I am currently working on a Store for my website funkinfamily.com. My store will be selling MP3 music downloads (Digital Releases) of music from my label. I am programming my store with PHP so I thought I would ask the PHP-heads here.

The question i have right now is, how can I secure my files so people cant find them on the server? More or less, How can I hide their download URL from being seen and possibly shared after a customer makes a purchase.

My only idea is to zip up the files and email them to the cutomer, but file sizes will be rather large and most email services will not download such large attatchments. My alternative to this is to create a temporary downloads directory for the customer to download the files from, where the directory will be removed after, lets say - 24 hrs. I figure that is ample time to retrieve their purchased music.

If there is some better way I am over looking I'd appriciate a tip. I am looking for suggestions so if anyone has one....

Ok so the question has answered it's self, CSCGAL if your reading - much like your MySQL question i commented on, the solution was in the query.

After posting the original message to this I started talking to google asking it the same questions I asked here. Low and behold! I found exactly what I needed.

I stumbled across a nice group of coders at stadtaus.com. They have written a script called Download Center Lite (link). If you check the link you will see it supports Hiding the Downloads dir., Tracking and Counting downloads, HTTP referer security check, and more. For what I needed it works great. It does cost some $$ to be able to remove copyright tags, but not much. I am definitely going to pay it when I get my next pay check (just another broke SOB trying to reprogram the world....

Hopefully this information will help someone in the future

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