Best place to host audio files from a conference

January 16, 2015 1:46 PM

I am trying to post a couple audio recordings of a conference online. I would like to be able to link to these recordings from our website, and possibly prevent download. What are some of the best options out there for this kind of file-sharing?

I know about websites like Soundcloud, but these seem to be mostly geared towards music. I am using the website Docsend to share PowerPoint presentations, which is great because I can track who opens what, manage downloading, and it looks sleek and professional.

However, they do not handle audio files. I could use Dropbox, but I am not a fan of how their sharing-screen looks, and for those who are not computer-savvy, a straight .mp3 file could be confusing (I know, I know... they exist. Believe me). I'd much rather link to a site that plays the audio for the user.

Anyone know of anything?

posted by Rage-chel to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Best answer: Soundcloud is definitely geared towards music, but some people do use it for general audio files as well (As an example, https://soundcloud.com/whitehouse)
You have the ability to either enable or disable downloads for the file.
posted by GnomePrime at 2:00 PM on January 16, 2015

Realize that it's effectively always possible for someone determined to download or copy the file. If your goal is just to make it more difficult, cool. But if it's critical that no one can do it, that is not a realistic expectation.
posted by primethyme at 3:08 PM on January 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: SoundCloud is perfectly viable, and in fact a significant number of public radio shows (etc.) now use it to post and stream their latest episodes. The number of musicians I follow on SC versus other kinds of audio content is overwhelmingly skewed towards the latter. Also, they have a decent mobile app and their plugins are HTML5-friendly, which means their embedded players work on pretty much all smart handheld devices. Plus, if you only want the audio accessible to folks from the conference, you can create private playlists and links. I'd say they win in a landslide for what you want.
posted by mykescipark at 6:09 PM on January 16, 2015

Why do you want to prevent downloads of this? Like, would it be an issue if people had a copy on their phones for the long flight or something? You could start off the recordings by saying what your website is.

Alternatively, if you really want to make things annoying for your end users enough so that they only stream the files, maybe look at those old real player codecs or something?

But really though. Be specific about why downloading would be such a big problem.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:10 PM on January 16, 2015

Easiest thing ever would probably just be a YouTube video.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:11 PM on January 16, 2015

You can easily set-up a folder in Google Docs which only people with the password can access.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:35 AM on January 18, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you for all of your input! It looks like for my purposes SoundCloud is the way to go. I wanted to restrict download so that it could be something that we only share with members (to make them feel fancy). Thank you all for your help!
posted by Rage-chel at 8:52 AM on January 18, 2015