I have a membership area and will be posting audios about an hour in length. I would like to let my users listen to the audios while they are in the membership area but do not want to provide a download link to an mp3. Can anyone recommend a program which will let people stream the audio but not let the user "rip" or steal the content? Any ideas are helpful! I realize nothing is 100% fool proof but any protection is helpful.
If a user can hear it, they can rip it - using applications like Streamripper, or even by simply recording the monitor output in apps like Wavelab. My only suggestion is to make the free audio REALLY low bitrate. Or even put 'bips' in every 20 seconds. Another alternative is to offer the audio as a video file, and put it on YouTube with a big logo or url as the video content - at least that way you're getting visual advertising when people playback your audio from their own PCs - you'll also pick up extra traffic from YouTube. What sort of material is it? Spoken word, music?
You can put sound watermarks on them (like gaps in the music), but that's often messy and people would complain about it if you make it too obvious. You can use flash to embed the sound player, but there are many rippers for flash out there. You can also make it lower in quality for the members. Sound is very hard to protect against ripping. It's not as easy as embedding watermarks onto an image. But those suggestions might give you an idea to how to protect the files.