Posted by Toby Inkster on 03/25/06 10:47

©® wrote:

> I have *no* idea how to start with this. Anyone care to point me to a
> tutorial as to how to make this available for purchase (e.g. PayPal) so
> that once one person purchases a track, they simply do not send the URL
> to someone else to get the same track free.

It's not an easy matter, so if this is just a one-off thing you may be
better off using a third-party service.

The first couple of hits here look OK:

http://www.google.com/search?q=sell+digital+files

The basic technique if you wanted to do it yourself would be:

1. gather any information you want from the user;
2. direct the user to your payment service and let them do their stuff;
3. receieve the user back from your payment service, who will hopefully
provide some verification that the user has payed properly, in the
form of a GET query string or POST data;
4. process that data, to make sure the user has paid, and set a cookie on
their system;
5. provide a link to the music file(s);
6. each music file should check for the presence of the cookie before
allowing itself to be downloaded. (Yoy may be able to achieve this
with Apache configuration directives, or a server-side script.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

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