Preventing playing an MP3 file using an HTML anchor

Question

How do you make an MP3 link download instead of play "in-browser"?

I tried changing the target to blank, but that just opened the player in a new window.

Answer 1

You can't do this by modifying the link. You will have to have the HTTP server that serves the file send a Content-Type of "application/octet-stream". Presumably it is sending the type "audio/mpeg", which is hinting to the browser that it is MP3 content. Without the capacity to alter this header, you can't achieve this.

Answer 2

If your server supports PHP, create a PHP script called "getfile.php" (or similar) that takes a parameter of a file ID or file name. Set the content-type and content-disposition headers within the script to force a download prompt.

See: http://webdesign.about.com/od/php/ht/force_download.htm