MakeTunes MP3 downloads not available for anonymous visitors

sorry im not very teky but why would robots take our songs ? sounds like a sinister plot from dr evil.....

Oh My God !!!!!! Im Gonna disconnect from the internet and start my backup generator cannot risk being on the national grid anymore ahhhhh my sons playing x box live gotta stop him!

Hehe, long story short - basically the deal is that every site on the net gets visited by bots, which are simply computer programs that run constantly, and retrieve web data from the billions of pages out there. Eg Google has many bots, which find new content every minute of every day, and add them to the Google search engine.

Those ones are fine, but there are lots of others - some of which don't play by the rules. Some bots are run by various agencies, which trawl the net automatically 24/7, and hunt for uploaded commercial songs for example (I believe some of these download every mp3 they find). Thats not an issue here of course, as they're hunting the dodgy sites.

However, there are also others which are just plain dumb (or malicious), and which go a little out of control, and download everything they can get their hands on, including all large files, videos, mp3s etc. Who knows for what purpose... but in the process it can chew through hundreds of GBs of my servers bandwidth.

No problem man :) Not the sort of thing that most people ever have to think about thankfully!

http://www.myspace.com/djxcell29

http://www.myspace.com/jcrysbass
THANK YOU MATT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi Matt,

While it is all good and well to restrict downloads from the front-end of your server - it may be a good idea to look at the back-end as well. How secure is your server's IP and firewall setting for incoming traffic? It will also add up to your bandwidth usage regardless of the way it is obtained.

Here is an example of a simple little string you can use in a Google search field to find MP3s (or anything you want really) on any server publishing itself on the net:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "band here"

I like to use this string to see if I can ever find any barbershoppe tracks on unsolicited servers, and then report them.

All you do is replace the "band here" part with "your band name", or, if you are looking for mp4, mov, mpg etc. just change that in the appropriate part of the string as well.

This is really a pirate tool for searching for downloadable music, but I use it for finding pirated copies of my own music of course.

To show you how effective this little search string is, click on the following link if you were looking for any mp3 songs by Metallica.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "metallica"

You get hundreds of return with many of Metallica's songs in mp3 format to download off mostly unsolicited pirate servers or private servers without any security protection.

Yeah Lenroc, when files of any sort are made available online on a web server, people can find and grab them via search engines etc. But people doing that is no big thing when there are hundreds of GBs of bandwidth available, it doesn't even really register a blip. The problem comes when poorly coded bots get hold of those same files, and start trying to download 7000 *at once*! :P In any case, problem solved.

Yup Eugod - true that my man. I'll try and add a small message under the tracks also, saying to the anon users that they can just register/login if they want to download many of the tunes they like too - in case they don't realize.

it sounds good and fair...i understand that it was causing site problems. But it was a good way for the members to have thier music displayed and downloaded by the general public. I'm sure every guest does not want to register just for the hassle of grabbing their favourite tracks. How about one of those temp password ports that change everytime you visit. Personaly for me it was a great way for me to keep track of who was feeling what tracks and what the download response was......

But those bots will get your music out there in some instances,Would they.

http://amiestreet.com/artist/7061

it sucks to think that our download numbers could be wrong or screwed by some bot....at least now we know the real number of downloads by real people who care to listen...thanks for looking out for us matt