how to make an audio "undownloadable"?

[zozzen]

Hi, my school would like to upload a few audio clips of tutorials. They want to let students freely listen to it with a web browser, but don't want them to download it.

As our server has a limited data stream (around 30GB/month), I've thought of putting these tutorials in a audio-sharing websites, but there're download tools for apparently all well-known file sharing website. Do you know any audio-sharing websites that can prevent users from downloading? (or making it so difficult to download..)

And what would you do to restrict audio download from your website?

Thanks!

[vincevincevince]

I'm sorry, but any audio delivered across the internet is downloadable, easily. Even with the most sophisticated delivery methods, your user can just fire up the recorder application, free and standard with windows, and take his own full-quality copy. Even if you could stop that, standard audio cables as found in most houses allow a recording of anything going to the speakers to be made using most MP3 players or cassette decks.

Your only hope is to make the audio undesirable to save. This could mean having it in a particularly low quality, overlaying commentary, or only providing short samples.

If you're stuck on this issue, it may be someone here can suggest a different way around your problems if you can tell us why your school wants to stop downloading of the audio.

[rocknbil]

Several sound services I use to get stock sounds for television commercials simply do a voice over, "My site - dot - com". But that's not very helpful if you want the audio to be part of the visitor's site experience.

The other thing you can do is put the students' audio behind a registered login area. You may still get the nefarious distributing it publicly but it will reduce it a bit.

[bcolflesh]

As mentioned above, if they can hear it on their PC, their are several software applications that can record it.

That said, you can serve the audio via a plugin (like Flash) and frustrate most of the casual copiers, ex:

<snip>
No URL's please

[edited by: limbo at 9:00 am (utc) on Nov. 9, 2007]

[zozzen]

Yeah, I also think that it's infeasible to stop people from "download" the audio clip, and using flash player is good enough for me. Stopping casual download is good enough.

Btw, do you know any services similar to youtube that offers free sharing capacity? Youtube is great for sharing video , but it seems that they don't provide flash audio player. I've tried other services like imeem.com, and they take all audio clips as "music" and restricts the length of time to play. Any suggestion is great.

[thecoalman]

They want to let students...

Impossible... lol If it can be seen or heard it can be copied, saved etc. Even if you could prevent that there is always the analog hole. Once one of them figures it out they will all know.

At best you might prevent some casual users, as suggested flash is sufficient.