Bandwidth Question

Go with the zip. If your file is popular, people will link to it and play it over and over (lots of bandwidth). As a zip, people will play it several times but from their own hard drive. If bandwidth is your concern... go with the zip.

correct.

Zipping a file won't prevent hot linking from other sites. You need to take care of that kind of stuff at the server level (in general).

I put up some information on understanding compression ratios here. It explains a bit about why zipping MP3 files won't get you better compression. It also explains a couple situations where you want to zip files even though you won't get any decent compression - basically for grouping.

Streaming incurs overhead, but that isn't the main concern. The overhead is generally pretty small. Some audio like WMA is very fault tolerant and can withstand packet loss without any serious problems. So past that, the main concern is people continually downloading the same content. Again, like mentioned above, you'll save on bandwidth if they simply download it.
You can actually force a download of an MP3 by changing the MIME type. The normal MIME type for MP3 is "audio/mpeg" or something similar. If you change it to something like "application/x-audio-mp3" or something like that, then the browser will download it instead.

So, you might want to set up a subdomain for that and have a custom MIME type. You then avoid having to zip any files and the MP3 still downloads.

Cheers,

Ryan

Info_Tech wrote: Sorry, I meant that it would prevent hot linking only when those that try to hot-link an audio clip want to stream it... because it is zipped so it won't play and will not stream... but yes it would still be downloadable as a zipped file.

Ahem... Yeah... Ouch... Hot-linked streaming could be potentially VERY painful!