Build backend to store and serve music for website

[benji1123]

Requirements

I'm using paid music (downloaded from uppbeat.io with my subscription), so the music file needs to be hidden from the public (to prevent ppl from downloading it) but accessible by my website

Alternatives:

• Use free music (i.e. soundcloud) or create my own; and store it in my website's public github repo
• Use an existing API to stream music. (i.e. spotify, radio)

Tech Questions

• Where do I store the music files? (S3, EC2 instance, etc.)
  • what is the latency of each method?
  • how much work is it? (keep in mind i'm doing this for fun and only need this for my website which has low/no traffic)
• Should I stream it or send the entire file as a blob?

References

• System Design for Spotify - https://iq.opengenus.org/system-design-of-spotify/

[benji1123]

Overview

I want the website to play cyberpunk themed music to immerse the viewer. I've already purchased and downloaded tracks from uppbeat that I'd like to use. To make these songs accessible to my website, I need to (A) store them somewhere (B) build a service to return them.

Solution 1: store in github repo

This website is hosted from a github repo as of today (April 2023), so the easiest solution is to push my songs here then play them:

const music = new Audio("$path-to-mp3-file");
music.play()

pros:

• free
• requires literally no work as I don't have to build a service or setup external storage

cons:

• I have to privatize my github repo so the songs can't be downloaded OR create a private clone of this repo (adds operational work to keep repos in sync)

Solution 2: AWS S3 + Lambda + API Gateway

Main flow

1. Store music files in an S3 bucket
2. Fetch songs from S3 with AWS lambda function
3. Give Lambda function an HTTP endpoint with API Gateway so website can request songs

API Access Control

(The API shouldn't work for other people) Setup a API Gateway Lambda authorizer to only allow API calls from my domain name.

Pros:

• free
• fun/learning

Cons:

• have to setup aws infrastructure
• a lot of work to send a few mp3 files
• pay $ if i exceed AWS free tier (not likely, but worth mentioning)

Solution 3: Heroku

This is similar to Solution 2: AWS where my music-fetching service runs on a dyno for a fixed monthly-cost (~$5-10/month). There's no music storage solution here, so we'd still employ S3 for song storage and access it from our dyno like this.

Pros:

• heroku might be easier to setup/develop with than AWS
• fun/learning

Cons:

• costs ~$5-10/month
  • dyno is always running compared to lambda which is on-demand

[benji1123]

My music files may be too large to send in one response. Read: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-lambda-response-streaming/