Downloading an MP3

Jane_prg

Hello.How are You?

I'm wondering about how to setup an mp3 for downloading from my server using php.
Should I use something like a filesystem object to convert the data to byte data?
I'm at a bit of a loss right now.A tutorial would be helpfull.

                     Thank you

bpat1434

You could use the [man]header/man to declare a header content-type of octet-stream which will instruct 99% of browsers to save it as a file. The 1% is for those that for whatever reason have octet-stream set to open up in the browser. Most browsers will pop open the "Save" box to save it to disk.

[ PHP.net Comment ]
That is a solution a lot of people use.

I suggest you read many of the comments on the [man]header/man manual page. You'll see what suggestions work, and where some pitfalls might be.

Jane_prg

Thanks for the reply.
I ran this code on an apache server on my machine and it downloaded just fine.
The thing is I got a "page can't be displayed error "when I tried to download from a real webserver.It didn't work at all.I'm wondering,perhaps I don't have permission to download.Bandwith problems?I don't know what the problem is.Any suggestions?

Any help at all would be appreciated.

<?php
header("content-type:application/octet-stream");
header('content-Disposition:attachment;filename="Dark night.mp3"');
readfile('YourSmile.mp3');
?>

bpat1434

Well, there are a couple things:
1.) It's "Content-Type" not, "content-type"
2.) There's a space between the colon, and the definition:

header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");

3.) YourSmile.mp3 has to be in the same folder as this file.

I'd suggest using [man]fopen/man and [man]fread/man rather than readfile. It may give you better errors.

What does your apache error log say? Does it say that the file is not found, the page is not found, or what?

Jane_prg

The program is working fine now.It appears in some cases to list the full url in
header proprties.For example,the mp3 was in the same folder but
wasn't downloaded until the full url was listed.

NogDog

Yeah, the HTTP 1.1 protocol states that the Location should be a full URI, not a relative path. Some servers may let you get away with a relative path, but - obviously - some will not, so it's best to always use the full URI.

bradgrafelman

Also, to add two more benefits of using fopen/fread as mentioned by bpat:

If the file is rather large, readfile() will read the entire file into memory. With fread(), you only use as much memory as you read at a time (since you'll constantly echo out what you've just read).
To quote one of the user comments on the [man]readfile/man page:

readfile and fpassthru are about 55% slower than doing a loop with "feof/echo fread".