Thanks Shawn,

The album stuff is very interesting, i like the idea of doing it that way. Your uploading files description makes sense, i expect the client will upload via ftp and doing the preview bit via the hook_file_action, not fully dug into it yet, but i assume there would be a way to have this generate preview on demand e.g. if the file has been uploaded via ftp.

Will be digging into this more today, around on #drupal and #drupal-support if your about fire me a msg

Cool! Yeah i think thats a very nice addition.

I've in fact taken another route for now, as the client wanted to see something asap (but we may revert to the auto-generated method). Here is what i've done so far.

2 new content types, made into products.

* product_track
- title
- body
- audio CCK (for preview)
- attribute for MP3/WMA/OGG etc

* product_album
- title
- body
- image
- node reference (multi) for track listing

At this stage the main 2 obvious problems facing me are :
- node reference just shows a text link, not a teaser / preview + add to cart link => fixable with theming i think
- node reference only giving 3 auto complete boxes by default, so you need 3 or 4 page refreshes to put a full album list together. => not sure how to fix this... anyone?

While thinking about this, i noticed that this CCK node reference solution could be a very nice way to offer complementary products on other shops. e.g. linking mp3 player to new head phones etc...

I did consider using CCK view reference, but it wouldn't have been able to give me the control over the track listing order that i would need.

As always i'm in #drupal / #drupal-support / #drupal-dojo if anyone has any bright ideas how to fix my 2 problems.

Drayen.

Hi Drayen

I am in the progress of making a record shop for my own label as well, very nice to read about your development, please keep on writing, I will ad stuff if I find out something that can help.
As soon as you have a site link that I/we can look at and comment please post it.

Keep posting
/August

So heres the idea, users buy a subscription to say "hot tracks" that gives them the "hot tracks subscriber" role, then once a week (say Friday 3pm) the system will automate the purchase of all products with the "hot track" tax term added in the last week for free (the products are normally chargeable).

The role 4 purchase thing is easy (thanks for that), the automated purchase i was figuring on writing my own module to deal with that with a cron hook. The only bit i'm unsure of is having a 0 price on the transaction, i was thinking the discount module might be a way to go (http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/143), but if its being fired off from a module - might it just be faster/simpler another way?

Thanks

Drayen

I'm actually heading down the same path myself.

I've messed around with setting up albums as a product kits and individual songs as products. Since it appears that the product kit prices are the total of the products included I've just priced them so that they add up to the desired total. I then set the kit so that it can only be bought as a unit. It's a little clunky, but it should get the job done.

I'm looking for a good way to tag the albums and songs with artist info so that they're easily searchable

Thanks for your notes here on getting this set up -- it's been very useful as I've been also setting up a CD shop. In regards to sorting the output of relativity, I discovered you don't need a bounty, the ability is already there! Under node relativity display settings (admin/settings/relativity/display) there is the rendering option for children nodes. And since you can use a view as the rendering option you have all the sort power of views at your fingertips.

An example view that I created for my track previews has the following: Page View enabled in Table mode, Fields of Title and Audio player, Filters is Published and Node type, Arguments is "Relativity: Parent Node ID" (this is the really important one!), Sort is "Product: List order". Works like a charm.

working on a similar project however i do not need access to a truncated/split audio preview.

the previews are allowed to be the same file as the downloads. is there a way to allow a visitor to listen to the files in /downloads/band/album/*.mp3s?

i would like to have the XSPF player (button) as a CCK field/link to the mp3?

so in the table it would be: mp3-player-button/link associated with download....track #...title...etc

help?

the XSPF player is here http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

drayen how did you get the audio player to work with the cck field? you use that audio module?

perhaps i can embed the player in a link field?

sorry i'm away from home/drupal/test-server... so i'm just trying to load my brain before i get back to working on the site tomorrow.

thanks for your help

while i'm at it... it seems from reading these forums that it would be best to keep a different sku for the hard-copies vs mp3-versions?
something like LABEL-001 and LABEL-001-MP3? can anybody foresee a problem with this method?

I'm on the path of doing the same thing here. I've got quite a way on my project.
So I've set up the audio files as Product, Albums as Product Kit. I've added a computed field to the Product Kit that displays a view of Products referencing to the kit, using nodereference. This gives me a nice display of all the individual audio files belonging to an album, with the 1pixelout player for the 30-second samples I've added and a direct button for "add to cart" for the individual tracks.
I've also created a genre view using views bonus pack Grid view. This displays up to 16 albums in a grid, showing their covers in an ImageCached fashion, sorted by publishing year. Very nice overview.

I've also added a content type Band, with each product kit referencing to an artist. Using the same method for showing audio tracks for albums, I can display a list of albums this artist has produced. Views+nodereference+cck is extremely powerful.

Instead of using taxonomy for labels, I've made a content type for them. This allows me to display all the albums that have referenced to a specific label, inside the label's node.

One feature I still want to enable is to create a playlist of all the mp3-files purchased, and send this playlist to a flash-player, preferably in a popup screen, to have a playlist of all purchased media and play it while surfing the site (or any other site..).