hypem

There's a new version of the Hype Machine! Cool. The mp3 blog aggregator's gotten a new coat of paint and a different flash player. It looks pretty nice, although I'm not entirely sure what substantive changes have been made. Nevertheless, it's at least much more t-shirt-compatible.

I decided to celebrate the occasion by digging into the workings of the site a bit more. Hypem provides a lot of music, but is understandably hesitant to provide direct downloads lest they be busted by The Man. But how do you go about providing an mp3 for listening but not for saving? It's as fundamentally unsolvable as any other DRM problem — more so, given the relatively open technologies in use.

Still, they do their best. For instance, only requests from known web browsers are allowed — try to use a command-line tool like wget or curl to fetch content and you'll get an "access denied" message. But it's easy to fake user agent strings (or just to do the dirty work within your browser). So let's have a look at the anatomy of playing a song on hypem: