But here is my concern: The .mp3 is tied in with a special promotion that is going to be running on the site. I have a licence from the publisher to be able to give away a certain number of downloads. Therefore, I want the visitors when they get to the page to download the song. I do not want it to be played in the browser. I feel that if people are able to listen to the file in their browser, then they just may revisit the page several times to listen to the song, and use up my allotted number of free downloads unnecessairly. While I know someone could get multiple downloads, I think the liklihood of this happening is much less than if they were able to play the song in their browser. Also, I might be logging IP addresses to prevent multiple downloads (depending on the customer's wishes) and if someone just listens to the song when they wanted to download it, they would be upset when they are told they cannot access the file again. The target demographic is an older age, so I must assume that they would not understand about retrieving a file from their browser cache.
I just feel that forcing the e"Do you want to open this file, or save it" box so the user can control this choice, and then choose save to open the "Save as" dialogue box, over allowing the media player to play the file in the browser, is the best thing that I can do given the situation.