GrooveGrabber: My First Chrome Extension

A while back, after playing around with Firebug, I developed a method for saving streaming media delivered by Grooveshark.com. Since then, I have been thinking about ways to share this method with other people. I had some spare time this weekend, so I implemented the approach in a Google Chrome extension. You can download it here.

Boris’s work with Chrome fueled my initial interest. As it turns out, programming extensions for Chrome is extremely easy! You have a great amount of power, a simple API, and zero cross-browser compatibility worries. This is a win-win-win as far as I’m concerned.

This would not have been possible without the insights provided on the Grooveshark Internal API wiki. I don’t know where this information originated, but the hashing algorithm and salting string are essential.

Also essential to this project: Paul Johnston’s JavaScript MD5 and SHA-1 and Douglas Crockford’s JSON. And although I used jQuery to prototype the extension, Using POST method in XMLHTTPRequest was a useful resource for rolling my own AJAX functionality.

Overall, programming this extension was very satisfying—I doubt it will be my last! Please help me learn by improving on my work on GitHub!