# If Flash goes away, how will you protect tracks on your website?



## rgames (Jun 9, 2012)

I'm finally getting around to a much-needed update on my website and I'm making the switch to HTML5. However, I still need to keep my demo tracks in a Flash-based player because there's no way to prevent illegal downloads using HTML5. At least none that I can figure out (and I've found lots of talk on the web saying the same thing with no solutions, so I'm not alone).

Has anyone found a workaround for this issue?

It's pretty clear that Flash is on its way out: Adobe has abandoned it on mobile devices in favor of HTML5, I'm willing to bet it will be abandoned altogether within a few years. But with no way to prevent downloads in HTML5, the move away from Flash seems to be bad news for anyone who wants to protect content on a website.

Maybe there's some JavaScript trickery that can be done, but my mediocre web development chops are leaving me with no ideas...

rgames


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## Reegs (Jun 9, 2012)

I came across a site once that served m3u files (streaming MP3 playlist) that would load into Winamp. It doesn't appear to be too common an option, though (I think because of server hosting requirements).


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## RiffWraith (Jun 9, 2012)

rgames @ Sun Jun 10 said:


> I'm finally getting around to a much-needed update on my website and I'm making the switch to HTML5. However, I still need to keep my demo tracks in a Flash-based player because there's no way to prevent illegal downloads using HTML5. At least none that I can figure out (and I've found lots of talk on the web saying the same thing with no solutions, so I'm not alone).
> 
> Has anyone found a workaround for this issue?
> 
> ...



Eh, just so you know, the files are d/l-ed even with Flash. The filenames might be different, and I think the extension is removed, but anyone that half-knows the internet, can still get to the files. So yes, it might be harder for some, but still just as possible.

We should go back to cassettes. :!:


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## Casey Edwards (Jun 9, 2012)

RiffWraith @ Sat Jun 09 said:


> rgames @ Sun Jun 10 said:
> 
> 
> > I'm finally getting around to a much-needed update on my website and I'm making the switch to HTML5. However, I still need to keep my demo tracks in a Flash-based player because there's no way to prevent illegal downloads using HTML5. At least none that I can figure out (and I've found lots of talk on the web saying the same thing with no solutions, so I'm not alone).
> ...



Depending on how you set your permalinks I think getting around a flash player could still be next to impossible.


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## RiffWraith (Jun 9, 2012)

Casey Edwards @ Sun Jun 10 said:


> RiffWraith @ Sat Jun 09 said:
> 
> 
> > rgames @ Sun Jun 10 said:
> ...



How, if the physical files are downloaded on to your HD? Please explain...


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## guydoingmusic (Jun 9, 2012)

What about the Soundcloud player? You can use an HTML5 version of the player now. Which, btw, I'm using on my site.


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## RyBen (Jun 10, 2012)

Honestly, any audio information that that can be transmitted through a PC's audio interface can be ripped, just like some old cassette players could record the radio. To add to that, there's usually a site dedicated to this, like Youtube downloaders and such. Yes, there's one for Soundcloud too. Anyone who has the brains to hack your site has the brains to google what they need to rip/record your music. The whole concept of web security is extremely dependent on the ignorance of the masses.


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## Markus S (Jun 10, 2012)

Be happy if people consider your music worth listening to.


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## Daryl (Jun 10, 2012)

There is no software protection that will work. Even if someone can't get at the files, they can always record the output. If you are concerned about someone stealing your music, just don't put complete tracks up. Give a 30 second blast of the bit you want people to hear. I can assure you that any Producer/Music Editor etc., who is wanting to listen to what you can do, will not listen to a whole track. If the meat is not presented within 15, or so, seconds, that track is a dud.

Unless you are posting your tracks for some other reason? If you are trying to sell your material, I would have thought that posting whole tracks would defeat the object.

D


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## mark812 (Jun 10, 2012)

guydoingmusic @ Sat Jun 09 said:


> What about the Soundcloud player? You can use an HTML5 version of the player now. Which, btw, I'm using on my site.



I agree. There is a compression issue with Soundcloud, but I think that most of the non-musicians don't care too much about it. Soundcloud player looks nice, it's customizable and simple to use. There are both HTML5 and flash versions.


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## MaestroRage (Jun 10, 2012)

as mentioned anybody that's slightly tech savvy will find a way around that. Even in flash player, the audio is cached so anybody who knows where their temporary folder is (or can google it), will have all the songs they listened to sitting there waiting for them. This is why Stock music sites insist that authors physically embed a watermark into the file rather then have the flash player play it for them.


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## rgames (Jun 10, 2012)

Yes - you certainly can just record the audio. However, I'm not that concerned about that problem. Having HTML links in the code makes it way too easy.

Does Flash use a temporary cache even if you set it up for streaming? I thought that having it stream got around that issue.

SoundCloud is an option but I'm not too keen on it for access to a whole bunch of tracks . I have my demo tracks separated by collection, so you pick a collection and then pick a track. It's all XML driven so I never have to change the code when I upload a new collection, I just add new tags for the new tracks in the XML file. I'm not sure how I'd do that with SoundCloud - seems I'd have to do it on a track-by-track basis.

If the SoundCloud player is HTML5, how does it prevent downloads? Seems you can just look at the code to pick out the link. I use SoundCloud sometimes and I have it set up to prevent downloads but I think the version I use is Flash-based.

Thanks,

rgames


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## Casey Edwards (Jun 10, 2012)

RiffWraith @ Sat Jun 09 said:


> Casey Edwards @ Sun Jun 10 said:
> 
> 
> > RiffWraith @ Sat Jun 09 said:
> ...



I wasn't talking about people accessing HD's remotely, that was a bit more techy than I thought you guys were talking about. I meant to keep people from finding your audio upload links and saving them once you find where they're hosted at on your domain. Like CaseyEdwards.com/Audio/July/2012/Demo_A.mp3 or something of the sort. If you change your permalinks to not be %name% then you can make it much harder to find these things. It was just a thought. You guys can carry on your Splinter Cell Spy level hacking conversation. I know nothing about that stuff.


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## Nostradamus (Jun 10, 2012)

Copy protection by using Flash? Well, nothing is easier as downloading a flash based track.


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## mark812 (Jun 10, 2012)

rgames @ Sun Jun 10 said:


> SoundCloud is an option but I'm not too keen on it for access to a whole bunch of tracks . I have my demo tracks separated by collection, so you pick a collection and then pick a track. It's all XML driven so I never have to change the code when I upload a new collection, I just add new tags for the new tracks in the XML file. I'm not sure how I'd do that with SoundCloud - seems I'd have to do it on a track-by-track basis.
> 
> If the SoundCloud player is HTML5, how does it prevent downloads? Seems you can just look at the code to pick out the link. I use SoundCloud sometimes and I have it set up to prevent downloads but I think the version I use is Flash-based.
> 
> ...



You can break it down into sets and have a few players if you want to.

And yeah, there are many free plugins for Firefox and other browsers that allow you to download flash content from pages with a single click. 

For example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashgot/?src=search (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... src=search)


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## ThomasL (Jun 10, 2012)

1) Who is your target audience/wanted visitor?
2) Is it worth the hassle to try to copy protect?
and
3) Why switch to HTML5 if you're keeping a Flash player?!?

Just a few questions...


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## Marius Masalar (Jun 10, 2012)

Richard,

Having explored this in a lot of depth, I'm sorry to say that — as you may have begun to realize — it's not a fruitful path to take. I'll just offer you my two (hundred) cents to add to the discussion.

Whether or not Flash is on its way out is not only debatable but not the point: even if it stays alive, the truth remains that iOS devices will never support it — and since they represent a massive percentage of the mobile browsing space, it would behoove any responsible site owner to make sure their media content is accessible via a more universal system like HTML5. Looking to the future (and my analytics stats), it's plain to see that we're trending toward mobile browsing as a very significant percentage of site visitors in the future.

With that in mind I think you're definitely doing the right thing by upgrading, but you may want to re-evaluate your priorities in terms of having tracks on your site. The reality is this: anything that you put on the internet, in any format, by any means, and with any kind of protection is vulnerable to copying; usually with next to no effort required. This is especially true of media content. Whether it's Flash or HTML5 or encrypted stream, it's all 100% vulnerable and the only variable is how tough it would be for potential takers to acquire the material — and this only ranges from yaaaaawn to Google.

So the conversation you're having now is essentially "will my 5 hours/$5,000 of extra effort, which will introduce 2 further clicks for my pirates, be worth it?"

You're the only one who can answer that, but let's look deeper.

Possible ideas like providing only snippets, or watermarking the audio, or offering only a very low bitrate version are all valid, but they are, at best, side-steps. There are arguments to be made in favour and against each, but at the end of the day they're all ignoring the primary issue: people want to listen to your music as they please.

When you look at it like that, it's basically a non-issue. I understand the concern though, so my priority would be to address the issue directly and see what you can do to make the experience of browsing your site as personal and rewarding as possible for your visitors. As it stands, some of your visitors will want to access your music samples outside the site. Meanwhile, you want to control access and ensure that the material isn't being used illicitly. Both of these are equally valid positions, so your job becomes to reconcile the two.

For my own site, I have chosen SoundCloud as my solution. There are a great many reasons for this, but some salient points are as follows:

- Flash & HTML5 support, very easy to embed and modify the widget to suit a design, which means you have the flexibility to target any platform.

- Live waveform and timed comments on the player provide interactivity and excitement for visitors; what's cooler: a play button or a waveform they can do stuff with? No contest. Making that impression is important, especially for people working in visual fields — makes the music tangible, visible, comprehensible.

- Granular control over what can be commented on, where those comments appear, what can be downloaded, what can be streamed on the widget, who can share the widget, and what can only be seen on the SC site itself.

- Deep stats, providing helpful analytics to make sure you know who's listening, from where, and who sent them.

- A gigantic (and growing) social community and growing public awareness that instantly places visitors in a familiar situation. Social aspects can be ignored, but if managed well can lead to tremendous bursts of attention. The on-site re-posting/sharing allows people to "share" your track on their stream, showing it to all their friends/followers, while the track retains all protection you've placed on it and always shows who it's by and links to your own profile. Just like retweeting.

- Tracks can also be "favourited" and then listened to at the person's leisure from their phone, the website, etc. etc. — without downloading it.

- Easy integration with a huge host of tools allowing you to sell, market, and otherwise add value to your music without having to link to two or three different places. It's all accessible from the widget.

The audio degradation complaint is one that is valid for certain circumstances (the way you encode and upload your tracks makes a big difference in terms of how SoundCloud's transcoder will render it, but it's not a perfect system), but none of that matters a bit to the layperson's ear. In the majority of cases, they literally cannot tell the difference — certainly not to an extent where it would fundamentally alter their impression of the piece — and even if they can, there is nothing stopping you from attaching a simple description note saying that lossless files are available upon request, or via purchase through BandCamp or whatever you happen to use. I don't work for SoundCloud, nor do I evangelize them idly. They are, at the moment, the ideal solution for my needs. When that changes, so will my recommendation, but for now it's the best I've found.

So to wrap up, my concern is that it might be a waste of your time to struggle too much by looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your listeners want to have access to your music separate from the site, it doesn't mean 100% of them want to use it illicitly. Let's be pessimistic and say that 70% are assholes — the other 30% just like the music, they want it on their iPod, they want to show their coworkers to help make a decision, they want to toss it in a folder on their desktop along with the reels of 4 other composers to help keep their choices clear...every time you make it more difficult for pirates to steal your stuff (and it's important to recognize that unless you are a genius at web coding you are literally just adding seconds of extra effort on their part), you're also adversely affecting the legitimate listeners in ways that might impact your business much more directly.

All of which is to say that if you're going to invest hours of effort and money into revamping your site, consider orienting that effort toward rewarding your legitimate users and expanding your social networking offer. Make positive impressions on your visitors. Reward them just for visiting and being cool. Have them pay with a tweet to download a few tracks. Hold some contests on Twitter if you have a fanbase. Make sure they can listen to your tracks on the go too. Chat with them and build in some interaction to encourage exploration...

Forgive the wall of text but I hope some of it offers you some food for thought!


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## rgames (Jun 30, 2012)

In the end I wound up using the Soundcloud player for a sort-of demo reel on the main page but I kept the Flash player for my library collections. There's just no way to elegantly set up the Soundcloud player for a bunch of different collections.

It's live now: www.rgamesmusic.com

My guess is that when this site looks outdated in a few years I'll have to brush up on my web programming skills once again...!

rgames


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## guydoingmusic (Jun 30, 2012)

I saw this the other day... http://billbrownmusic.com/music.php Thought this might be of some inspiration for you, Richard. If not... I only wasted a small part of your bandwidth.


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