Offering Audio?

[cmoffett]

Hi,
I'd like to offer a 3.0M audio file as a free teaser on my site. But I don't have any experience with this. Am I going to run into bandwidth problems?

Thanks!

[Pethens]

Since you have 3TB of monthly bandwidth, your visitors could download that audio file 1,000,000 times in a month before you ran out of bandwidth. Of course you will want to set aside some bandwidth for the other content you serve, but it seems that you will have plenty of room to work with.

[felgall]

With a file that big it will take quite a while for it to download for most people. Many of them will give up on it before it finishes downloading unless you make sure they know how big it is before they start downloading and give them a really compelling reason to want to download it.

[Pethens]

Yes, it would make sense to create an .m3u playlist which links to the file. Most browsers will hand these playlists to mp3 helper applications like iTunes or Winamp, which will use progressive download to play the content as it downloads.

Another approach is to use a Flash MP3 player like XSPF Music Player which will also start playing the file before it downloads completely.

[cmoffett]

Right, 1,000,000 downloads ought to be enough!

I should have relatively patient visitors, but I'll look into a m3u playlist. Thanks for the tip. Any suggestions on where to start?

[Pethens]

An m3u playlist is just a list of files or URLs, one per line. Yours might look something like this:


http://www.mysite.com/downloads/thesong.mp3

Then in your web page you might have two links, one labeled "Right click to download the song" which links directly to the mp3, and one labeled "Click to stream the song" which links to the .m3u file.

That's a simple approach. If you are more ambitious you might add a PHP download script to make the MP3 download automatically, or a Flash MP3 player to stream the song right in your web page. Pick the approach that works for you.