Since virtually no-one has responded to my relevation that the recent Philadelphia 78 torrent was actually an mp3 sourced show (excepting one supportive post and a cryptic comment by that torrents publisher), I figured I needed to make an obvious thread about it.
What does this trading community think about the issue?
Do people check their source material with a frequency and/or spectrum analyser to confirm that it has not been sourced from mp3 files? Do people care?
I'm recently new to trading, and I'm still learning myself. To that end, I went through my collection on the weekend, finally doing what I should have done months ago, and checked all my shows with a spectrum / frequency analyser. I found 5 flac shows that turned out to be sourced from mp3s. Two came from here, one from the hub and 2 I received recently in a trade.
There were also two or three shows with a radio or video rip source that had minor compression, but these have great audio quality, so they can be forgiven. :)
I have removed all the mp3 sourced material from my shares, as I think it is important to protect the quality of source material.
That's not to say I don't have any time for mp3 shows. I have lots of them, and love 'em for what they are. But the two need to be kept well separated from each other. Why someone would make a flac torrent out of an mp3 show and then spread that in the trading community is beyond me. The only reasons I can think of are ego driven. Or, of course, an honest mistake. Anyone can make one of those. The trader I dealt with did exactly that, and is correcting his mistake in a honorable manner.
I don't want to accuse anyone of deliberately polluting the trading pool with inferior or falsely labelled material, I only want to bring this issue into the open, and make people aware of the issues around lossless and lossy recordings.
Which is another reason why I am totally nonplussed by Fairy Fellers reaction to my post about the Philadelphia show. A trader with as much stuff as he has got should be well aware of the importance of checking his source. I should have been thanked. As it is, I'm not sure what his comment meant at all, but I didn't take it as being nice. (See link
page 4)
So, what about it?
Is this something that we should be more aware about and more vigilant about?
Or is this something that is spoken about loudly in public, but in reality no one really gives a damn about?
I'm curious to hear what people think.
I hope you're happy with my response in the Philadelphia thread. :P
Since I recently made a comparison between MP3 and FLAC sourced bootleg recordings, and found no audible difference between them, I couldn't care less about what the source is...
As you can probably guess, I'm not a *serious* trader.