Many of you may know of a system that is gaining in popularity called Weed which allows you to distribute songs that have been encoded in a special way, ensuring the Artists get paid.

One of the problems you may run into using Weed files within Jamroom is the way Jamroom renames the uploaded song files, whereas Weed files must be named in a specific way to work.

The following should work to allow you to distribute Weed files throughout your Jamroom and have it all work (at least that’s the intention!).

NOTE I don’t personally use the Weed system, and this method is based on what SHOULD work.

• First, you’ll want to make sure that “Allow Uploads” is enabled from the Jamroom Config. This will allow artists to have a “uploads” directory (in jamroom/uploads) that they can “store” raw files in, that Jamroom will not rename. You users will now be able to “import” them into the Add Song / Modify song screen.

• Go into the Song Add screen, create the new song and “import” the Weed file as a HIFI version of the song. This will “insert” the info needed by Jamroom into its database.

• Next, you will need to modify your Jamroom theme so it links to the weed file instead of the jamroom play.php script. For example, in the “song_hifi_stream.tpl” template file (in the theme directory), which looks like this:

<a href="{SONG_HIFI_PLAY}">
<img src="{THEME_URL}/images/play_hifi.gif" align="absmiddle" border="0" alt="HiFi {SONG_NAME}"></a>
<a href="{SONG_HIFI_PLAY}">play hi-bitrate</a> ({HIFI_EXTENSION}) (broadband)<br>

You would modify to look like this:

<a href="{JAMROOM_URL}/uploads/{BAND_ID}/{HIFI_NAME}">
<img src="{THEME_URL}/images/play_hifi.gif" align="absmiddle" border="0" alt="HiFi {SONG_NAME}"></a>
<a href="{SONG_HIFI_PLAY}">play hi-bitrate</a> ({HIFI_EXTENSION}) (broadband)<br>

Now you will want to do the same modification in the “song_hifi_download.tpl” (i.e. changout the {SONG_HIFI_DOWNLOAD} link for the {JAMROOM_URL}/uploads/{BAND_ID}/{HIFI_NAME}).

Now when the visitor clicks on the link in the Artist Page, they will download the Weed file instead.

• You’ll want to likely map the jamroom/uploads/(band_id) directories to your user’s home directories (or ftp subdirectory) so they can FTP and upload their weed files directly into your Jamroom, i.e.

ln -s /path/to/your/jamroom/uploads/1 /home/someuser/ftp

• Next, you will need to log in to your Jamroom as the Master Admin, and go in to the “Modify Quota” section. You are going to want to modify each of your Jamroom Quotas and set the following feature to “no”:

Protect Song Directory - If this option is set to “yes”, then a .htaccess file will be placed in the song directory for the artist that will prevent anyone from “snooping” or slurping the files without going through the Artist Page. It’s recommended you set this to “yes” unless you are using an application that needs access to the directory.

This will allow the audio files to be directly linked to from the Artist Page (as is needed for serving Weed Files).

That’s it! You should now be able to server Weed files directly from your Jamroom Artist Pages.

1) this is because Jamroom counts song streams and downloads via the play.php and download.php script, which have been removed from sending the Weed Files.