if you want to be free, take a sip of this tea, join the red oyster cult

Posted on May 12th, 2003 in my ramblings.

The new Guster album, Keep It Together, comes out on June 24th. Guster kicks mega ass. Also, they’ve made six out of the thirteen tracks on the album available for listening (not downloading, sort of) on their website – at the Guster Player.

Super-secret stuff: the tracks are stored as MP3 files embedded into Shockwave Flash files. So if you were to, say, sniff the packets that the Player sends out, and find a url such as http://wbr.bandbuilder.com/guster/amsterdam128.swf then you might be able to save the files and then extract their bubbly goodness. An exercise left up to the reader, but only because I failed. I want to listen to these songs on the subway! Damn you, silly proprietary player! PS: hell yes I will be buying their album, I might even pre-order a signed copy.

 

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2 replies

  1. OnewayDC says:

    Added on May 14th, 2003 at 11:31 pm

    If getting the MP3 doesn’t work you can do what I did: record them into WAVs with the Windows sound recorder (set to CD quality) and burn them. Just hit record while the Guster player is playing. You might have to fiddle with which source is selected to be recorded. It’s like your very own Keep It Together EP. The sound may not be perfect, but it’s good and will be sufficient until June 24th.

  2. Victor Rehorst says:

    Added on May 15th, 2003 at 10:26 am

    True that. Hrm, I think with my sound card I can record from its wave output, so I don’t thing there would be any further loss of quality from going digital->analog->digital again. Still, it’s a last resort for me 🙂 I tried to decompile the SWF files with a few tools – they have embedded MP3 files in them, but they seem to have been munged so that you cannot decompile them. Those crafty bastards!