How to Download Twitter Spaces That Aren't Yours

swyx 2022-02-28

July 2023 update: Twitter seems to have broken this API now. I think a keen developer who knows GraphQL could possibly reconstruct the query since they probably just moved some fields around. please email or DM me if you are working on this.

the current two best ways are:

yt-dlp (download cookies from browser, privacy beware but jt works)
https://github.com/Chiplis/moonbird (confirmed that it works on first try and is fast, requires Rust toolchain)

I recently caught the tail end of a TimescaleDB Twitter space that I wanted to snip for my mixtape in future. Spaces are only saved for a few days so if you want them beyond that you will have to download it. However, Twitter only lets the host of the space download. I tried using youtube-dl for it but it is currently unsupported.

Fortunately 89z on GitHub is very actively maintaining his own project that interfaces with some arbitrary social media: https://github.com/89z/mech and answered my questions enough to get me using it!

The project bundles releases only for Windows, so here’s a quick sequence of instructions for Mac.

Prerequisites

In case you are a nontechnical person arriving from Google - these instructions are meant for developers but written out step by step as faithfully as I can. The only prerequisite you need is:

Git and
Go

but I won’t spend any time teaching you how to use the terminal.

First get the Space ID

The primary piece of knowledge you need is the Twitter Space ID. Given a Twitter space URL https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YqGoprjyQEJv, the space ID is 1YqGoprjyQEJv. No API key is needed as far as I can tell, which is just peachy.

IMPORTANT - this process does not work for Twitter Super Follows Spaces as far as I can tell. If you are a developer, you MAY be able to fork the project to modify it. Let me know if you do.

The quickest way (June 2022)

I’ve now had enough support load that i realize I should just upload the binary myself so you can just use it.

If you trust that i’m not doing anything funky, go to https://github.com/sw-yx/mech/releases/tag/swyx-fork-v1 and download that twitter binary to somewhere local.

then, open your terminal to the same folder where that binary exists, and:

chmod +x twitter # for first time only
./twitter -c YOUR_SPACE_ID_HERE

You may need to also set permissions in System Preferences.

Instructions to compile it yourself (May 2022)

We’re going to use @89z’s mech project, but as of the time that he used to support Twitter Spaces. so bear with me:

# make sure you have `git` installed!
git clone https://github.com/89z/mech
cd mech
git reset 5b977a09590b883584662a656a14d393337411c1 --hard # old twitter functionality was removed https://github.com/89z/mech/issues/71
cd cmd/twitter
# make sure you have `go` installed!
go build

This builds a binary called twitter which you can run:

# mac
./twitter -c YOUR_SPACE_ID_HERE   
# windows
twitter -c YOUR_SPACE_ID_HERE

This starts the download:

$ ./twitter -c 1YqGoprjyQEJv    
POST https://api.twitter.com/1.1/guest/activate.json
GET https://twitter.com/i/api/graphql/Uv5R_-Chxbn1FEkyUkSW2w/AudioSpaceById?variables=%7B%22id%22%3A%221RDGlgoYkDkKL%22%2C%22isMetatagsQuery%22%3Afalse%2C%22withBirdwatchPivots%22%3Afalse%2C%22withDownvotePerspective%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReactionsMetadata%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReactionsPerspective%22%3Afalse%2C%22withReplays%22%3Afalse%2C%22withScheduledSpaces%22%3Afalse%2C%22withSuperFollowsTweetFields%22%3Afalse%2C%22withSuperFollowsUserFields%22%3Afalse%7D
GET https://twitter.com/i/api/1.1/live_video_stream/status/28_1496228425874374659
GET https://prod-fastly-us-east-1.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/Ze8MHZCOuvGIbhBQYBAevAIotnQEwAixsGxoUgsOOJaJsf0Qm6Kxhwt3JH77MIxknSr_2nobkgkUDyYP9YwzbQ/non_transcode/us-east-1/periscope-replay-direct-prod-us-east-1-public/audio-space/playlist_16801097405082696033.m3u8?type=replay
0/1299 /Transcoding/v1/hls/Ze8MHZCOuvGIbhBQYBAevAIotnQEwAixsGxoUgsOOJaJsf0Qm6Kxhwt3JH77MIxknSr_2nobkgkUDyYP9YwzbQ/non_transcode/us-east-1/periscope-replay-direct-prod-us-east-1-public/audio-space/chunk_1645642768437487255_0_a.aac
1/1299 /Transcoding/v1/hls/Ze8MHZCOuvGIbhBQYBAevAIotnQEwAixsGxoUgsOOJaJsf0Qm6Kxhwt3JH77MIxknSr_2nobkgkUDyYP9YwzbQ/non_transcode/us-east-1/periscope-replay-direct-prod-us-east-1-public/audio-space/chunk_1645642768440813639_1_a.aac
2/1299 /Transcoding/v1/hls/Ze8MHZCOuvGIbhBQYBAevAIotnQEwAixsGxoUgsOOJaJsf0Qm6Kxhwt3JH77MIxknSr_2nobkgkUDyYP9YwzbQ/non_transc
# and so on...

The final file is an aac file which is still annoying but at least convertible and playable in Audacity.

Old Instructions (Feb 2022)

# make sure you have `git` installed!
git clone https://github.com/89z/mech
cd mech
# update: v1.49 onwards has the twitter spaces support again! https://github.com/89z/mech/issues/18#issuecomment-1058789325
git reset --hard v1.46.6 # only if you need to pin to a specific version that supports Twitter spaces, otherwise delete this line
cd cmd/twitter
go build