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I am working on a church website. Currently the task at hand is to convert an archive of worship songs (pdf chord charts and mp3s for each one) to streaming files to prevent users from downloading the actual mp3 (licensing mumbo jumbo). Can anyone think of a solution? Thanks in advance for the help.

I’d make an audio player for the site that plays it in browser.  When people go to listen to a song they click a link to the page with a parameter to determine which file and then that one is played in the player.  You can use quicktime, windows media player, or real player as your embeded player.

There are free audio players out there but I’ve always gone with a custom solution when doing things like this.  http://www.hotscripts.com is somewhere to look if you wanted to find something.

A couple of resources:

1. A nice embedded MP3 player: http://www.alsacreations.fr/dewplayer-en

2. Think about embedding the MP3s into their related PDF files, using Acrobat Pro. This would effectively discourage extracting the MP3 as a separate file.

Sorry, what? Embedding mp3s into PDFs? I am not sure this is really feasible, or practical. To answer the original question, streaming audio might be a solution, but it comes with a bunch of potential new issues.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on this one but regarding audio on a web-site - if you can hear it on the web then you can save it to your computer.

Doesn’t matter if it is streamed or played through a Flash mp3 player or anything else. If a person wants the audio then they can 100% get it if they really want it.

You may be able to hide the URL to a certain extent but in most instances there are ways around this and unfortunately should the worst come to the worst then you can easily record whatever is playing on your computer to an mp3 file using one of the many programs available on the internet. The only effective thing you can really do is lower the quality enough that people wouldn’t want to keep it as the quality just wouldn’t be nice enough for them to use.

Sorry for being the bearer of bad news, nearly 100% of the time I come in here and try to help out as much as I can but on this one there really is no effective way of stopping people getting the audio if they are determined enough.

All that was said with my audio producer hat on 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

Totally in agreement with Mark that if it’s on the Internet, it’s snarfable!  With programs like Audio Hijack (MacOS) and numerous others, anything can be captured to a file.

The PDF option only came up for me because the MP3s were to be “paired” with printable scores, similar to some work we have done.

Embedding MP3s in a PDF is pretty easy with the Pro version (see attached screenshot), and its “snarfability” goes down quite a bit when the page on which the sound container resides includes some suitable lega-leze warnings.

Antony

Thanks for the help guys!

I’m not worried about completely full-proofing the songs from being downloaded. Currently all I have is a link to the .mp3 file that plays when it’s clicked. So all the user has to do is right click, save as etc. I’m just interested in making it a bit less obvious that the file is available for download, even if the actual source of the mp3 isn’t hidden in the code.

I’ll look into the flash player mentioned above. Let you know what I find out. Thanks so much!

Well if that is what you are after then Flash audio players would probably be your best bet then yes.

Most of them use an .xml file which holds the titles of the files for loading into the player. This of course can be downloaded or opened in a browser so that a person can view the paths to the audio and then download them in that way but won’t be immediately obvious to the less technically savvy user so probably your best bet I guess.

Hope it all goes well for you and sorry to have been the bearer of the bad news on this one.

Best wishes,

Mark

Something I’ve use in the past…if you’re playing your audio via some sort of FLASH player, you should be able to alter the file extension, say from .mp3 to .m3u and the file will still play because of how FLASH interprets the file.

Your reference to the file will have to change with the new file extension.

This is certainly not a full proof method for preventing users from taking your content, but rather a deterrent. The result of this is that the file will not play in other audio players (Windows Media Player) because of how those players interpret the file.

If the file extension is restored to .mp3 the file will be playable - at least from my experience.

Just a thought.

Hi Michael,

Was just going to post and say that it wouldn’t really stop people but then saw your last line which is absolutely true. If you download the files and simply re-name them as they are after all just mp3 files anyway then they will work again.

Also a lot of audio converters don’t really care what a file extension is and instead looks at what the file actually is internally so people might just go and convert them thinking that they are m3u files and get at the audio anyway, even though they don’t need to.

I think that seeing as how for the less technical user they probably wouldn’t have the know-how of how to find the xml file and then get the URLs of the files then hopefully just using a Flash audio player should deter a lot of people.

Best wishes,

Mark