Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Album Downloads - Help!

Collapse
X
Collapse
 
  • Page of 1
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
Previous template Next
    #1

    Album Downloads - Help!

    Hi everyone,

    First time post for me so accept the requisite apologies for asking a blatantly obvious question...

    I'm currently setting up an online store for my record label (using Actinic v8.5) and I'm coming unstuck with the digital downloads. I obviously want to be able to offer the customer the option of buying our albums in a number of ways: physical shipment (CD, Vinyl etc.) and digital download. As far as DD is concerned, it's important that they can purchase a download of the album in its entirety or, if they choose, to purchase one or any combination of the individual tracks from the album.

    I've set up the individual tracks no problem, by creating individiual components for each track, making them optional, and assigning them with the individual products I created for each track. This seems straightforward and I've assigned each of those individual track products with their respective MP3's.

    My problem arises with full album downloads: how can I have the customer tick one option (Download Entire Album) and then get a bundle of MP3's to take to the checkout? I only seem to be able to assign one MP3 to each product...

    As another issue, if there is a solution to this will it involve the consumer receiving a raft of links for each of the individual tracks on the album when they come to download the music?

    Rambling message I know, but if there was any assistance out there I'd be inordinately grateful...
    Tags: None
    #2
    Merging the tracks into an album would be my approach, i then have albums plus the individual songs. If i buy an album, i expect to get all things it contains in one download.

    Comment

      #3
      hey, thanks for getting back so quickly...

      Merging MP3's - is that a relatively straightforward operation and if it is, I'm concerned that I might have file sizes that would choke a horse: some of our albums are double albums with upwards of 20 tracks (even 30 in some cases!) and the likelihood of 100MB+ file sizes...

      Comment

        #4
        If i'm downloading a 100MB album or 20 songs of 5MB each, what's the difference? apart from the fact that for the album i click on one link, whereas the single tracks i have to click on 20 separate links to achieve the same result. An album download is the quickest method without doubt as the manual intervention is the least.

        Comment

          #5
          looking and asking around other mp3 retailers it seems fairly common for album downloads to be in the form of multiple links per track - not uniformly popular with people who prefer to get one 'zipped' file but certainly a fairly standard way of doing things it seems...

          It raises the question again of whether Actinic Catalog can offer the facility of 'bundling' MP3's when the customer clicks once on the 'full album download' product...any ideas?

          Comment

            #6
            Originally posted by peloton24
            not uniformly popular with people who prefer to get one 'zipped' file but certainly a fairly standard way of doing things it seems...
            Customers telling you how to do it there surely? zip them up and provide a link to the zip file?

            Comment

              #7
              this question has been raised previously, and the same peoples answered:

              - put all the tracks, ID3 V1 AND V2 tagged and named correctly in a zip file.
              - put the album art as a 1000x1000px jpg. call it 'folder.jpg'
              - include a text file with your website name and a description of where the files came from, together with an email address.

              when they extract it, it'll have the cover art in the player.

              Comment

                #8
                Originally posted by gabrielcrowe
                - put all the tracks, ID3 V1 AND V2 tagged and named correctly in a zip file.
                - put the album art as a 1000x1000px jpg. call it 'folder.jpg'
                - include a text file with your website name and a description of where the files came from, together with an email address.

                when they extract it, it'll have the cover art in the player.
                Thanks for all of this - I'm back on track again and grateful for the response (sorry if I never saw earlier threads). One thing though - could you clarify what you mean by ID3, V1 and V2 tagged?

                Comment

                  #9
                  mp3 files have an area reserved in the file, for a metadata type information known as tagging.

                  there are two variations. V1 and V2

                  the first is simple tagging, trackname, artist, album year, genre, etc.

                  the second is more advanced and can store things like album art, and lyrics.

                  in winamp (http://www.winamp.com/) load up your file and press alt+3

                  this is a tag editor that saves to the files. when the person then plays the files, thee tags are read and the correct trackname can be given, even if the filename is very mutated.

                  almost every mp3 player that exists supports V1, and most modern players support V2.

                  V2 support definately exists in ipods, itunes and in windows media player.

                  Comment

                  Previous template Next
                  Working...
                  X