How To Use Your Digital Downloads

All the products on this website are primarily available as digital downloads (although we do offer physical products where available as alternatives). However, you can make your own physical product, eg CD or DVD from this digital download.

Digital downloads mean you are downloading software or audio-visual media or file as opposed to receiving a physical product you can handle. You will download this file onto the receiving device, usually your computer such as a PC or Apple Mac.

About Compressed or Zipped Files

The file will be ‘zipped’. That is to say it has been compressed in size to save you time when downloading.

Compressed files combine multiple files into a single file to make them easier to download or save on diskspace. Zip is the most-widely used format, used by the Windows operating system and more recently by OSX as well.

To use your digital download file, you will need to ‘unzip’ it using proprietary software.

PC Computers

On a PC this is usually available on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8. You access this by highlighting the downloaded file and then right-clicking. You will see a menu entry labelled ‘Extract’ or ‘Extract All’. Select this and then choose a destination for the new unzipped file. This may be in your Music folder or wherever you think appropriate, just remember what you selected to access it afterwards.

If you do not have this feature installed or enabled on your PC, you will need to download software such as WinZip. This can be downloaded for free here – http://www.winzip.com/win/en/downwz.htm

Follow their instructions for installing and using the software.

Apple Macs

On a Mac you can…

If you do not have this feature installed or enabled on your Apple Mac, you will need to download software such as WinZip. This can be downloaded for free here – http://www.winzip.com/mac/en/#download

Listening To Your Purchased Product(s)

Once unzipped using any of the above methods, you can use the file/s in the following manner:

  • You can save your file on your hard drive or storage device and simply use your default media player to play the file such as iTunes, Windows Media Player or anything else that came installed on your device.
  • Using iTunes you can transfer the file(s) to your supported portable media player, eg iPod, iPad etc.
  • Transfer the file(s) to other media player devices such as SmartPhone.
  • Create your own CD or DVD if you have a writable drive installed on your computer

In each case, refer to the manufacturers instructions for further details.