We want you to download our songs. We made a page just for them. And we thought the little haiku at the top made it clear exactly how to achieve that goal, but apparently not — I’ve gotten a few comments from folks asking how they can download the songs instead of just having them play in the browser. I thought that everybody knew how to do this with the right mouse button, but hey, we all have to learn somewhere. So we have revised the haiku and I’m writing this post to clarify, for anybody still having trouble.
To download our songs, right-click the name of the track to open a menu and, depending on what browser you are using, select…
“Save Link As” (Firefox or Chrome)
“Save Target As” (Internet Explorer)
“Download Linked File” (Safari).
They all do the same thing: They ask you where on your computer you want to save the MP3. (And if you do not have a two-button mouse, use Option-Click instead of right-click.)
Now, I had planned to make a “Download Now” button so as to remove that hassle altogether. But I’ve found that it isn’t as easy as it looks. If the browser sees the MP3, it wants to play it. In order to get around it, I tried changing my .htaccess file in the songs directory, but it did not work (it had an effect, but it broke file access altogether). Another suggestion was to put every track in a .zip archive, and I don’t wanna do that. For one, it makes counting downloads a little harder if there are two versions of each song being downloaded. For two, if people are a little confused by right-clicking to download, now I’m introducing file compression, which simply swaps one problem for another. And I have heard of PHP solutions around it but I don’t know PHP so I couldn’t make head nor tail of them.
So…for now, I’m keeping it as is. Please use the “right-click-save-as” method. It’s standard across the web and a good thing to know.
In a last ditch effort, you can try downloading from our page on Last.fm. But that didn’t work for me, even though I set it up for free download. I got a 503 error.