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Comment by jdillaaa | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by actual streams?

The audio stream. This will likely never ever be supported by Spotify/Apple because of DRM reasons.

Yes, the raw AAC / OGG content would naturally break DRM. Spotify, however, has a ton of libraries that allow for you to write your own clients, which honestly allows for an "audio stream" for most purposes if you are able to run an OS. You can write a very simple CLI app that plays Spotify music for example, and Spotify's libraries will handle the DRM.

"Audio stream" to burn to a CD or a tape cassette? Yeah, that's not gonna be supported.

Surely you could redirect the audio once it's been unencrypted by Spotify though? It has to be presented to your systems audio drivers in an unencrypted state eventually. I guess the downside is that you'd have to rip songs at 1x speed.

I wonder if you could spoof the system time provided to Spotify too and have it "play" the music faster than real time.

Libspotify gave you PCM. It's since been deprecated but old app keys still work just fine.

Their current SDKs are only for iOS and android. They do also have a Web player but the DRM for that requires playback through a Web browser i.e. You cannot write a simple CLI app that plays Spotify music.

Spotify is supported by some 3rd party DJing apps which would need access to the PCM stream (pacemaker and I think edjing). However they probably have some kind of secret licencing deal/API access.

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