A website URL has "hidden" some MP3 files by embedding them as Shockwave files, as follows.
<span><!-- Odeo player --><embed src=""quality="high" name="audio_player_tiny_gray" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="always" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="valid_sample_rate=true external_url=" pluginspage=""></embed></span>How can I download the files for off-line listening?
I've found two methods:
1. The Stack Overflow Method
Create a new local HTML file with just the links, for example:
<a href="">Sunday Edition 25Nov2008</a>Open the file in the browser, right click the link and File > Save Link As.
2. The Super User Method
Install the Firefox addin Iget. (Be sure to use the right version for your Firefox version.)
Tools > Downloads > Enter URL in the field.
Are there any other ways?
617 Answers
On Linux, use 'wget' on the command line:
wget If you want a similar tool on Windows, you could install wget via Cygwin or use one of the GNU Win32 ports.
On Mac OS X, there's cURL, which appears to have a Windows build.
73. The command-line method
Download/install/build wget or similar and download from the commandline:
wget I use DownThemAll for this. You can just copy the link, open the manager window and select 'Add URL', assuming it doesn't pick the links up when run normally.
if you have the URLs ready and a vanilla Firefox, you can simply download URLs by pasting them in the download manager. I just tested this with FF v26 and it still works like that. btw jtbandes says, this works in Chrome too.
Here is a way to create a download page on the fly without leaving your browser.
- Navigate to the web page (which I'm guessing is ?).
- Type this JavaScript into your address bar:
javascript:document.documentElement.innerHTML.match(/external_url=([^\"]*\.mp3)\"/);document.write('<'+'a href="'+RegExp.$1+'">download<'+'/a>')
When using Firefox then you don't need any add-ons. Just go to menu Tools » Page Info (or press Control/Command-I) and select the Media tab. Here you'll see all media (images, video, audio, ...) embedded in the page, including a "Save As..." button.
2How about this website: ?? It creates a download-able link to the URL.
1Firefox 10.0.2 still can't directly download a URL.
The original asker first method (create HTML file containing <a href="...">link</a>, open in Firefox, right click the link, save as) can be optimized with a bit of javascript like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
var copylink = function(){document.getElementById("thelink").href = document.getElementById("theurl").value}
</script>
<input type="text"/>
<button type="button" onclick="copylink()">Update Link</button>
<a href="">Download Link</a>This little HTML file can be put to favorite. So the new flow will be:
- Open this HTML from favorite
- Copy paste URL to the textbox
- Click 'Update Link'
- Right click 'Download Link', Save As
(Or just copy it into a jsFiddle and use it there, for example like this)
There's also a plethora of clipboard-monitoring download apps that will start downloading a file when it is copied to the clipboard if you like that sort of thing. I've used FreeDownloadManager in the past.
The other command line method would be Curl which can also read URLs from a file. Alternatively you can write a higher level script that gets the original page, and parses out the URLs to get individually using something like Perl, Python, Ruby, maybe even JScript, or ZSH.
Using Safari, all you need to do is open the activity window and then click on the file in the list of files. It should then start downloading the file.
If the media opens in a new window and menu File -> Save As is disabled, then I use the following on Mac OS X.
curl -o sundayEdition.mp3 I always use the wget application on linux or axel if I know that I won't overload the server with 4 connections and I want it faster. Both are available on windows with Cygwin. If it's on a site which I will scrape often, create a script to extract the URL for me and run similar.
2For Safari, this can be accomplished by pasting the URL into the downloads window.
If your browser does not support starting a download via a direct URL (such as Safari), you can just copy the URL into the address bar and go File > Save As.
3First, try visiting the URL in web browser. It should prompt for the download. But, if plug-ins are screwing things up, see below.
Install a download manager like Internet Download Manager and use its add URL option to paste the URL in question. This can download any type of resources reliably.
You can automate the process by using Xidel:
Xidel is a command line tool to download and extract data from HTML/XML pages or JSON-APIs, using CSS, XPath 3.0, XQuery 3.0, JSONiq or pattern templates. It can also create new or transformed XML/HTML/JSON documents.
Xidel is xmllint, jq, curl/wget all wrapped in one. It may not have every single feature the others do have, but it comes pretty close.
Extract the url:
xidel -s "" -e "//embed/substring-after(@flashvars,'external_url=')"or
xidel -s "" -e "//embed/extract(@flashvars,'http.+')"Download the url:
xidel -s "" -f "//embed/extract(@flashvars,'http.+')" --download .P.s. These queries use Windows quoting. If you're on Linux be sure to swap " and ':
xidel -s "" -f '//embed/extract(@flashvars,"http.+")' --download .Copy and paste URL into Firefox and voila. Instant download. Easiest method by far ; )
