Selling Mp3 downloads

[ecluley]

Hi,

Here's my problem:

My girlfriend is a musician. She has asked to me to make her a website which people will be able to visit and download, for a fee, her music. How would I be best doing this?

I thought about this way:

A user clicks the "buy track" button on the site. This does several things. Firstly it will take user payment details (possibly through a paypal account?!)and then it will create a page with a dynamic file name (e.g. 234x56bgr87.html but which will be different the next time the track is bought) which links to the mp3 file allowing the user to download it. This page expires after 24 hours so the buyer cannot give the page address to others. The button will also send the buyer an e-mail with a link to the page. Hope that made sense.

Will this work? Is there a better way to do this? Is .net a viable soulution? Are there any books on this subject which would let me develope a workable soulution?

Thanks

Ewen Cluley

[PeOfEo]

What may be better is to store all of the music within a databse and then when you get to the download portion of it the server sends the user a download file. This way the user cannot just request the file, the server has to send him the header to get the file. But I don't know how you would make it nice and pretty so that they can still get the file if they disconnect or somethign mid download.

[Cipher]

Can you show me a small exampl of that header?! i just need to understand how to make it work?!
Thank you.

[ecluley]

ok, thanks PeOfEo. Thats a great idea! How would I go about implamenting such a solution? Do you know of any tutorials or guides which would tell me how to do this?
Thanks again.
Ewen

[PeOfEo]

Ill have to look at this old asp.net file manager example to see how this other guy setup the header. I can probably post some code tonight.

[ecluley]

thanks PeOfEo, much appreciated.
Ewen

[ecluley]

ok... anyone got any code that would help me? Links to tutorials? Anything? Thanks