Protecting individual files/dirs from access

Hey all, I hope this isn't too off-topic for this list, but I have a need to protect dynamically created directories in an Apache environment and not sure the best way to go about it. It's yer basic LAMP environment, and what will happen is that the client will be uploading a musician's sound files to his/her own directory and then allowing them to be downloaded by people who pay for them. So the directory for the artist, which will be one level below the docroot, like public_html/greatsinger/, will contain the artist's music, and must be accessible by those who have paid for the music, but should be protected from any typed URL attempt to access the music files directly. I was wondering if it were possible to drop a .htaccess file into each artist's directory that would password protect it and then code the URLs in the PHP script that allows access to the fines to access the files with a user name and password, but also hid this URL from display in the browser? The files need to be under the document root to allow a link to download them, right? Any suggestions for common ways to solve this would be appreciated. -- Skip Evans Big Sky Penguin, LLC 61 W Broadway Butte, Montana 59701 406-782-2240 http://bigskypenguin.com =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Check out PHPenguin, a lightweight and versatile PHP/MySQL development framework. http://phpenguin.bigskypenguin.com/