I am an audio engineer...and I need to secure my content

Houdini

Hey I never give out what I do
except for right now and I engineer mp3s for some publixhers but I need to work on my own with a secure sight that will expose music in the mp3 format, although only certain people are supposed to even see this much less hear it.

Right now it is a URL by invitation only!

So it must be secure for several reasons besides licensing, can I do this sucessfully with PHP alone or should I do something entirely differernt?

khendar

There's a couple of ways to do this. You could use sessions containing a username and password which limits the links that they can see. However I dont know that this will prevent people from accessing the mp3 links directly.

You could use htaccess to password protect a folder...

Or (this is probably the way I would do it), you could store the files directly in a database which can only be accessed by a script which checks the session username and password. That way people cannot link to the files directly.

samudasu

I don't know why you couldn't do it with php. Or better yet, a combo of php/mysql because i know that you know it already. I haven't ever had to protect audio files but here's what i'm thinking. Part of your site would be password protected ofcourse with username/password stored in a database or flatfile if just a few users. When the user logs in a session is set. Each page in the password protected area checks the session and either lets the user proceed or redirects them out if they're not supposed to be there. There'll be a page with links to the audio files. Clicking on the link will call a script that'll use readfile() to read the audio file from a directory outside the document root. Having the audio outside doc root will make it impossible for people to directly link to the audio files. You can also have a table in the database to log who downloaded what, how many times, and when. I guess i pretty much said what khendar did execpt where the files are stored.