Disallow Downloading

Hey guys,

I'm really not sure if this is possible, but I hope it is! I'd like to allow users to listen to streaming audio from my website but not be able to download it. Is there any way I can do this, and if so, how?

Thanks!
Dan

Well whatever you do people will always be able to download software that can record the streaming audio as it plays off your site, it's just a matter of making it as hard as possible to directly download as possible.

As far as I can tell that means embedding the audio into the page and hiding the actual location of the audio file. I don't really know how you do that but I imagine you can do it with some javascript magic.

e.g. trying to find the file location of a video on the portsmouth official site all i can see from the source is the javascript

videoHi = "/page/media/0,,~,00.asx?path=" + escape("zzf://ivqrb.cerzvhzgi.pb.hx/cbegfzbhgu/250806arjf2_uv.jzi");

Oh, well I've already done my best to hide the location from the users. I'm just worried about someone just randomly going in the URL and figuring something out that way.

This is one of those rare occasions where Flash is probably the best
solution. You can get free Flash MP3 players [I'm assuming it is MP3
files you want your users to listen to, ] where all the work is done
on the server, so you never have to show the user the path to the
directory with the files in. Then, just to be safe, using htaccess or
httpd.conf or IIS user settings, disallow everyone from seeing that
folder [or simply put it outside the web root.]

This is what I've done. I actually took the time to learn how to create my own flash player (http://mymusicnow.net choose any song). I'm on a shared hosting account at GoDaddy though, so I can't put the directory outside the root folder.

Thanks for the input guys.

That flash music player is very nice! Look's good and I'm liking the bars

The upload seems to work nicely too; I uploaded U2 - Beautiful Day and it retrieved the artist and track name perfectly Liking it a lot, although I imagine the upload could be abused but not a lot you can do about that

In that case then, I'd put all the music in a really randomly named
folder that no-one could guess the path to - just for that bit of
added security.

Like the site, btw.

Thanks! That reminds me, I've got to put on instructions for the way the file name should be and I'm going to code something to try and detect if it's not set up right, as well as "computerly possible" . Oh, and I'm working on getting a pause button and volume controls on the player. Still, I'm pretty happy with the results of the flash player after my first flash endeavour.

Funny that you mention that! This is my plan...however at the moment I'm having to put the directory in the FlashVars (shown in the HTML source) so it's doing me no good. I've been trying to put the directory in the flash applet, but when I do so, it just ignores it. I'll have to go to a flash forum and get some help on that.

How are things going with the site & flash? Are you any closer to getting pause and volume controls?