[LAU] How to listen to songs on myspace without proprietary software?

[Ken Restivo]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 01:42:35AM +0200, hollunder at gmx.at wrote:
> Hi,
> sorry if you feel that it's kinda off-topic.
> 
> A lot of music nowadays can be found only on internet platforms like
> youtube, myspace and so on, and they need flash and similar stuff to
> work.
> For youtube, there are ways, a totem plug-in does the job well for me,
> I can watch videos and search.
> With myspace the story is different. The gnash plug-in that is
> currently available in ubuntu kinda works with some stuff, but is often
> totally unusable, and that's how it is with myspace.
> 
> So the big question is: Is there a way to listen to songs on myspace
> without using proprietary software?
>

This drives me nuts. I am on a 64-bit system so there's no Flash for me. I have come up with the following hokey solution for listening to MySpace music:

1) I have a fully-working Windoze 98 installion in a QEMU virtual partition file.

2) I launch QEMU as follows: qemu -soundhw sb16 -m 256 -daemonize -usbdevice tablet -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -net user  -hda /location/of/dos-partition

3) In a separate terminal, fire up a program called "urlsnarf", with: sudo urlsnarf |grep cache

4) I fire up Firefox inside the Windoze emulation, visit the foul MySpace page, and click on the music.

5) When the audio file (it's always got "cache" in its path) floats by on urlsnarf, I *quickly* copy the URL and paste it into a third terminal, to wget it to my linux box, as: wget -O name-of-band-01.mp3 "http://long.myspace.url?with&lots%of&junk%in&it". the "-O" option is required because otherwise the name of the file would be too long. Note that the url will appear again in urlsnarf, but I ignore its second occurrence, because it was caused by my wget.

6) I click on the "stop" button in the MySpace player, then click on the next song in the band's queue, and click on it, and repeat the steps above.

7) I have to keep the MySpace page open until all the songs have been done downloading. When I'm done, I shut down the virtual Windows session in QEMU. Then, I can listen to the songs using mplayer or mpg123 or whatever. 

As you might imagine, I don't do this very often. It is a huge PITA.

-ken