: What is the ideal user-interaction for full album download as MP3s? I want to offer a full length album as a free digital download. I can easily throw the MP3 files up on a webserver and

@Alves908

Zip is fine for posting it on your webserver. But you really should be getting your music onto distribution channels like emusic and itunes. It's super easy these days. And of course they'll integrate directly with many media players AND offer a broader audience than you're going to get on your website.

Try www.tunecore.com/ if you want to sell your stuff and www.jamendo.com/ if you want to give it away.

Don't re-invent the wheel! especially when the hoveboard has already been created.

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@Moriarity557

Either:


A platform-specific "smart client" (this has many names) such as a downloaded Adobe Flex desktop client, or a Silverlight "Out-of-Browser" local client


OR, more likely


A single zip file for each album, with a folder structure in the zip, i.e. something like: .artist-namealbum-name<individual files> ; where the individual file names are on the form <tracknumber> - Title ; and with an MP3 playlist for the album in each album directory.


The zip file is of course way easier to implement...

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@Murphy175

To force downloading instead of opening the file, add the following to your HTTP headers when downloading:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="track1.mp3"

And any well behaved browser won't try to open the file. That said, another option is to just throw them all into a ZIP file with no compression (as MP3s don't compress inside a ZIP anyway) and then they don't need to download all the invididual files. The time taken to unzip (which is why you use a ZIP with no compression, which makes this step much much faster) is going to be about equal to the time taken to download all the files, but with much less clicking involved.

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