Haystack: How to Download Music

Contributed by shamanstears June 22, 2007  
Tagged: Internet

Haystack is a social network that is all about music. You can check out an artist’s music, videos, and pictures and get reviews of their albums. Using this hack, you can also download free music from the site to play on your computer or portable media player (iPod, Zune, Zen, etc.).

1. Go to Haystack.

2. Create an account so that you can build lengthy playlists (playlists are limited to 2 songs if you’re not registered).

3. Once registered, login to Haystack.

4. From the menu, select Music and Playlists.

5. From the resulting page, you can access popular playlists, find music by genre or style, search for music, etc.

6. When you find a song that you wish to add to your playlist, click the List button next to the song. The song will be added to the playlist which will appear on the right of the page.

7. After you have built your playlist, right-click on the page and select View Source.

8. Instead of trying to find the playlist in the code, search for info_button_text.

9. The address that is found is to the playlist. Copy the address only to the xml extension (for example, /playlists/xspf/7945/27874/27775.xml).

10. Go to the address bar of your browser window and type www.haystack.com, then paste the rest of the address (for example, www.haystack.com/playlists/xspf/7945/27874/27775.xml).

11. The xml file has the addresses of the mp3 files for the songs in your playlist (they are inbetween the location tags. Copy an address and paste it into a new browser window’s address bar. Save the song to your computer.

12. Repeat the copying and pasting of the mp3 addresses to your songs until you have downloaded all of them.

Note: While the filename’s will need to be changed to reflect the song and artist, the tags for the files are accurate.