Exporting and editing a Twitter Spaces recording#

I hosted a Twitter Spaces conversation the other day. The recording is only available for 30 days afterwards, and I wanted to publish it elsewhere.

Exporting the recording#

Right now the only way to export a recording is to request an export of your entire Twitter account, and then wait around 24 hours for the export to be generated.

I hoped I could instead hack around in my browser network panel to extract the audio, but it’s served up as hundreds of smaller files so this wasn’t feasible.

So I hit export, waited 24 hours and downloaded my 900MB archive zip file.

Within the zip file was a spaces_media/ folder containing a 49.8MB space-1ypKdEXvkMLGW_0.ts audio recording.

Export using youtube-dl#

Jan-Erik Rediger sent me this tip on Twitter:

So regarding “Exporting the recording”: the thing is served as a m3u playlist. If you find that URL in your browser’s network tab, you can throw it against youtube-dl and it will give you the full recording as a single file (mp4 for reasons, but it’s really just aac in there)

This works! I ran the Firefox developer tools console against the Twitter spaces page, filtered for “m3u” and hit “Play” on the recording to kick off the audio load and capture the URL to that playlist file:

Then I pasted the resulting URL to youtube-dl:

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% youtube-dl "https://prod-fastly-us-west-1.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/GPI6dSzgZcfqRfMLplfNp_0xu1QXQ8iDEEA0KymUd5WuqOZCZ9LGGKY6vBQdumX7YV1TT2fGtMdXdl2qqtVvPA/non_transcode/us-west-1/periscope-replay-direct-prod-us-west-1-public/audio-space/playlist_16798763063413909336.m3u8?type=replay"
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[generic] playlist_16798763063413909336: Requesting header
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[generic] playlist_16798763063413909336: Downloading m3u8 information
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[download] Destination: playlist_16798763063413909336-playlist_16798763063413909336.mp4
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ffmpeg version 4.2.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2019 the FFmpeg developers
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...
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size=   44469kB time=01:03:45.66 bitrate=  95.2kbits/s speed=65.5x
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video:0kB audio:44982kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: unknown
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[ffmpeg] Downloaded 45536276 bytes
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[download] 100% of 43.43MiB in 01:00
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% ls -lh
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total 90120
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-rw-r--r--  1 simon  wheel    43M Mar 25 10:08 playlist_16798763063413909336-playlist_16798763063413909336.mp4

Converting that to mp3#

I used ffmpeg (installed via brew install ffmpeg) to convert that file to an MP3:

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spaces_media % ffmpeg -i space-1ypKdEXvkMLGW_0.ts space.mp3
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ffmpeg version 4.2.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2019 the FFmpeg developers
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  built with gcc 9.2.0 (Alpine 9.2.0)
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  configuration: --prefix=/usr --enable-avresample --enable-avfilter --enable-gnutls --enable-gpl --enable-libass --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libxvid --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libtheora --enable-libv4l2 --enable-postproc --enable-pic --enable-pthreads --enable-shared --enable-libxcb --disable-stripping --disable-static --disable-librtmp --enable-vaapi --enable-vdpau --enable-libopus --disable-debug
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  libavutil      56. 31.100 / 56. 31.100
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  libavcodec     58. 54.100 / 58. 54.100
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  libavformat    58. 29.100 / 58. 29.100
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  libavdevice    58.  8.100 / 58.  8.100
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  libavfilter     7. 57.100 /  7. 57.100
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  libavresample   4.  0.  0 /  4.  0.  0
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  libswscale      5.  5.100 /  5.  5.100
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  libswresample   3.  5.100 /  3.  5.100
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  libpostproc    55.  5.100 / 55.  5.100
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[aac @ 0x7f59653ad180] Format aac detected only with low score of 25, misdetection possible!
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[aac @ 0x7f59653ad180] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
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Input #0, aac, from 'space-1ypKdEXvkMLGW_0.ts':
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  Metadata:
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    TIT3            : 3856965984.391
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    id3v2_priv.com.apple.streaming.transportStreamTimestamp: \x00\x00\x00\x01\xc9\xdd\xe3\x82
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    JSONMetadata    : {"HydraVersion":4,"ntp":3856965984.391}
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    HydraParticipants: []
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    HydraAudioLevel : [0]
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  Duration: 01:09:09.41, bitrate: 96 kb/s
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    Stream #0:0: Audio: aac (LC), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s
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Stream mapping:
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  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (aac (native) -> mp3 (libmp3lame))
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Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
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Output #0, mp3, to 'space.mp3':
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  Metadata:
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    TIT3            : 3856965984.391
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    id3v2_priv.com.apple.streaming.transportStreamTimestamp: \x00\x00\x00\x01\xc9\xdd\xe3\x82
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    JSONMetadata    : {"HydraVersion":4,"ntp":3856965984.391}
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    HydraParticipants: []
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    HydraAudioLevel : [0]
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    TSSE            : Lavf58.29.100
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    Stream #0:0: Audio: mp3 (libmp3lame), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp
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    Metadata:
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      encoder         : Lavc58.54.100 libmp3lame
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size=   59777kB time=01:03:45.69 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s speed=  56x
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video:0kB audio:59777kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 0.000740%

Editing the file#

I wanted to make a very basic edit to the file - just to cut off the first six minutes.

I used QuickTime Player on my Mac to do this.

I opened the file in that application, then moved the play head to the point that I wanted to start the track and used Edit -> Split Clip to split the clip - then deleted the section before the split.

Then I used File -> Export As -> Audio Only... to export the audio. This gave me a .m4a file.

I uploaded that file directly to SoundCloud.