Protecting audio from download

There is no sure fire way to protect files from being downloaded if they are transmitted over HTTP. There are some ways you can make it a bit harder, however. Drupal's private download method can restrict access to a file based on a user's permission, and you can obscure/hide any direct audio URLs displayed on a page. But a saavy visitor can always "view source" on a page and grab the link, or capture the audio as it streams to their speakers.

Do you have any examples of sites that demonstrate the type of functionality you are looking for?

something like that only works if u sell files using commerce, which would mean only people that pay can access the file (playing is downloading)

I've seen sites do this by by making the media file only available for a short time after the player makes the initial request. I think the jPlayer module has a feature that does this.

A loose user story would look something like this:

1) A user performs an action that requests a song (presses "Play")
2) The media file, which is stored in a non-public directory, is copies over to a public directory for a short duration while the user can listen.
3) After the set duration elapses, the public file is deleted from the system.

There is definitely more nuance to doing it well. It's never going to be perfect protection, as I've been able to yank media files from that do this protection fairly well by copying the URL from the Net tab of Firebug and downloading with wget.

@molenick: That's an interesting idea...any examples of sites that you think handle this well?

This requires a lot of server configuration, so it is likely out of scope for inclusion in the distribution. Another idea is to only provide streamable version of low bit or 30 sec previews, and then sell the full file download using gumroad or another commerce solution.