How To Download A Song From Seeqpod Without Registering
Posted by voice | Filed under Techie
As you probably remember from earlier this month, I discussed a website called Seeqpod which allows you to listen to mp3s you search for over the internet. The problem with the site is that if you want to download anything you need to register with their website and that can raise a whole bunch of privacy questions in our sue-happy media days we’re currently in. So you think its pretty pointless being there because you can’t save the file. This actually isn’t 100% true though, theres alot of methods to retrieve music files and I’ll go over one.
The method I am going to go over is basically looking at the TCP packets, reassembling them in order, and saving them as a mp3. Sounds compilcated and maybe it is, but you’re not going to do all the reassembling yourself, theres a handy little network monitoring tool called Wireshark
and all it does is store the packets as it receives them so you can look them over, it was used to verify when Comcast was throttling BitTorrent users via sending RST(Reset) flags to disconnect seeders.
So, once you have downloaded and installed Wireshark you’ll obviously need to open it up, Linux users will need to sudo it as it seems to have issues running as a normal user. Once opened you select your interface, hit start, and head over to Seeqpod, do your normal searching and select your song, be sure to let the media player load the song completely. Once loaded check Wireshark, it should be full of information now, if not read over the manual for Wireshark some more, clear your web browsing cache, and try again.
Click on any of the packets you see thats green and says [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU], click on the arrow next to Transmission Control Protocol, then the arrow next to [SEQ/ACK analysis], in there should be a link that says This is an ACK to the segment in frame: xxxxxxxx, you want to click on that, you may not get the right packet the first time, keep trying, you’re looking for a packet that in the main packet list that will have (audio/mpeg). Once you have located the packet, look in the window below, you’ll see a heading Media Type, you want to right click on it, wait for Wireshark to reassemble all of the packets associated with the media, then click on Export Selected Packet Bytes, decide where you’re going to save it and end the file with .mp3, then click ok. Congrats you’ve now got the mp3 from Seeqpod and can now listen to it! In case you need a visual aid of what your overall packet should look like heres what it was on my machine, click to enlarge:
NOTE: This method also works on Youtube.
