do I really need to specify the php head content-type?

Question

I have both .mp3 and .pcm audio format on my server, how should I set the php header content-type when I don't know which type the user has requested for?

Answer 1

Yes you have to .. you can use mime_content_type to Detect MIME Content-type for a file simplify the process in your header

Example

header(sprintf('Content-type: %s',mime_content_type($filename)));

Answer 2

I guess you can just use "Application/octet-stream" for any type of binary file format.

Answer 3

When you say you set the header the i think your rewrite your .mp3 and .pcm to a PHP-Script.

In this case you should rewrite it with the file extension. Then you can check the extension in your $_GET variable.

if(strpos('.mp3', $_GET['filename']) !== false) {
   header('Content-Disposition: inline;filename="test.mp3"');
}

if(strpos('.pcm', $_GET['filename']) !== false) {
   header("Content-type: application/octet-stream;");
}

PCM data is RAW-Data so i think you can use octet-stream or the cool solution from Baba

So you can check which format it is and set the header for the specified file.

Here is another post to this problem: Output mp3 with php

Answer 4

In my site i used this type of header. I suggests this one.

Example

header("content-type:text/xml;charset=utf-8;charset=windows-1256");