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Streaming Non-Shared Music (Javascript)
I want to write a simple javascript-based (frontend only) dropbox music player. Just a dropbox file explorer, playlist and audio controls -- very basic for when I want to play some music without syncing the files locally.
I have experimented a bit, and can create a temporary file link (filesGetTemporaryLink) and play it with Audio object.
This works, but I wonder if there is a better way? It seems a temporary link is a public (non-authenticated) link to the file. I guess it is a very minor security risk. I don't know if Dropbox likes/allows frequent temporary link creation. Is it possible to get an authenticated link?
Thanks for the help. Sorry, I am a bit new to web/javascript/dropbox-api so I might be missing the obvious.
2 Replies
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Community Moderator
The Dropbox API doesn't offer an alternative for this, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. The temporary links contain a randomly generated token though, so they should be effectively impossible to guess.
For reference, the way to directly access file content in an authenticated fashion is to use filesDownload:
https://dropbox.github.io/dropbox-sdk-js/Dropbox.html#filesDownload__anchor
That may not work for your use case, as it doesn't give you a URL you can pass to a media player. Depending on the media player though, making a local blob URL as shown here might work for you:
https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-js/blob/a88a138c0c3260c3537f30f94b003c1cf64f2fbd/examples/javascript/download/index.html#L51 Thanks Greg!
With filesDownload, it seems it is possible to use the audio object with the return of URL.createObjectURL(blob).
I guess this is more secure, but it is definitly faster to create the temporary link and stream that.
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