music downloads / product listing conundrum

I am setting up a store that sells many different kinds of products, including music.

Here's the site: http://findbliss.com/Shop

My client wishes to be able to sell individual tracks as well as full albums, so we settled on the technique of creating a bottom level category for each album, with the album product and each of the songs purchaseable at that depth. Here's an example breadcrumb trail:

Home : music downloads : chanting : door of faith

So, we set up all our attributes and options for downloading. However, if you have an attribute attached to a product, you may not use the "Buy Now" button (at the category level), instead "...more information" is displayed, forcing the user to go down one more level to purchase the product. My client has determined that this is undesirable, and wishes for customers to be able to purchase (and hear samples, which I have worked out) right there.

So, I tried changing the attributes type to "read only" which allows the buy now button, but disables the download at checkout.

We cannot change the default behaviour of the product listing routine, as we have other products that use dropdown attributes (clothing, sizes) that need to be maintained.

I think I am trying to do this the hard way, and that there might be an obvious solution that I have overlooked. Please have a look at our site and offer suggestions. Would it be possible to change the Read Only attribute type to allow downloads?

Thank you,

David Lovere

I developed a solution for a similar problem early last year - you'll find details and the code changes I developed in this thread in the archives. It's unlikely that it will work in v1.3 or later: the theory will still be valid, but the coding will probably need to be updated. It's a good starting point for you...

bunyip:

I developed a solution for a similar problem early last year - you'll find details and the code changes I developed in this thread in the archives. It's unlikely that it will work in v1.3 or later: the theory will still be valid, but the coding will probably need to be updated. It's a good starting point for you...

Thanks for the response, Neville.

I have decided to sell each track as a product attribute instead, so that all the tracks or the whole album can be downloaded from the product display page.

This thread was a big help.