It's great that Phish has decided to make a lossless format available as well as the lossy mp3s. etree.org has been doing this for a number of years, and a method of distribution has been developed that preserves the quality of the audio as it passes through many hands.
etree.org offers legal show recordings from bands that promote the taping of their shows. The bands get free publicity, the fans get free recordings -- it works out for both parties.
Phish is pretty typical in that they only allow audience recordings (no soundboard access) and they sell (generally) better sounding soundboard recordings.
Furthur is being developed by some of the etree.org crew. Etree.org has an outstanding track record so far. The group trades only "taper-friendly" recordings, and if anyone asks for a recording that isn't taper-friendly, members are sure to jump on the request and tell him to look elsewhere (some are more polite than others).
You'd think that a group of over 13,000 (that was last I heard a while ago, and with the second related story in a week, there are sure to be many more directed from/.) would be chaos. However, the group is pretty well self-policed.
The fact is, if someone wants an illegal bootleg, there are plenty of other places to look rather than the etree.org lists. Rather than get flamed and endanger etree.org, those people just go elsewhere for those needs.
Check out etree.org's legal page for more information about policy. After 3 years, there still hasn't been an RIAA shakedown.
With a traditional cassette tree, yes, every member in the chain is adding a lossy generation to the next tape in the chain. That can't be helped with cassettes.
By "original files" what do you mean? Do you mean the original wav files? The original shn files? Or maybe the person transferring the master made some mp3s? Also by "compressed format" are you talking lossy or lossless?
The traders are bright enough to not re-encode all the time, they're passing around original shn files that match an md5sum hash in an established database. That way everyone is guaranteed a good copy; at least they're guaranteed the same quality as the master! The people in this community have a different solution for those with reduced bandwidth: USPS. Mailing around CDs filled with SHNs is still very prevalent.
It is a compromise though. You have to wait a long time to transfer a single show. It's a compromise most are willing to take, though, for the higher quality. Who's going to trade with you if you have a lower quality recording than the next guy? You might not be able to hear the artifacts introduced by mp3, but if the next guy can, he's going to be pissed that you traded him schwag.
The community chose Shorten because they needed a way to guarantee quality. A commercially pressed CD has thousands of "masters". A show taped by the taping community has one, or maybe a few more if he was giving patches. To distribute an exact copy of this music from only one master is quite a feat.
The community also chose Shorten because it DOES sound better. For example, live field recording has a ton of ambience. Lossy compression schemes such as mp3 do not encode that well.
The reason the live music trading community (most notably etree.org) uses the shorten format is because there was not a way to widely distribute exact copies of, say, master DATs. Now, assuming the person transferring the DAT, did a reasonably good job, every person after that who receives the SHN files can create an exact copy of that DAT. This is crucial because of the way shows are distributed. One person gets a copy from his friend, and he passes it on to his friends. If there was a lossy step involved in the middle of the chain, each copy would be worse than the one before.
Note tape trading. Copying a cassette is lossy, so someone who got such with a 4th or 5th generation tape was stuck with all of the artifacts that were introduced in each generation above. Even copying CD audio is not perfect: programs that do digital audio extraction need to do a good job reading the data without any error correction. Shorten makes 100% sure that every copy is just like the original.
In the past few Kernel Traffics, there has been a lot of discussion about Andrea Arcangeli's VM patches. Alan Cox, for one, was reluctant to introduce such drastically new VM code mid-2.4.
In the Changelog they are listed as "tweaks".
What changes made it into 2.4.11? How reliable are they?
We need help if mp3 is indeed the future of music.
What is the appeal of mp3? File size. What happens as everything gets bigger, ie more bandwidth, more storage, etc.? We won't be worried about file size. There goes mp3's main advantage.
The future will definitely be a lossless algorithm, not mp3.
I think it's unfair to trash Redhat just for offering a subscription service. The people that use the service will be the ones with extra cash that are too lazy to follow the updates and grab an rpm every once in a while. To generalize.
Don't discount what may be a perfectly good distrobution because they are trying to make a buck.
And don't get me started on the Microsoft Network... hehe
I'll most likely continue using my current Redhat 6.1 and update packages where I see fit. I'd love to try Debian, but I figure it would be such a hassle to migrate, I can live without apt-get.
I agree with Katz's response to a certain degree, but it seems that both he and the question's poster are making vast generalizations about religious communities in general. Yes, there are many vocal "anti-Christian" geeks out there, and yes there are plenty of vocal members of the Christian Right. Those certain individuals cannot be taken to represent the entire community. I know plenty of excellent Christians, and plenty of not-so-excellent ones.
So how can we discuss the Christian community? We can't. It is as simple as that.
I am not trying to knock on Christianity, or religion. I am quite confused about mass religion, and I don't know where to go with it. I do know, however, that any discussion trying to generalize the community won't get very far. Maybe that's the case for every community. Who knows.
Phish has not allowed any soundboard patches for quite a few years because tapers were unplugging necessary equipment in order to get a good patch. There's more info out there if you're interested. Start with phish.net.
People have brought up the fact that Phish allow their shows to be freely distributed, except when officially released. This is gray area - evidently this show is no longer allowed to be distributed over the etree, but it is allowed to be trading over snail mail. However, this release will be higher quality than your tapes, guys - it's a direct soundboard.
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It's great that Phish has decided to make a lossless format available as well as the lossy mp3s. etree.org has been doing this for a number of years, and a method of distribution has been developed that preserves the quality of the audio as it passes through many hands.
etree.org offers legal show recordings from bands that promote the taping of their shows. The bands get free publicity, the fans get free recordings -- it works out for both parties.
Phish is pretty typical in that they only allow audience recordings (no soundboard access) and they sell (generally) better sounding soundboard recordings.
Furthur is being developed by some of the etree.org crew. Etree.org has an outstanding track record so far. The group trades only "taper-friendly" recordings, and if anyone asks for a recording that isn't taper-friendly, members are sure to jump on the request and tell him to look elsewhere (some are more polite than others).
/.) would be chaos. However, the group is pretty well self-policed.
You'd think that a group of over 13,000 (that was last I heard a while ago, and with the second related story in a week, there are sure to be many more directed from
The fact is, if someone wants an illegal bootleg, there are plenty of other places to look rather than the etree.org lists. Rather than get flamed and endanger etree.org, those people just go elsewhere for those needs.
Check out etree.org's legal page for more information about policy. After 3 years, there still hasn't been an RIAA shakedown.
With a traditional cassette tree, yes, every member in the chain is adding a lossy generation to the next tape in the chain. That can't be helped with cassettes.
By "original files" what do you mean? Do you mean the original wav files? The original shn files? Or maybe the person transferring the master made some mp3s? Also by "compressed format" are you talking lossy or lossless?
The traders are bright enough to not re-encode all the time, they're passing around original shn files that match an md5sum hash in an established database. That way everyone is guaranteed a good copy; at least they're guaranteed the same quality as the master! The people in this community have a different solution for those with reduced bandwidth: USPS. Mailing around CDs filled with SHNs is still very prevalent.
It is a compromise though. You have to wait a long time to transfer a single show. It's a compromise most are willing to take, though, for the higher quality. Who's going to trade with you if you have a lower quality recording than the next guy? You might not be able to hear the artifacts introduced by mp3, but if the next guy can, he's going to be pissed that you traded him schwag.
The community chose Shorten because they needed a way to guarantee quality. A commercially pressed CD has thousands of "masters". A show taped by the taping community has one, or maybe a few more if he was giving patches. To distribute an exact copy of this music from only one master is quite a feat.
The community also chose Shorten because it DOES sound better. For example, live field recording has a ton of ambience. Lossy compression schemes such as mp3 do not encode that well.
The reason the live music trading community (most notably etree.org) uses the shorten format is because there was not a way to widely distribute exact copies of, say, master DATs. Now, assuming the person transferring the DAT, did a reasonably good job, every person after that who receives the SHN files can create an exact copy of that DAT. This is crucial because of the way shows are distributed. One person gets a copy from his friend, and he passes it on to his friends. If there was a lossy step involved in the middle of the chain, each copy would be worse than the one before. Note tape trading. Copying a cassette is lossy, so someone who got such with a 4th or 5th generation tape was stuck with all of the artifacts that were introduced in each generation above. Even copying CD audio is not perfect: programs that do digital audio extraction need to do a good job reading the data without any error correction. Shorten makes 100% sure that every copy is just like the original.
In the past few Kernel Traffics, there has been a lot of discussion about Andrea Arcangeli's VM patches. Alan Cox, for one, was reluctant to introduce such drastically new VM code mid-2.4.
In the Changelog they are listed as "tweaks".
What changes made it into 2.4.11? How reliable are they?
We need help if mp3 is indeed the future of music.
What is the appeal of mp3? File size. What happens as everything gets bigger, ie more bandwidth, more storage, etc.? We won't be worried about file size. There goes mp3's main advantage.
The future will definitely be a lossless algorithm, not mp3.
I think it's unfair to trash Redhat just for offering a subscription service. The people that use the service will be the ones with extra cash that are too lazy to follow the updates and grab an rpm every once in a while. To generalize.
Don't discount what may be a perfectly good distrobution because they are trying to make a buck.
And don't get me started on the Microsoft Network... hehe
I'll most likely continue using my current Redhat 6.1 and update packages where I see fit. I'd love to try Debian, but I figure it would be such a hassle to migrate, I can live without apt-get.
Just my two cents.
I agree with Katz's response to a certain degree, but it seems that both he and the question's poster are making vast generalizations about religious communities in general. Yes, there are many vocal "anti-Christian" geeks out there, and yes there are plenty of vocal members of the Christian Right. Those certain individuals cannot be taken to represent the entire community. I know plenty of excellent Christians, and plenty of not-so-excellent ones.
So how can we discuss the Christian community? We can't. It is as simple as that.
I am not trying to knock on Christianity, or religion. I am quite confused about mass religion, and I don't know where to go with it. I do know, however, that any discussion trying to generalize the community won't get very far. Maybe that's the case for every community. Who knows.
My two cents
Phish has not allowed any soundboard patches for quite a few years because tapers were unplugging necessary equipment in order to get a good patch.
There's more info out there if you're interested. Start with phish.net.
I didn't say that it was in any way like Open Source. Phish's taping policy puts distribution in the fans' hands.
People have brought up the fact that Phish allow their shows to be freely distributed, except when officially released. This is gray area - evidently this show is no longer allowed to be distributed over the etree, but it is allowed to be trading over snail mail. However, this release will be higher quality than your tapes, guys - it's a direct soundboard.