Salient point. Dont get me wrong, I use FF reader mode all day long and I sing its praises to all who will listen. But I am using this to access content over Tor when cloudflare would otherwise prevent me from doing so.

I would not recommend for anyone to feed all their browsing to a third party in a way that can easily be tied back to them, but I am using this tool to overcome a specific obstacle when I encounter it and not otherwise.

Maybe I should have described this scenario more completely at the start of my post 🤷

My use case is to access text and link content on a web page anonymously over Tor without getting blocked by Cloudflare (such as when browsing warez sites).

I downloaded Audacity on a friends Windows PC yesterday, and it allowed me to export MP3 without asking for any other steps!

From Audacity’s website:

FAQ:Installing the LAME MP3 Encoder

The software patent on LAME encoding library has expired, so now the LAME library for MP3 export is built-in with Audacity for Windows and Mac. Linux users will still need to download and install the free and recommended LAME third-party encoder to export MP3 files from Audacity.

Linux users should use the following instructions to download and install the free and recommended LAME third-party encoder to export MP3 files with Audacity.

Windows: LAME is now built-in with Audacity for Windows.

Mac: LAME is now built-in with Audacity for Mac.

Linux/Unix: See the LAME installation section on Installing and updating Audacity on Linux.

Thanks!

I don’t seem to be able to find the m3u8 in network tab with Firefox, so not sure if thats my fault or if youtube changed something. I’ll think to search for the m3u8 in the network tab next time I encounter a blob elsewhere, though.

I often have trouble trying to get VLC to work with videos on youtube directly, and it didn’t seem to like the blob link from youtube as described by this article, I assume youtube changed something and VLC hasn’t been updated to keep pace.

(Article is from 2021)

So strictly speaking, blobs themselves still cannot be downloaded but it is often possible to find the stream link which will work when a blob is being used.