Lossless > Lossless Conversions Options

[fatejd]

I have a ton of live music that is in SHN and other inferior formats that I want to convert to FLAC (I probably won't go WAVPack, but you opinion is welcome on that, mostly because the bulk is already FLAC). People discourage sharing music once you convert it to another format, but lossless is lossless right? I don't see the problem, but maybe some here could enlighten me as to what the reasoning is behind this.

Thanks

[NeoRenegade]

Yes, lossless is lossless. A lossless->lossless conversion is fine.

[fatejd]

Exactly what I KNOW as well - I don't get why people can't get off their high horses and realize that. Thanks for validating my knowledge

[bhoar]

Exactly what I KNOW as well - I don't get why people can't get off their high horses and realize that. Thanks for validating my knowledge

I suppose the most important thing is to make sure that you can convert it back to the original data format, including headers or other metadata, since that's the accepted trading format.

-brendan

[Canar]

FLAC is fine. Lossless format zealotry is quite passe. Just do a bit of reading and pick one, and you don't even have to do the latter. I've got FLACs, APEs, WVs, and ALACs, although the APEs are going to get converted one of these days. Monkey's Audio has poor support in foobar2000.

This post has been edited by Canar: Jul 28 2006, 01:35

[TrNSZ]

When it comes to sharing (P2P, etc.) and spreading lossless rips of live music, lossless isn't really always lossless, even if the audio data is exactly the same. Quite often, the only way to verify a rip is the MD5 checksums and file sizes made by the originator.

There is always the possibilites of differences in the metadata as well. SHN files with arbritrary external metadata and set notes in text files might not always be easy to map on a 1:1 basis to another tagging format with any regularity.

Even if your conversion is correct, there is no way for others to verify the music is indeed correct and not transcoded. It probably shouldn't be spread further in the scene, and if you share it on P2P networks, being "different" files makes it less available for other downloaders. For etree and similar communities, you should leave the sets untouched if you plan to share them. This is why transcoding, even lossless to lossless, is not recommended.

For personal use, however, transcoding to another lossless format (or even a lossy format) is just fine.

[bhoar]

Hmm, I've been out of live show trading for a while, but my comments above were with respect to the old-school digital trading style where SHN was the defacto standard file format that all trades were expected to use.. .until I saw some other replies I hadn't realized this had moved to P2P nets. Is that the case now?

-brendan

[fatejd]

The main "scene" I'm dealing with these days is Bit Torrent, and I guess that make sense what TrNSZ said about not being able to verify it's not a transcode. I'll just keep them in their current form until I'm sure I won't need them to seed to other people. Thanks for the comments guys.