This document explains some basic concepts of www.trackseller.com and it's purpose is to make it more easy for you to understand the "steps to your online music store"

Trackseller sells music between "your website" and the "customer browser" that means trackseller uses "encoded download links" from a website.

Your website can be your own website or a webspace that you rented from trackseller. In both cases trackseller works the same way.

Trackseller in the end will give you a button "buy now" that you may place on any website you like.

A file (like filename.mp3) governed by trackseller will be named something like filename-shgwz.mp3 where -shgwz is the key to the file that is not publically available.

That is a "trackseller locked file".

The renaming is done via the FTP-protocol (part of a webserver to modify webpages)

When a customer paid for a download, trackseller will give him the full address to the file on your server for download. This must be fully open directory accessible by everyone.

That means, it is your duty to create a open accessible webdirectory with the music on your own server or let trackseller do that for you in case you use a uploading account. Only trackseler knows the public file location.

The webserver can be your band-webserver or any other webserver in the world or it can be trackseller's webserver.

On trackseller's you have different sizes of storage available at diffenrent prices.

One Gigabyte GB is 1000 Megabyte MB is a million Kilobytes.

When you do a search on "webspace" in the internet you find millions of companies to sell webspace, yeah, that is what we call the "free market".

You may also come back to trackseller and purchase webspace from trackseller.

Trackseller is a fully equiped online store for your music.

Registered people can be artists or labels

Artist are registered "standalone" but can also have a label

Labels can have one or more artists

When you add an artist you must set his properties like "name, genre, description (in english) country, initial etc." or otherwise the people looking at your "artistpage" will find empty space and no information.

You need to search for artist or label before you can add it because your label maybe already added "you-artist" to sell some of your music.

Many different people can sell music under the artist "you-artist": your label, another musician that you made a performance with, your label, a venue that recorded your performance etc. They will all sell music under your "you-artist" - name.

That is why everybody logged in can become "label" or "artist"

But any time only the one logged in who added the files can modify his own file properties (that is the price etc.) . These properties are not shown to the other people "on your name"

Everybody logged in can be artist or label or both. What you are is set in "change options for this artist" or "change options for that label" you make yourself the artist or the label that the artist is signed to.

When you create a new artist, you have to accept the trackseller's term that you only submit material where you really own all copyrights

You need to add a button "buy this song now" or "buy this album now" to your website when you are done editing all properties. (Final step)

"Add your file locations to sell" means explain to trackseller a webpath where it can get your files that you wish to sell.

Maybe your files are available under www1.trackseller.com/villalog/musicfile.wav

That means : when you type : http://www1.trackseller.com/villalog/musicfile.wav

in your browser, a download window opens and the download starts.

This must work on your webserver with and without trackseller.

When that works , these are the components you must add to "Add file location" by trackseller :

FTP-Server name : www1.trackseller.com

Path : villalog

username for FTP-Connection :

password for FTP-Connection :

path on the webserver : www1.trackseller.com/villalog/

Trackseller will then connect and it must find the file : musicfile.wav.

then you say "lock files" this means "rename to a secret filename that only trackseller knows and only the one who paid for it recieves"

Then you will have several files under file properties with status "NOT READY"

Not ready means, the files have no name, title, price, duration etc"

That is the work you have to do to manage your catalog. each file needs its properties.

Each file can have a prelisten-piece.

This piece named maybe mf.mp3 is not locked by trackseller but maybe in the subdirectory /prelisten on your webserver. that means that in "edit file properties" soundbite for musicfile.wav you need to set :

www1.trackseller.com/villalog/prelistem/mf.mp3

When you do not set that, the people will not have the chance to prelisten when they find the song in www.trackseller.com.

Trackseller can sell any file for any price. That means you might add a video like show.avi to your directory www1.trackseller.com/villalog/

You do not want to sell it standalone, but add it as a bonus item to a special file collection maybe "Record1". Then you select: " is available on a file collection only : YES" (step7)

Then this piece will become a bonus item and you can add it to any "collection" of files that you created.

A collection is something similar to a album: multiple songs in one package. I do not call it album because it can also contain any other multimedia content you like, so it will become a collection of files. You sell files or collections of files via trackseller.

A file collection has a name an optional description and a price. It consists at least of one file. (maybe all, why not ?)

Then in step 9 you add the bonus items to file collections = real files.

What happens, if you have one big zipfile and it contains several songs ?

That is when the option "Add a virtual song" becomes valuable.

A virtual song is a part of a file.

A virtual song has no price and no length (you do not need to set that in file properties).

A virtual song is part of a file collection that has at least one file (that the song is a part of).

A virtual song can have a piece of prelisten

A virtual song can not be bought standalone, only as part of an album.

In "my publicity" you will get a piece of HTML that is the "buy now button" that you may add to your website.

You may take away the <img> tag or create a better button but you must not modify the <A></A> Anchor-tag.

In "my publicity" you also have a possibility to test if the download really works.

That is how the customer sees your files, when he/she has paid. So take care here !

So always keep these five things in mind when working with trackseller :

• 1. trackseller sells URLs to hidden files on an open webserver

• 2. artists can be part of a label or vice versa

• 3 songs can be real or virtual but somewhere they must be part of a "file" or a "file-collection".

• 4. A file collection may contain all media incl. bonus tracks ("available on collection only")

• 5. language in trackseller is english. keep that in mind for band and file descriptions

Trackseller is a full equiped online record store - but it also needs good store managers.

(oops and of course a good site manager ;-)

It was created as an open platform for you to sell your music.

I hope, I can help you to run a prospering online store.