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On my website I have linked to a locally stored MP3 file. Normally when a user clicks the file they get a box asking them to open or save it. However, people who have quicktime installed (thanks Apple) instead go to a new window where the track plays.
I personally know how to disassociate quicktime from my browser, however most of my users do not. I am looking for a way to force a download regardless of whether or not the person has QT installed.
I know this is possible because sites do it. In searching through the code I cant figure out how though.
< no example links, please - see Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com] >- this is an example, even I have QT enabled it downloads the file.
[edited by: tedster at 8:35 pm (utc) on Oct. 14, 2009]
Just need to find somebody to give up a script and explanation. You could probably search for a PHP solution easily enough, but no reason this can't be answered in-house.
The no-effort, no-learning way out is to drop your .mp3 in .zip and link to that. LOL
In short, you'll want to add something like
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="whatever.mp3"to the HTTP headers you output for that file.
Thank you for helping.
so just adding that within the Head tags
No, this is not a page <head>, it's a http header, the data sent to the browser BEFORE the content delivery. You can see http headers by loading the FireFox extension "Live HTTP Headers" and opening any page.
Content-disposition helps, but it's not always enough. Browsers sometimes "sniff" a file type. If it can detect a particular type and has a "helper application" available it will still try to display it.
Usually this is best done by printing out a munged content-type header, which forces the browser to prompt download.
PHP, perl, ASP, doesn't matter:
print "content-type: bad/type\n";
print "Content-Length: $size\n";
print "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename\n\n";
then open and print out the file to the browser.
Those are the basics, PHP seems to need a bit more, Google for "force download PHP" if this is your language of choice.
If this header is used in a response with the application/octet-stream content-type, the implied suggestion is that the user agent should not display the response, but directly enter a `save response as...' dialog.from aforementioned RFC 2616 section 19.5.1.
* "better" here meaning "more in line with the RFC" rather than "functionally superior".
"Bad/type" is just what I use to "munge" the content-type header. It could be anything, as long as the browser doesn't recognize the content-type. "Content-type:IE-is-a-pain\n"; :-)
With PHP though, there are specific headers required and it does use octet-stream, and appears to work. So I guess it depends on the technology.
Regardless, if you're silly enough try avoiding the very useful "Open with" part of certain browsers' downloading UI, I guess you gotta go with whatever works for you. :P
