How viable is Dropbox for streaming previews of audio tracks?

[iggy-man]

Hi,

How useful would DB be for eCommerce audio track preview? I'm not talking about streaming service, rather music track preview listen only. Are DB servers fast/optimised for something like this? Again, this isn't a Spotify sort of scenario, just a track preview listen.

Cheers,

I

[Jay · Accepted solution]

Hi @iggy-man, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

The Dropbox site can be used for previewing files, although it is worth noting that there are a few restrictions on bandwidth used, depending on your plan.

For audio and video files, there are more limits on the amount that can be streamed per file.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

[iggy-man]

Hi Jay,

Many thanks for that. I'm considering DB and AWS cloud server, that is why I asked. Having read the the link you shared, I think Professional would be a good fit for me. To give you some perspective re. the audio files, those would be AAC or MP3 audio files which are quite small (I'm expecting 5MB per track and about 150-300 tracks that equals about 750MB-1.5GB in total), and I (the business) would be the sole owner of those files.

I think the outstanding conundrum for me is the bandwidth and I'm not too sure how to calculate it. If there are a few thousand of people around the world previewing/listening to one of those tracks—and, of course, there will be a few cases where the same track/file will be listened to—how does one calculate and predict whether which DB plan would be right, or if it would work at all? It sounds like DB could handle it, but I'm not sure, hence why I got in touch with you. 🙂

I was wondering if you could shed some more light considering the point I made above please?

Kind regards,

Iggy

[Jay]

Currently, it isn't possible to track the bandwidth usage of shared links on your account. 

The limit isn't for a single link, but for the entire account, and included repeated listens of tracks. If you're on a Dropbox Professional plan and in one day, your account uses over 1 TB of bandwidth (across all your shared links combined), the links will be banned for 24 hours. 

So, for instance, for one track of 5 MB, if 1000 people listen to it, that's 5 GB of bandwidth gone. Another 200 listens, and you reach 1 TB, which could happen if people repeat the song or play other tracks on your account, or even if there are more than a thousand listeners.

[iggy-man]

Many thanks, Jay. Appreciate it.