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Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC)

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Re: Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC)

#5

Post by OJFord »

quenix wrote: post #4

I was under the impression that all audio Spotify serves is heavily DRM-ed and can only play with special hardware decoders which respect the DRM? How did was this person able to play the encrypted audio? Does this not let them effectively rip music from Spotify?

I don't know how special those decoders could be, obviously not Spotify-specific. Unofficial clients that want to stick around tend to require a premium account, libspotify/spotifyd on Linux for example.

Re: Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC)

#6

Post by sneakymichael »

quenix wrote: post #4

I was under the impression that all audio Spotify serves is heavily DRM-ed and can only play with special hardware decoders which respect the DRM? How did was this person able to play the encrypted audio? Does this not let them effectively rip music from Spotify?

Just some context: Spotify's official iOS library used to serve streaming [unencrypted, 'raw'] PCM data to the app for playback[1]

"The good old days"

[1] Trace of this, from 2013: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20614360/does-the-libspo...

Re: Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC)

#7

Post by oceanplexian »

quenix wrote: post #4

I was under the impression that all audio Spotify serves is heavily DRM-ed and can only play with special hardware decoders which respect the DRM? How did was this person able to play the encrypted audio? Does this not let them effectively rip music from Spotify?

The DRM has been broken for years, and is still broken (I personally wrote a Rust client to grab music from Spotify in .ogg format) but their lawyers rabidly take down any reference to decrypting it on Github or anywhere else, because well, the implication.

Re: Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC)

#8

Post by matthewmacleod »

quenix wrote: post #4

I was under the impression that all audio Spotify serves is heavily DRM-ed and can only play with special hardware decoders which respect the DRM? How did was this person able to play the encrypted audio? Does this not let them effectively rip music from Spotify?

It's not, really – AFAIK the audio is just AES-encypted with a per-session key that you get when logging in (but it's been a long time since I looked). There are a bunch of open implementations, like https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot – I guess it's kind of an open secret that you could rip music if you really wanted to, and you certainly used to be able to do that with libspotify when it was still around. I imagine the lawyers will come for you if you're silly enough to bang on about it.

Certainly there's no need for "special hardware decoders" – Spotify works on loads of devices that have no support for that kind of thing.

Re: Unofficial Spotify Client for the Nintendo Switch (PoC)

#9

Post by mogery »

quenix wrote: post #4

I was under the impression that all audio Spotify serves is heavily DRM-ed and can only play with special hardware decoders which respect the DRM? How did was this person able to play the encrypted audio? Does this not let them effectively rip music from Spotify?

Spotify DRM is basically security through obscurity. It's just AES-128-CTR over a plain old OGG file. The tricky part is figuring out the extremely odd protocol you have to request audio keys and track data through. That's all.
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