Need Direction

[hopper]

I am building a web site for a musician friend. He wants to be able to sell
his songs as downloads much like Itunes and Napster does. This is a bit
above my knowledge. I feel this can be done with the cgi and a scripting
language, and I don't mind doing the research myself, but I have been unable
to find my answers. Does anyone have an idea where I might find a solution?
Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[J.O. Aho]

I am building a web site for a musician friend. He wants to be able to sell
his songs as downloads much like Itunes and Napster does. This is a bit
above my knowledge. I feel this can be done with the cgi and a scripting
language, and I don't mind doing the research myself, but I have been unable
to find my answers. Does anyone have an idea where I might find a solution?
Any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks.

Take a look at different protals/e-commerce projects that are listed at
freshmeat.net, think you can be quite lucky and find one that does what you need.

The idea is quite simple really, an user system, with a download script that
calls a payments script and then forwards the file in question from a
directory which isn't accessible with a browser.
If you would take the time to write it yourself, I would suggest you use PHP,
as it works on most platforms (your friend won't be depending on a special
web-hotel, but can freely switch to another one) and for it's stability. There
is an on-line manual at www.php.net, which is really useful and then you have
alt.php and alt.php.sql where you can get good help with both PHP and SQL.
I do really suggest you do look at already made solutions.