Cracks in 8tracks…
It was the 80's and 90's when we had magnetic tapes and cassettes on our shelves and huge cassette players playing our favorite melodies…..old classical days… Well those compact cassettes were actually a condensed version of 8-track tape, a magnetic tape sound recording technology popular in the United States in 60's and 70's.
Coming back to 21st century when internet has become a fundamental human right (yes if you don’t know that click here and here) somewhere in San Francisco(well i haven’t seen S.F. yet so yeah) a company was born whose main aim was to bring a revolution in the music industry since Steve Jobs was not doing anymore ‘best ever thing’ in music industry(google for apple.com:best ever).It was 8tracks, same old 80's concept of 8 tracks in a tape( well not just being the conventional 8track tape, it has the ability to play more than that !!! :p). An internet radio revolving around the concept of streaming user curated playlists, beautifully handcrafted playlists. You can consider its reputation by the fact that it was featured in Time Magazine in 50 best websites list in 2011(damn).
Coming back to my time,I was in college where i was looking for a place that was perfect enough wherein i could spend considerable amount of time switching tracks. Internet radio was there but wasn’t good enough and then I found this place, here I can even search playlists on genre(bloody cool), instantly i told my each friend about this, “bro here is a new music website giving everything i need. It has handcrafted playlist(s) and we can search on genre or mood, wow”. Days were going good, in the green foothills of shimla cool breeze was keeping us refresh and beats of 8tracks chillaxed us. Then something went wrong. Maybe it was college internet or maybe I went greedy. I cannot afford to stream music all the time what about when I am having tea at lalaji’s dhaaba I want this there…let me tell you something about lalaji ka dhaaba. Close your eyes and think about this…a dhaba on the top of the hill with facing valleys and mountains guarding them(sometimes they were even snow capped too) and sun rays fighting for their existence in the mist of air….(man o man i miss those days, feeling nostalgic) and there was this smell of forest in the air, a smell of mother nature…away from the nauseating stench of metropolitan shenanigans(now i am really getting into that…lets come back to earth). So yeah i went greedy….now I want all those 1's and 0's of track on platter of my hard disk….but what should i do??? Where should i start with??? I think I googled it first but didn’t get any good result. So like a gypsy I was wandering on other pages of site and i spotted a page with name developer…(eyes shining) so I started looking into their api’s and a gif below can explain you what happened after that.
There was a loophole in their APIs and voila, i created a single page website in leu of its exploitation from where I can download all those tracks just by running one recursion :D.
Sometimes most difficult things can be accomplished via most simple means.
Its been long time since college and its wasn’t same again, never, those days will always be missed but something happened to 8tracks too. They had posed a new policy where you can’t skip songs more than thrice in an hour. I wasn’t listing to music on 8tracks since long time but one day when I came back i realized that downloader wasn’t solving purpose :/ Now what now lets do something else, whats that something else….whole story in three screenshots below….no more boring anyone anymore! And yes it is that easy!
For those who didn’t got that what was that partitioned window in first screenshot, well that was developer console which is present in every chrome. From here you can play with few tools that chrome provides you and some other information regarding the website you are browsing(right click and select inspect element). Discovering that I leave upto you!!!
P.S. : Yeah I have informed people at 8tracks and talked to someone named Samuel Peterson who mailed me that “ our engineers assure me that they’ll be addressing any security concerns immediately” and its been a very long time since than.
