SoundCloud: Best developer key – EVER!
Some weeks ago, i made a post about VEOH.com and the developer they hid in the source code of their very own site.
This time i was investigating SoundCloud. It’s something like YouTube for music and they got this pretty neat comment feature, where you can pin your comment to a certain time in the track. Here is some example for you – listen to it while reading the rest of this post ;)
They also propagate the development of 3rd party apps and their for offer a rich and easy to use API. But once more you are forced to register yourself as an official developer to get access to a client id, which effectively is their name for developer key. So while reading their API documentation, I saw a URL like this:
…/tracks/43110396.json?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID
And thought… “where to get this #*!$##! key from…” never the less i copied the URL in my browser and… i worked! Stunned by this, my first idea was, they only use the key for statistics, but nay. If you change the client_id
parameter to something else, you only get:
{"errors":[{"error_message":"401 - Unauthorized"}]}
So development with YOUR_CLIENT_ID
went on and until now i never faced any problems using this special developer key :) – Thanks SoundCloud!
About that developer key…
Currently i’m working on VEOH.com integration for our software TubeBox (was mine, now sold, whatsoever). TubeBox is search / download / convert tool for video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, etc.
And every time you start implementing a new provider you cross your fingers and search for “[Provider-Name-Here] API”. Most providers have beautiful Web 3.0 sites and offer a public API to create mesh ups and get more reputation.
And so does VEOH.com. They offer a REST API full of awesome methods to search videos an query all kind of helpful information. Nice.
But wait… API Key needed? Developer Registration? Become Business Partner? No way my bros from oversea! This is not an option. A Web 3.0 API should be public! Really.
So lets get back to basics and parse plain HTML with the power of regular expressions… Boring.
So i opened a video from their site and started studying the source code, when suddenly out of nowhere *le wild line 533 appeared:
__api.apiKey = “E97FCECD-875D-D5EB-035C-8EF241F184E2”;
Could it be? They use their API themselves and are also registered as developers and business partner of… themselves? Let’s check it out…
Yep. They really are! So let’s close our favourite RegularExpression Designer and have a look at the API again :) – Thanks VEOH!