Hopefully quick and easy…
Is there a way to embed an audio player (MP3 file) on a web page / blog page that does NOT allow for the file to be downloaded? I have not gotten this question before and my Google-fu seems to be weak today. I have embedded Quicktime players before, but it seems that if the user has the Pro version that the file is downloadable through the player menu. Just wondering if there’s a way to play it without it being downloadable at all.
Thanks.
No. No matter what you do, you have to download the date in some fashion to play the song.
If you want to make it difficult (but not impossible) to save the song, then you can use some form of Flash-based streaming player instead of directly embedding an MP3. That will require some custom server-side setup, and all it does is make things a little more complicated to deal with. If someone really wants to save the audio, they will always be able to, even if it comes down to doing it via analog loop.
You can use this little Flash player, which is very common, but one can view the source of your page and see the full URL to the MP3 and then use that info to download your MP3.
But it keeps people who don’t know how to view source from being able to download your MP3.
If you stop to think about it, the browser has to download your mp3 to play it. So there will always be some way to download it. But as others pointed out you can make it hard.
If I can hear the song out of my headphones, I can record it. I happen to be able to record it losslessly to an audio file on my hard drive*, but in extremis I would still be able to get out my MP3 player which has a microphone and can record plenty of audio when it’s empty. That last bit is called the ‘analog hole’ and it can’t be plugged.
*(The Pulseaudio audio subsystem in many modern Linux distros comes with a program called ‘pacat’ which is the digital version of running wires from the outputs of your soundcard to its inputs.)
That said, all browsers have caches, or places on the hard drive where they save what they get from the Internet. If it’s on the Web and someone sees it, it’s been downloaded into their cache and it’s not that hard to find it and copy it somewhere else on the hard drive.