Web design ? regarding musical demos

[Geoffrey Taucer]

I'm looking to add musical demos to my website. I'd like to know if there's any way I can allow visitors to my website to listen to a song of mine without making it possible to save it to their HD. I'm thinking something like you might see on myspace, or other sites like that.

How might I go about doing this?

[OverCoat]

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ is pretty nice.

[Kanthos]

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/ is pretty nice.

Good-looking player. Problem is, I figured out how to download the tracks it referenced within 15 seconds. Ditto for Pixietricks' website. The problem with both scripts is that you send a playlist as a parameter to the script, and the playlist references the audio file in unencrypted format. Of course, that might be secure enough for you.

You might be able to get around this with the player SOC recommended by putting your playlist in a separate folder on your server with a .htaccess file set up to deny permissions to that folder. Also, changing access on the playlist files might work. It would depend on whether the contents of the file were sent to the flash player once the client had read your webpage (and thus, the file was sent remotely) or not. Worth a try though.

Other ways to get around this would be either need to have the player reference a database (and restricting access to the database), uploading multiple versions of the flash file that contain the MP3 files (meaning you'd need flash), or finding a flash file that contained one or more playlists where you'd tell it which playlist to use via a parameter on the page (again, you'd need flash for this). I don't know if any solutions like this exist.

Really, comes down to how much security you want. Most people aren't going to be clever enough to look at script parameters, open a playlist file, and find the link to the MP3 that way, but ultimately, there's no way to stop it with SOC's script.

[Geoffrey Taucer]

That should be fine for my purposes.

EDIT: another question, while I'm at it; is there any way to get an invisible hit counter? Like, so I can tell how many hits I've gotten without having one of those ugly counters visible to everybody who visits the site?

[Nutritious]

That should be fine for my purposes.

EDIT: another question, while I'm at it; is there any way to get an invisible hit counter? Like, so I can tell how many hits I've gotten without having one of those ugly counters visible to everybody who visits the site?

You could use google analytics. Lots of information beyond just hit counts.