Mixcloud downloader This downloader allows you to download an MP3 fast from Mixcloud. Enter the Mixcloud URL into the following form to begin directly to download. Mixcloud URL Enter the URL as seen on Mixcloud (e.g. https://www.mixcloud.com/RadioSoulwax/dave/). Download from Mixcloud

Download instructions

If you want do download directly from Mixcloud only with your browser read "How to download from Mixcloud". Those instructions describe how you can do the download without a Mixcloud downloader like this site.

To use this downloader follow these instructions:

Visit the Mixcloud page of the mix which you want to download. Copy the complete URL from your browser's address bar into your clip board. You can do this by selecting the address bar and then pressing ctrl+c or with the context menu of the right mouse click. Please copy the complete URL, including the https:// prefix and any trailing slash. With the complete URL of the mix, go back to this downloader and paste the URL into the Mixcloud URL field above. Click on the the Download button of the form above.

Easy download variant

Above steps are quiet complex. There's an easier way to use the Mixcloud downloader:

Visit the Mixcloud page of the mix which you want to download. Replace now in the address bar of your browser "https://www.mixcloud.com/" with "http://www.mixcloud-downloader.com/dl/mixcloud/". Please don't forget to replace "https://" with "http://". The download will start as soon as you go to the replaced address.

Example: Replace " https://www.mixcloud.com /RadioSoulwax/dave/" with "http://www.mixcloud-downloader.com/dl/mixcloud/RadioSoulwax/dave/".

MP3 download

Mixcloud provides normally the mix' stream as an M4A file with a low bit rate. Several places in the internet describe how to get the originally uploaded high quality MP3 file. However this method doesn't work reliably on all mixes. Only a few mixes are still available as high quality MP3 downloads. This downloader tries to always serve the MP3 file if available. If the MP3 file is not available it falls back to the M4A file and would serve that. This happens transparently for you in the background, so that you will always get the best available option. You can check the file extension of the downloaded file if you are lucky and did receive an MP3 file. Also the download page itself will tell you if the stream is an MP3 file.

Why downloading a mix?

If you just want to listen to a mix, use Mixcloud directly. That's the best option you have when internet is available. However sometimes you don't have internet access, but still want to listen to your favorite mix. This could be in a car which is only equipped with a CD or USB player, during jogging with your MP3 player or while a flight without a broadband connection. For those scenarios you can use this Mixcloud downloader to download your favorite mix and listen to it offline.

Yet another Mixcloud downloader?

There are already plenty downloaders in the internet. Why did I create another downloader? I wasn't happy with the existing solutions. The existing downloaders do simply extract the stream URL and just give you a link to that URL. While this is nice as it saves you doing so by yourself, there are still remaining disadvantages: I find this extra step of right clicking on the link and selecting "save link" annoying. Also the resulting filenames were meaningless like 3e2c-d487-42b1-a418-95e85831ba6e.m4a. But this is of course not the main reason why I would build another downloader. The main reason is the speed. I used the existing tools to download mixes which are a few hours long which I then could listen in my car's CD player. Mixcloud does throttle the speed of those streams to 20KB/s. Downloading such huge mixes took many minutes and if I want to prepare an MP3-CD for an 6 hour ride, it took hours. This downloader bypasses the artificial download throttle. You can download a stream as fast as your bandwidth allows.

How does a Mixcloud download work technically?

When you are listening to Mixcloud the audio data has to come somehow onto your device. You can now use a traffic sniffer like wireshark or even more simple a browser like Chrome to see which data streams are transfered. To do so, open Chrome's developer tools by pressing ctrl+shift+i (other browsers do offer similar functionality). Go to "Network" and see which URLs are opened while opening one web page. Try that while listening to Mixcloud and sort the list by size. You will notice the biggest address which is of the type "media" and has the file extension ".m4a". That's the actual internet address of the mix.

You can directly use that URL to download the mix. And that's exactly what all other Mixcloud Downloaders are doing for you. They spare you the work to search that stream URL.

When you've done that, you will notice two annoyances: The name of the downloaded file is meaningless and you will have to rename that. But even more annoying is the speed. The stream is throttled to 20KB/s. To solve these issues, this downloader works a bit differently. It doesn't provide the direct URL of the stream. It offers you a direct download instead. That's because this downloader is acting as a proxy. You tell which stream you want, the downloader downloads the stream and forwards the data directly to you. From your perspective it looks as if you would download directly from this site. Actually you are downloading the stream from Mixcloud.

You can think of this site as a software for downloading from Mixcloud, like a download manager. Instead of locally installing this software on your device and execute it locally, it is running on a remote machine and you are executing it remotely.