Accessing file outside of server

[lives4him06]

I have a music library in the directory "mydocs/music" with the song tbs.mp3. My server is set up in the directory "mydocs/server".

How can i make available for download the song in the music on the server?

[devinemke]

if the file resides in a non-public directory then you need to serve it up using the [man]header[/man] function.

[lives4him06]

okkk i read through the headers thing and i cannot find what i am looking for.

Could i have a bit more direction??

[devinemke]

$path = '/mydocs/music/tbs.mp3';
$file = basename($path);

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $file . '"');
header('Content-type: audio/mpeg3');
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));
readfile($path);
exit();

remember, there can no output sent to the browser prior to calling the header() function. read up on headers here.

[lives4him06]

do i have to provide a content type?

[devinemke]

lives4him06 wrote:

do i have to provide a content type?

if you want to explicitly tell the browser what type if file to expect, then yes.

[lives4him06]

what advantage is there to this?

[Weedpacket]

The disadvantage of leaving it out is that it doesn't work.

[devinemke]

Weedpacket wrote:

The disadvantage of leaving it out is that it doesn't work.

actually that is not entirely true. some browsers (namely IE) can get the file type from the file extension (if there is one) so the procedure outlined in my code example above would technically still "work".