Deezer – Unplayable Songs (Hack)
Thursday, January 31st, 2008For those of you that don’t know, Deezer is a website that allows you to play a huge selection of songs by huge selection of artists for free, no questions asked. You can also create playlists and so on, if you register an account with them.
(If you want to skip all the preamble just go down to the code section and you’ll see code that will fix the Deezer problem. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, continue reading.)
But, it is a very weird site. They’ve changed their layout a few times, it used to be “blogmusik.net”, but they’ve always been buggy. Apparently it’s run by someone in France as many of the writing is in French, which is often quite confusing.
Most people can ignore all these oddities as they can still search and play music.
Well, quite some time ago there were “grayed-out” songs. Meaning you couldn’t click on them anywhere. There was no support saying why they were that way, no FAQ, no instruction. It annoyed a good many users, including myself, so I went to the forums and found a simple work around. You could right click and say “Play This Track” and it would play.
I thought it foolish of them to have unexplained grayed-out songs that could be played with a right-click. I used this for many months, then I was informed they changed their layout.
Sure enough, next time I went to play a song from them, different layout, and you could no longer right-click to play a track, but there were no longer grayed-out songs. There were songs that simply wouldn’t play.
Well this was worse, again, nothing in the support or anywhere on the site saying why you couldn’t play these tracks. Some people on the forums reported adding them to a playlist, and then playing them would help. This, however, was not a universal solution.
I found, on the forums, someone who wrote a line of javascript to copy and paste into your browser, click “enter” then refresh your page, and it will work. I thought it was a weird solution, but worth a try. It worked!
With no further ado, this is the code:
I haven’t inspected this code thoroughly, but basically it looks like it sets your cookies to make it look like you’re from France.Today, I found out something strange. It was the first time I had used Deezer on a new computer so I knew I had to find that code again. It was not in the forums, and other people were asking for it, and someone noted that a moderator removed it. Apparently, in that forum someone posted it again. By the time I got there, it was removed.
My father had saved this code away in a google document, so I asked him for the link and used it. Yep, still worked. So, this is my “protest”, so to speaker, to their unexplained censorship. If they were kind enough to explain why they had unworking songs, why they didn’t want the code around, I could respect their wishes, but at the moment it seems very illogical.
-Kerry