Hi, although the topic is 1 year old, this is my first post here and I am not of the mentality to open new forum threads for the same subject. So I would like to add some things to this you are talking.
First of all, I will soon create a digital download store for a record label. The Label wants to sell all kinds of audio formats, including all possible bitrates, mp3, flac, for example, a flac at 24bit 96khz. This means that this file is going to be kinda large for a single song if the length is say a 10 minutes track. This also means that it's preview player button on the frontend of the site should not play audio from this file, but a chosen lower quality one, actually cut-sample of less than 3 or 2 minutes (upon company choice), for various of reasons, some of them are:
> The original product file will be huge to start fast on the player, this will cause the shopper to think the site is broken. It will also kill bandwidth (not recommended at all).
> It is kind of a standard that the artist or the label chooses the best area of a track to present online or on ads, like on youtube.
> A short sample always makes the shopper interested to buy, once not enough, when it is 2 minutes as well as cut. (A song for sale should never play full. Only cut sample).
> Lowering the quality doesn't mean to make it freaking bad, we are in 2012, but never at top quality on the shop for performance reasons mostly.
When I was using virtuemart for this, I was using joomla content plugins and add code in the short description etc, doing everything manually. What I would like to see from HikaShop is the following:
> A full downloadable product file (with it's browse button)
> An short preview sample file (with it's browse button just under the full)
> To extend this, some made-ready-ability to “enable” an external audio player joomla plugin within HikaShop configuration.
As a result after save-product, refresh the frontend, and the | PLAY | DOWNLOAD | buttons are ready, same as it would happen uploading images.
Those 3 would make the webmaster's life very easy, no need to copy paste filenames, add {file.mp3} codes in descriptions and all that lame oldschool coder mess.
You may consider for the future to even make a script that will do the following, after the downloadable file gets uploaded on server:
> Choose a random say, 3 minute area from the middle of the song (time length user defined in configuration), and convert it on the fly to also a user defined bitrate/quality. This way the webmaster will only need to upload just 1 file, the original product. And there can be a radio button choice in configuration, like:
> Auto-Generate Audio Preview Sample (Edit Settings)
> Do Not Auto-Generate Preview (Use Custom Audio File, Manual Upload)
> Disable Audio Preview Option.
>>> I would also find intelligent to let the short preview sample file (with it's browse button) within the backend product page in all cases, to serve as an “upload and replace preview file at any time”.
I have tested HikaShop just for about an hour, looks promising although many features are in the pro version only.
Thanks and wishes for the best to all and of course to HikaShop
peace
EDIT::
I would also like to ask if HikaShop is already able to do the following:
> Make say 8 individual downloadable products (mp3 individual tracks), but also to create an “Album” which will contain those tracks/products as a whole, with a title, different price even etc. Like Parent/Child products on the same page as a track-listing with the BUY button on each track.
cheers