There have been tons of reports of people who were unable to generate a Deezer ARL by following the old methods. In this article, we’ll show you how to correctly generate a Deezer ARL, with the highest success rate — a couple things have changed from the original methods. We’ll also tell you about some other ways to rip your music, and why you might want to switch.

Deezer ARLs

As a refresher, the three methods used before were IBAN, BIN, and VCC. The best method to use is still VCC, as it works 100% of the time unless there’s an issue with your provider. We officially do not recommend using the BIN method anymore, since the success rate is quite low (unless you find a reliable source), and it’s way more sketchy than the previous methods. IBAN still works, but we’ve made some changes to the steps used to generate an ARL using IBAN in order to have a higher success rate.

Generate an ARL

Before we begin, please be sure that you’re writing down all the account information, to ensure that you don’t lose access by accident — browsers have cleared caches/cookies before, resulting in lost accounts. We also recommend that you take note of the steps you do/don’t take, and share them with us. Your community input on what works or doesn’t work will help us improve our guides! If you use a password manager, creating an entry for your ARL works fantastic.

This is using the IBAN method. If you’re interested in the VCC method, you can find more information further in the article. The ARL I generated while writing this guide will be available on the Matrix server, by the way — alongside other community ARLs, and people who can help you generate your own. Let’s get started.

1. VPN: Enable your VPN, set to Germany. If you do not have a VPN yet, Windscribe offers a free plan with access to their Germany servers. We do not recommend using Windscribe for permanent use, but it’ll do just fine if you don’t have one yet. Read about our VPN recommendations here.

2. CREATE AN ACCOUNT: Go to Deezer’s website, and sign up for a Premium account. On the sign up page, it should ask for an email, username, password, age, and gender. For the email address, use one that ends with @gmail.com or @hotmail.com. If you do not have a spare Google account to use, you can use Tempmail. If Tempmail doesn’t load for you, Emailnator should also work. It hasn’t asked for any verification in the past, so you may be able to make up a random email address. For the other required fields, you can find randomized information at Outputter. If Outputter doesn’t load for you, MyFakeInfo will work fine too.

3. PAYMENT: It should then lead you to a payment page. If you’ve followed the previous directions, it should give you the option for Direct Debit. Select Direct Debit and fill in the information, again from Outputter. Confirm the Terms and Conditions, and begin your free trial. Enter the IBAN from Outputter (or alternatively, RandomIBAN). For the email address, use the same address you used previously. Hit Continue.

4. VERIFICATION: Change the country code on Deezer from +49 to +1, and go to recieve-sms-free.cc for a temporary phone number. Click Send Code, and wait a minute or two for the text to be received by receive-sms-free, refreshing often. If the text hasn’t come through after a few minutes, go back and try another phone number. You’re looking for a text which says the following: Code:XXXX. Allow (Deezer SA) to debit your account. One time password, expires in 15mn.

Grabbing the ARL

The ARL will be listed in your cookies. Here’s how to access your cookies on the most common browsers:

On Chrome, go to the icon next to the website URL, usually a padlock. Hit the arrow next to Cookies, and then click the arrow next to deezer.com. Under Cookies, there should be a row with the key arl. Click it and the value (ARL) will appear below the dropdown.

On Firefox, right click on the screen and click Inspect. Go to the Storage tab, and click Cookies on the left-hand side. Then click on deezer.com and arl will be in the list of cookies. Double click on the value to select the entire thing.

On Safari, you’ll need to go to preferences and enable “Show Develop menu in menu bar” under the Advanced tab. Then you can click Develop in the menu bar and click “Show Web Inspector.” Then go to the Storage tab, hit Cookies (and then deezer.com if necessary), and the ARL will be in the list of cookies.

If the arl cookie doesn’t appear, first ensure that you’re logged in. Go through the account initiation process (select some random artists, etc). Reloading the page or logging out/back in may help. If it still won’t show, try another browser.

Using an ARL

I recommend Streamrip (which is a command line program) to rip your music, since it supports many platforms, including Deezer, TIDAL, Qobuz, etc. The full guide to Streamrip (including installation) is available on our site as well. To add your Deezer ARL to Streamrip…

% rip config --deezer
Follow the instructions at https://github.com/nathom/streamrip/wiki/Finding-your-Deezer-ARL-Cookie
Paste your ARL here: 
Validating arl...
Sucessfully logged in!

Alternatives to Deezer

While Deezer offers lossless music, it also caps at CD quality. By contrast, both TIDAL and Qobuz can reach up to 192 kHz.

Audio quality in lossless formats are defined in four aspects: bit depth, sample rate, and channel count. Lossy formats such as MP3 or AAC are typically defined by data rate, since they can highly depend based on format and compression method.

As for Master Quality Audio (MQA) with TIDAL, it can reach 24-bit 352 kHz — but the MQA format is closed-source, lossy, and its benefits are far from proven. That being said, the quality of an MQA track typically depends on the track and the quality of the master. Here’s a Reddit post on the matter. The format is highly criticized, but the general consensus in the audiophile community is that it may sound good, but the on-paper specification of a “lossy” format is not preferred over a standard like FLAC.

The idea with MQA is that artists can make their tracks sound as intended, and then put the music in a format which won’t hog your bandwidth. The first part is great (though some producers end up botching their master), but the same can be done with FLAC, with files that are only slightly larger… so why is TIDAL pushing this format? (Pssst, it’s because of the money.) To support the playing of MQA, developers have to pay up to TIDAL.

Regardless, the point is that Deezer doesn’t serve the highest quality music out there. But… are other services exploitable?

Exploiting Other Services

I attempted to exploit both TIDAL and Qobuz with IBAN, but neither of these services have an option for Direct Debit, so IBAN isn’t an option here. And since BIN isn’t (or shouldn’t be) an option… what can we do?

Virtual Credit Cards

To recap, the VCC method is taking advantage of a legitimate service offered by many credit card companies (and others), called Virtual Credit Cards. They allow you to use different card numbers for different websites, while charges to any of them will go to your one account. You can “burn” cards when you don’t want to risk being charged by them anymore, or set charge limits so that they can’t charge you more than you intended.

This is useful for us because we can create a “burner” card with a $1 maximum total charge limit. This way, when Deezer (or another service) attempts to check the validity of the card, it’ll work fine. But when the trial ends and they try to charge the card, it will fail since the card won’t allow a charge over $1. While I doubt a VCC provider would approve of exploiting free trials like we do, using VCCs for a free trial (generally speaking) is a totally legitimate practice. If you’re committing serious financial crimes, definitely do not rely on a VCC to protect you — but again, we’re only exploiting free trials, so VCCs will work great for our use-case.

Therefore, if you can get ahold of a VCC, get one! For those based in the United States, Privacy.com is free for up to 12 cards/mo — plenty for generating accounts. IronVest (formerly Abine Blur) is another option, which probably offers more privacy than others (though paid), and Revolut is a great option for those in the UK. Your credit card provider may also offer a similar service, perhaps under a different name. The age minimum for these services vary, as do the documents (or lack thereof) required for verification to sign up, so I would recommend reading the requirements before attempting to sign up.

The process for generating accounts is 100x easier with a VCC, plus it’s still fully anonymous to the streaming service, as you can use any address and name with the card. Using a VCC is just like signing up for any other free trial, except you’re using the VCC’s card number. You can use tempmail or outputter to get your email address or account information, but you don’t have to.

Slav Art

If you can’t get a VCC, some folks over at Slav Art have whipped up a system which will let you rip from Qobuz in seconds, without the need for ARLs or anything of the like. We recommend using their site (slavart.gamesdrive.net), but they also have a server on Divolt with capabilities to rip from Spotify, TIDAL, etc. The accounts used by Slav Art are typically contributed by the community, so it’s a win-win situation with this program.

Conclusion

If you’d like to continue using Deezer for music ripping, you can still generate ARLs fairly easily. If you’d prefer TIDAL or Qobuz, you can get a VCC or use Slav Art. If you have any questions or had success with generating an ARL using these methods, let us know!

Updates and Corrections

01/18/2023: Abine Blur is now IronVest. abine.com/faq-blur-ironvest