I won't pretend to be a devoted Clipse fan, but Spencer and Matt's excitement over We Got It For Cheap Vol. 3 has got me intrigued. But I didn't really want to keep my browser open for an hour while I listen to it.

So! Turn on the Live HTTP Headers plugin in Firefox. Reload the streaming page. Capture the conversation between my browser and their server and search for "mp3". What comes up?

http://www.mp3asset.com/xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480

GET /xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480 HTTP/1.1

Host: www.mp3asset.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
BAR: foo
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 286
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:55:28 GMT
Server: Apache 2.4.0

What lives at that mysterious http://www.mp3asset.com/xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480 URL? This does:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<playlist shuffle="0" autoplay="true" color1="231C24" color2="ED2311" color3="984537">
   <sound src="http://www.archive.org/download/Vol.3_734/01Track1_vbr.mp3" stream="true"><![CDATA[We Got It For Cheap Vol.3 Re-Up Gang Records EXCLUSIVE..]]></sound>
</playlist>

Sure looks like an XML playlist to me. Follow that archive.org URL and what do you get? The complete downloadable MP3.

Security through obscurity: its track record is at least consistent. Use one-time URLs if you want to keep something semi-private, kids.