No, the newbies might be happy, but the person at the other end will be mightily pissed off someone has tried to rip him off. There are loads of shows I can get / or have already got in mp3. I trade to get them in lossless quality. Imagine how pissed off I am in in the trade I get something I already have or could have got with minumum fuss.
The newbies will not be happy when I smear their reputation across the Internet. Then they'll find there are no traders that want anything to do with them.
Obviously I wasn't clear enough... As long as nobody notices the difference, everybody's happy.
Even long time serious traders haven't verified the origin of their material, so why would everyone else have?
You can of course smear the reputation of a helpless newbie, but would you try to do the same to Mr. Scully if one of his trades came from an mp3 source?
My advice:
Always ask a short (10-15 sec) flac sample of each show and check the frequencies. This is the only way to avoid mp3 sourced shows.
Do remember that most of the MD players (especially the older ones) pack the audio so that the frequency ranges seems to be missing above 16000 hz. This is not the same as mp3 conversion as MD uses ATRAC. Also, mp3 cuts the frequncies in strict horizontal line. ATRAC packing shows a lot of "peaks" in the frequencies so it looks different than mp3 frequency cut.
How can I check that my lossless aren't mp3 based? Which program? And what do I have to look out for exactly?
And to be quite honest, would you hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 or a Flac one? In your average hifi system?
I'd like to do that test. Actually I have done similar tests (mp3 with audio cd) and none of my friends could hear the difference... But I guess it depends on the quality of the hifi system, the quality of the mp3 and maybe more....
How can I check that my lossless aren't mp3 based? Which program? And what do I have to look out for exactly?
And to be quite honest, would you hear the difference between a 320kbps mp3 or a Flac one? In your average hifi system?
I'd like to do that test. Actually I have done similar tests (mp3 with audio cd) and none of my friends could hear the difference... But I guess it depends on the quality of the hifi system, the quality of the mp3 and maybe more....
HC
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) is one of the best programs for copying cds, and it is free. It also has a spectral and frequency analyser built in. I would recommend it to anyone.
Holden Caulfield, it's actually nothing to do with what you can hear. Some people could actually hear the difference, but that's beside the point. In an mp3, information is missing. Do you want your recordings to be the best quality possible? Then don't use mp3. That's why they are fins to listen to but not to trade.
I use CoolEdit Pro 2.1. These days it's called Adobe Audition as Adobe bought Syntrillium.
Just open a wav/FLAC file and click "spectral view" under View tab in the top.
In that case if you want your recordings to be the best possible you shouldn't convert to ANY digital format.
Sound is an analogue medium created by moving air. It should wherever possible be captured by analogue methods and retained with no compression and sufficient headroom for all frequencies to be heard.
Conversion to a digital recording by sampling at whatever rate will cause some degradation of the signal.
mp3 and flac are used for convenience and that means different things to different people. There is room for both formats. TBH and at risk of causing another 20 page thread it wouldn't hurt the serious traders too much to release everything they have converted to low bitrate mp3.
The leechers would have the "product", the wannabee traders would know what was out there to aspire to and the casual fan would get a nice bonus package.
Sound is an analogue medium created by moving air. It should wherever possible be captured by analogue methods and retained with no compression and sufficient headroom for all frequencies to be heard.
Any technology used to capture the sound is insufficient, unless you're capable of recording the movements of every single molecyle, atom, ion... etc. :P
The point of any medium (be it analogue or digital) is to make a compromise based on what humans can hear, and how the recording equipment perceives the sound. There's hardly any point in recording infra- or ultrasounds, is there?
