Is it possible to decode 'octet stream' .bin file?

Question

Tidal.com streams flac files, but it does not provide with file download, which is what I want. As you would expect from a big company such as Tidal, upon my inquiry, its support service in an utmost polite and friendly manner advised me to go funk myself.

Preferring not to, I learned that when flac track is streamed, several .bin files are being cached in my browser. I saved one of such .bin files - its size approximately corresponds to that of flac file, but I was not able to open it with neither 7Zip nor UltraISO nor by renaming it into zip or flac and opening it with VLC or PotPlayer.

So I guess my question is - can I decode such file or obtain flac from it by some other means? Thanks.

Solution

A quick Google tells me...

"The FLAC stream is encrypted, though it is possible to find the encryption key in a JSON file that the Tidal API pulls right before streaming a song including the direct song URL and as well as the key, but I’m not sure of the algorithm used. I’ve tested many times with OpenSSL to decrypt the files with AES-128 and 256. Either I’ve setup OpenSSL wrong, or they’re using Salsa20 to encrypt the streams. The API calls are going over HTTPS while the streams are not."

— in short, you're not going to do it.

Comments

[user1686]

Both ".bin" and "octet-stream" can mean literally anything – there is no specific format, no specific structure, nothing that could be "decoded". (Basically, "application/octet-stream" is the fallback MIME type used when nothing else is known about the type.) So maybe someone can answer the specific "rip Tidal music" question, but it's completely impossible to answer the generic "decode .bin files" question.

[user498283]

@grawity fair enough, but if a browser can decode it, for sure there must be a way?

[user498283]

Your tip is exactly what I needed. Thank you.