[AndrewD]

Originally Posted by berayiwu5

Mostly for now, I would like to control mp3 audio recordings to be played by Windows Media Player (or Real Player) embedded in posts. What sort of changes should I make? If you can give me detailed instructions, I believe I am up to the task. I singlehandedly set up the vBulletin board myself and installed a number of plugins to date. The only thing I don't know is coding.

1) Install LDM
2) Visit your normal VBulletin admincp, attachments/extensions and sizes. If you have already got an entry for mp3 files, good, otherwise add one. The important setting is the mimetype, which should be Content-type: audio/mpeg
3) Visit the LDM admin settings page, and make sure that this setting is defined: file_iconsdir. This should point at the directory in which you have uploaded the icons that are provided in the LDM release, e.g. images/LDM
4) Visit the LDM admin permissions page and check that the desired usergroups have got can_play_musicbox permission

Originally Posted by berayiwu5

Oh, by the way, one more question. MySQL has a limit on the size of attachment, correct? Does LDM works if I choose to put a link like the following into a post:

www.mysite.com/forum/media/file.mp3

instead of uploading it as an attachment, which might be prohibited by MySQL because of its large size?

That is to say, I FTP file.mp3 into the server, instead of uploading it as an attachment. Does LDM work just as well in terms of controlling how many times the file is to be played? If so, how do I go about doing that?

LDM does not place the files into the MySQL database - it always uses files, even if these are uploaded. However, there are quite tight limits on what can be uploaded using normal web forms, so you are right, the best approach is to upload the files using FTP.

To continue...

- Put some entries in your LDM database. Create a category, then create entries in this category which point to the files you have FTP'd onto your server. It is better to refer to these using local filenames rather than full urls, i.e. create the entry as /dir1/dir2/file.mp3 rather than http://yoursite/dir1/dir2/file.mp3

- If you want people to access these via your posts/forums rather than via LDM itself, then you need to make note of the 'linkid' for each mp3. You can find this by hovering over the LDM entry. You need to paste urls of this form into your posts: http://yoursite/local_links.php?action=play&id=9 in order to get the media player to work

Originally Posted by berayiwu5

For now, it works fine if I can control how many clips each user can play per day--preferably also per week. I think you can easily implement the latter--how many times each user can play per week, right?

The control is 'per day', but there is also an option to let unused allowances accumulate for N days, so I think you can achieve what you want by giving a daily allowance of one seventh of the maximum weekly consumption, and a 'carry forward' of 7 days.

You set these limits on the LDM admin/download quotas page