Converting shows / Etiquette Question?

[dancin_carrot]

I have recently begun converting all of my SHN shows to FLAC (thanks to Five's excellent tutorial) and tagging them with foobar2000. I notice many torrents on this site with "disclaimers" that say something to the effect of "if you want to trade this show, keep it as it is." Now I realize the thought behind this, if lots of people convert shows to other formats and trade them (without keeping track of the fingerprints/checksums) the trading pool is polluted.

However, the benefits of the FLAC format over SHN has been widely touted, especially on this site. As far as I can tell, you guys (the admins) have a rule that requires shntool md5s on all SHN seeds, but it is rarely enforced because people can't get shntool to work. Shntool md5s would, I believe you say, make format completely unimportant, as the audio-only checksum would be consistent no matter whether the show is SHN, FLAC, or anything else they come up with in the future.

Basically what I want to know is, what are people's opinions on converting shows and trading them? Does it really pollute the trading pool or not? Keep in mind I am talking about responsible conversion (keeping the original SHN md5s, bitcomparing with foobar, updating lineage in the text file, etc). I am truly interested in hearing people's opinions.

[dorrcoq]

I do it with every SHN show I get (since Five's tutorial), and don't see any problem with it

[AAR.oner]

especially if there's a md5 for the wav files...should be no problem, since you've got that as yer "litmus" to be sure it encoded competely accurate...

[Five]

SHNtool md5 aka .st5 is best

check here:
http://thor.prohosting.com/roh0205/

or use xAct for mac.

wholefile .m5 for the .wav files works too in a pinch just make sure that they work when decompressed from the final FLAC files you make.