Product Reviews

Sometimes a good idea seems so obvious you wonder why no-one thought of it before. One such example is Actinic Audio Store, an application for selling your music online, which has come at just the right time with all the media hype over MP3 downloads.

Modern thinking on music ownership goes something like this: why pay for all the packaging and distribution when the product is digital in the first place? In fact, why not simply download what you want, track by track, and then store it on your hard disk or MP3 player? With the advent of broadband and products like Apple's iPod, this is no doubt the future for the record industry, as much as it hates to admit it.

Copyright issues aside, up until now distributing digital media from your website and getting paid for it hasn't been easy. Unless you have access to teams of developers, how do you make sure the money is in the till before the download link is clicked?

Actinic Audio Store has just solved this problem in one package. It handles both conventional product sales and distribution, along with digital download, order and online payment processing. Actinic has moved the goalposts to such an extent that, like home studio and mixing software before it, Audio Store could open up a whole new world for the unsigned musician. This is probably why the software is available exclusively from Et Cetera - a major distributor of computer music products.

So how does it work? Well, just like Actinic Catalog (which forms the basis for Audio Store), you create your catalogue of products to sell offline in a database. Audio Store allows you to choose your site design and layout, arrange your products in departments and enter all the details concerning price and product description, as well as definable options like size and colour.

The central working area is a tree-type display of product categories, under which you'll find the products themselves, with each item's

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components and attributes underneath. Attributes can be simple items such as colour or size, and product components may be chargeable or non-chargeable add-ons, which is ideal if you sell an item that offers a choice of extras such as batteries. You can then use component 'permutations' to exclude certain combinations of components from the catalogue, or even set a new price for a specific variation.

The really interesting bit, however, is the extra tab on the product record for Digital Download. At first glance, it doesn't seem to do much, just asking for a filename on your local PC, but inputting that filename is all you have to do to enable the secure sale of digital media from your website.

When Audio Store uploads the site to your server, it also takes the files you've specified as products to sell, places them in a secure area and obfuscates the filename in a way that only Actinic can understand. When someone chooses to buy this item, the software sends them to a shopping basket and checkout screen just like any other e-commerce package - the difference is how they get their purchase.

Audio Store displays a digital receipt on the website order-confirmation form and emails this to the customer - this contains a link to instigate the download. If you wish to offer a time window to download the file, a limit can also be set within Audio Store. Then, when the file is downloaded, it arrives with the original non-encrypted name ready to play or view.

Customers can also save their shopping carts and come back to them later, which is very useful for repeat orders. Plus, it's possible to decide where and how you want the 'quantity to order' and 'add to cart' buttons to appear. This enables you to add lists where you're able to choose several items (music tracks, for example), with 'quantity' fields beside each item, and a single 'add to cart' button for an entire page.

Once you're at the checkout stage, Audio Store automatically provides the delivery options for different locations and carriage prices. VAT is then added or included as appropriate, and payment is organised via a long list of definable Payment Service Providers - all clever stuff.

And the same can be said for Audio Store as a whole. E-commerce software came of age a while ago, but digital downloads have somehow been avoided until now. Thanks to Actinic Audio Store, life has suddenly become a lot easier for the musician, DJ, garage collective and anyone who fancies distributing their musical creations online.