killerdog

I can see why it would be a poor solution for video downloads, but I still think it would work fairly well for mp3s. If an album has 10 mp3s the zip file is likely 30mb or so, which seems not completely unreasonable.

I agree – if you only want to offer a single format for your downloadable music. Not a problem. But if you want to offer your music in various formats to better serve your customer (e.g. MP3, AAC, WMA and Ogg) you would still have the same original problem. Offering various downloadable format options is the way most of the big boys do it these days, like https://www.beatport.com does.

Actually this could be done very simply.
-Create each album as a product
-For each album, create an option for each individual track, with an appropriate MP3 file linked to it

It would be way too complicated, and bad for business due to potential purchasing hesitations, to require that our customers actually have knowledge about codecs and formats before they actually buy the product. Most customers don’t even know what a codec is or what format actually works best for them.

Actually this could be done very simply.

In reality, it’s not so simple. The resulting zip file often ends up being so huge that the servers time out before it’s fully downloaded. ??

And in our case we sell digital video downloads where we make various encoded formats available for our customers to download. All files contain the same video so the ZIP alternative wouldn’t work for us at all. Nobody would want to download a single 5 TB ZIP file containing 10 different codec versions of the same 500 MB video.

Still no support for multiple file downloads per product?

This is the only feature missing that’s been holding us back from using eShop on several of the web sites that we work with…