fired up firefox and started the firebug extension to see what actually happened when I started playing a song. The "net" tab is quite nice to show what actually gets transfered over to my computer.
One thing caught my eye right away. Between the gets of images, flash and js files I suddently saw a couple of links to youtube. Could it be that simple? Did a couple of more searched and now also saw a couple of links to google-video.
Aha! I looked at what I had gotten from youtube ant noticed that it was the usual "get_video" request that the youtube player uses to get the flv file containing the video.
so thats where they got their music from. It is actually just the video it plays without showing the image. This also explains why the sound was often so bad or like live recordings (there s quite a few live recordings around on youtube).
I copied the link from the youtube "get_video" link from firebug and into another firefox window. I was then asked whether I wanted to download the file or play it with my media player (Gnome Totem). I selected the last option and this is what I saw:
The music video of dire straits that I just listened to on Songza.
Nice and easy. The best thing is that the Songza interface is a lot easier to find music with than the one in youtube and google-video.
In other words, this might not be such a bad idea after all - even though it still just brings us what youtube and friends does.
I am pretty sure though that within a couple of weeks, firefox extensions like downloadhelper will provide support for downloading music (well videos) from songza.
Permanent url: http://www.schulz.dk/en/blog/blogarchive/109
| solas | |
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musica wena |
| Answer | isabel - google.es, 2007-12-07 23:35 |
| Nice find! | |
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Hehe, nice find. I wonder how legal that would be and how amused Google/Youtube is about that.
I recently wrote about similar services (but with legal music) here:http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2008-01/10-music_for_your_blog_free_playlist_services |
| Answer | Andreas Gohr - http://www.splitbrain.org, 2008-01-26 10:44 |
| Great service to find rare tracks | |
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I find Songza great to find those hard to find tracks by my favorite artists. For more reliable way to keep and listen to your music collection I prefer Rhapsody (all the music ever made!) or when I'm geeky inclined, I just stream my library over DAAP |
| Answer | Andrej - http://www.imoondo.com/blog, 2008-01-27 20:50 |
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