If you've ever been part of any music community, you may have stumbled upon leaked information regarding upcoming releases, and if you've ever wondered how some of these leaks happen, this article will showcase one of the ways anyone can gain access to this information using just a computer with Windows installed.
When opening an audio file on your computer, chances are you've used the pre-installed Media Player app, an application that you've most likely closed right after finishing listening, without ever exploring any of the included features. One of which is the ability to look up album info online and edit the metadata depending on the information found, a useful feature for anyone not wanting to gather all of this information manually. But this feature doesn't just find metadata for released projects, it also includes any projects submitted for release in the near future, sometimes even months before their announcement.
If someone wishes to use this feature to access upcoming album information, all they need to do is edit the title and artist name of any random file to match the track name they're searching for. For the purposes of this article, the track we're looking for is an upcoming song from Oklou called Viscus.
After editing the file metadata using the built-in editor, simply save it and click on "Edit info" on the "Unknown album" that Media Player has created for us under the artist name. Then just click "Update album info online", which reveals the tracklist and cover art for the upcoming project.
If you wish to dig deeper into this and see how Media Player gathers this information, you can simply run Fiddler while searching for the album info. This reveals that the request is sent to the URL https://musicmatch-ssl.xboxlive.com/en-US/albums/suggest, with the request and response including the information shown in the following image.
Interestingly enough, the metadata always includes a release date of January 1st, which may play a part in this exploit, as it considers those projects already "released."