Grateful Dead

You are spot on with your thoughts. My lousy player in my truck does not support lossless formats so I have to make a choice. I can convert one show to WAV and fill up three CD's and I have clear and clean, highs and lows. With three discs floating around it is hard to keep every thing organized. Now if I convert the same show to a lossy MP3 I can get the whole show (sometimes 2) on one CD. I had to give up the clear clean sound with pristine highs and deep lows. In the truck at 75 miles per hour it does not make a lot of difference. To much road noise. This is a personal choice. If I were to vine or torrent that MP3 and the person who receives it try's to play it on his high end super system and it sounds like a tin can recording. I did not help enrich his experience I helped to degenerate it. This is not good and I have imposed my choices on him. This is why using MP3's for personal use OK but to trade or vine them is frowned upon. I have not been lucky in finding any factual evidence that lossless recording keep all of their bits and bytes in place when copied from copy's but I do know that is is frowned upon in more sites than this one. Some places will drum you out of the ranks for that infraction. I think we are a bit more enlighten here but as a courtesy to our fellow vines. PLEASE only send the original discs in a lossless format. Peace Rick

So there's the media (the CDs & DVDs in this case), the player/recorder of the media (hardware, software, or, most likely, a combination of the two; in this case, a hardware CD/DVD drive and a software player), and the audio system through which one may listen to the audio signal from the player/recorder (computer amplifier/speakers, high-end home stereo systems, headphones, etc.). The quality of all three of these aspects can vary. For instance, as the original discs travel from person to person, they get scratched, nicked, blemished, etc. At some point, lower-quality CD/DVD drives and the associated software will not be able to correct the errors read from the discs. That's one of the big areas of variation among drives/software---the sophistication of their error correction. If someone with a lower-quality drive were to replace the scratched discs with new ones, the error correction issues go away, but now the errors that went uncorrected by his drive are burned onto the media. Even perfect error correction will no longer see the error, because to the software it's not an error anymore. Finally, the audio systems can vary . . . for instance, the volume (ie, soft/loud) and the frequency range of the music will change depending on the speakers/headphones and amplifiers used. Those are issues caused by the electrical design and performance of the gear. If everyone had the same gear and always vined the same files on perfect-quality discs, everyone would be presented with exactly the same music. But even then it would *sound* different to different people due to the last and perhaps most critical point of variation . . . our senses of hearing. But back to basic topic at hand, many people prefer lossless compression (SHN, FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc.) over lossy compression (MP3, AAC, etc.) because no information from the original, uncompressed file is lost during compression. It's a way to save file storage space without degrading file quality. Everyone chooses the trade-off they want to make between storage space and file quality, but in light of the low cost of storage I think many make this decision based on the formats' ease of use. It does take some time to get up to speed with SHN/FLAC in particular because of the lack of support for the formats in mainstream media players, both software (iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.) and hardware (iPod, Zune, etc.). Arguably, Apple Lossless would be easier for more people to use and would still be lossless. But then some people don't like being tied to a closed-source, proprietary standard like Apple Lossless for fear that Apple will discontinue/change it; FLAC is open-source, so there's no issue there. SHN, interestingly, is not open-source, but the owners of SHN apparently choose not to try to exclude others from incorporating it into their software players (Cog, for example). I probably complicated the discussion rather than simplifying it, but that's my $.02. ~~~~~~~ "They say Cain caught Abel rolling loaded dice"

Great discussions here, I am happy to see the interest in this topic.Please take a look at these pages for some impartial ideas. etree.org is a good place to start The Etree Wiki A rather technical discution of lossy vv Lossless Wikipedia's discustion of Lossy Comprestion Wikipedia's discustion of Lossless Comprestion Peace Rick

in the old days - the original source was read (IN) and converted from whatever source it existed on (e.g tape) and was passed through the machine mechanism from the IN section, through the MIXER section, to the OUT section, where it was replicated - along with any noise that was included along the way. However, Nowadays, with the Digital revolution, this is not the path of replication - it simply reads what is on A and writes it to B, in an identical fashion, so that if you make 500 copies of a source, they are all identical.

If I send you a cd full of text files - or of video files, or of wav files - or of shit files. and you copy it, it is an exact copy - no loss - it's all digital - regardless of format your copy version is identical to the original - that;s the beauty of the digital age!!!!

Lossless vs. lossy is an issue surrounding the compression of raw audio files, which can be quite sizable. in the old days, people copied cassette tapes, which introduced more noise with each copy. Now that we're digital, that issue goes away - unless you down-convert to some format like MP3, which throws away certain information in order to achieve a smaller size.

you'll have to excuse my lack of computer skills, but how do i use this lossless u speak of? Im always looking to expand my collection.

Derik,you said... if I copy the WAV disc you send me, and trade it to someone else, and they copy their disc and trade it to a third person, and they do the same, there is going to be some sound quality loss. this is cassette tape thinking - there is no loss in digital (cd) copying - it is true identical copying - no loss.

The site has not been accomodating my previous efforts at posting.I feel compelled to state the following points 1.lossless is not a music format - it is a compression scheme. (shit converted to flac is still shit) The orignial recorded copy is in some sort of audio format - which then gets copied .... either identically ... or in a compressed format. If it gets converted identically, in the same format - it's identical. (takes more space) If it gets converted in a lossless format, it can be re-created completely. (takes less space) If it gest converted to a lossy format (mp3) - then the lost information is gone for good (whether you could hear the diference or not) (takes lots less space) Raw music takes up lots of space. You can keep it native, or compress it to any one of many formats - but some are "lossy" (mp3) and some are lossless (shn / flac). There are many others. What works for you is your own business - but don't re-introduce lesser copies into the "original" world - this is pretty easy to avoid. In the old days, cassette copying introduced hiss - this goes away with digital copies. shn / flac exist simply to provide for compression - they are typically converted to wav for playing. The wav stuff i put out comes from flac or shn sources, so it's identical to the source - just being shared in a different format. if you convert to mp3 for your own use, that's your decision - just don't re-represent it as lossless. (nuff said). But - the stuff I seeded is itdentical to the source!!!! 2. I typically make the determination as to format, based on volume if it's one show (2 or 3 cd's) i may put it out as 3 audio cd's (for convenience) - but it's from a lossless source. If it's more than that, I will just put it out on DVD - and find stuff to maximize the space (so u get more). if someone was to ask me to provide an mp3 version, i would feel comfortable doing so, with the caveat that it is MP3 and lossless - not to be mis-represented later. 3.I don't care what you do with it, after it leaves my hands - i will usually try to track a vine to see if it's been lost or needs a re-seed, but if you want to convert to wav, or mp3, it makes no difference to me - It's not about me - it's about you - and about the music getting out and about, so i don't mind lots of little efforts vs. one huge endeavor that lumbers about... it reminds me of a great wizard who wanted his legacy to be preserved. In one case, he simply dumped everything on the young apprentice - and said "there you go". vs. the alternate ending, which has the master stringing the apprentice along, with one discovery after another, one by one, keeping interest and building commitment over time until the apprentice has the same zeal that the master does - and is ready to take over. Maybe that doesn't apply here,.but it has been expressed to me that the mega-trawler ocean-going drag-net fish factory approach tends to kill the excitement of uncovering a special find - like a little show that you happened to be at (vs. "here's the19xx dump of all shows") - no, i have not been asleep for the last two months - or for any time - I;ve been here, and have been listening, and responding and will continue, dispite the lack of "superstar" status that has been conferred upon some who have arrived after me & sought the limelight to their own supplication - e.g. putting their name into each vine they seed, even if it's a group effort.

True, erickat, BUT, if I copy the WAV disc you send me, and trade it to someone else, and they copy their disc and trade it to a third person, and they do the same, there is going to be some sound quality loss. There won't be as much loss as there would be with cassette copying, but there will be some, and as you get further away from the WAV copy you sent me (the original copy), there is more and more sound quality loss. The way I look at it, the first few generations (my copy, the copy I trade, the copy that person trades) has minimal loss. I would guess that the loss for the first 5 copies is negligible and not noticeable. But as you get further away, it is noticeable. I have WAV shows that I acquired from other people via trades and I have noticed some loss in sound quality with the sound being "quieter" than it should be. In the end, if you are just trying to get all the shows you can for your personal use, a WAV copy of a WAV copy from the lossless source is perfectly fine. But if you may be trading that show in the future, having the lossless source is better. Either way, there is plenty of room here at the vineyard for people to vine both. But please, NO MP3!