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| So how do I store all this stuff? |
| If you're experiencing lossless trading for the first time, you're probably perplexed as to how to store your archives. Since converting to mp3 and lossy formats is against the rules and burning to audio CD devalues your recording with most traders, what's the best way to back everything up? There are many opinions on this, but the only rule is to make sure you keep original lossless files that are not compressed to lossy formats or burnt to audio CD for future trading. Many people use data CDRs and increasingly data DVDR discs for backing up shows. Others are using portable hard drives for this purpose, while still others employ combinations of these methods to ensure backups are always kept. Poke around on the boards and ask other how the categorize, backup, and organize their collections. Just remember that it is important to keep them in lossless audio formats only. |
| Why trade lossless media? Mp3 and Ogg sound good to me, what's the big deal? |
| Proponents of lossless and lossy audio formats seem immutably locked in a struggle for ideologic dominance. Each seems convinced of the superiority of each style and virtually unwilling to listen to the arguments presented by the opposing side. In this swarm of insults, baseless criticism, and pseudo-scientific testing methods, there is indeed an enormous difference, and understanding where each style of audio compression is appropriate is an extremely important facet of trading. In simple terms, lossless compression schemes are capable of being decoded back to an identical .wav file as the one that created it. Lossy compression picks certain parts of the music and discards it in an attempt to shrink the filesize. The idea is to pick parts that the human ear is unable to discern and remove them, thus leaving no wasted space for storing files. Quite simply, the latter is inappropriate for audio trading. The files which you trade will pass through hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of hands. If each trader takes the liberty of compressing to their own lossy format of choice, the result will be catastrophic for the quality of the audio after several iterations. To ensure that everyone who desires a recording gets a chance to hear it in as good a quality as it was originally recorded, it is important to maintain a lossless lineage from user to user. Once a file has been compressed to a lossy format, that missing information can NEVER be replaced, and therefore files that have been compressed to lossy, even when converted back to lossless formats, are unsuitable for trading. The truth about lossy file types is that, under proper scientific double blind studies, a very small percentage of humans are able to hear the difference between uncompressed .wav audio and high quality (192 KBps or higher) encoded lossy formats. These formats have their place. Many people compress their audio recordings to a lossy format for playing on portable players, their computers, or standalone home units. This is an effective method as the audio difference in one generation of lossless to lossy compression is likely to not cause an audible difference. Feel free to compress lossless recordings to whatever format you choose, but never, ever pass on files compressed to lossy formats or lossless files sourced from lossy formats to other traders. For the good of the trading pool, please respect the difference between lossless (SHN, APE, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, etc) and lossy (MP3, OGG, AAC, etc) compression types. Only trade or pass on lossless files so that the overall quality of the trading pool remains high for everyone to enjoy. Simply put, there are NO lossy file types (OGG-Vorbis, MP3, AAC, etc, etc) permitted for trade at this site. This is NOT a negotiable issue, there will be NO subforum for mp3 traders. If you ignore this rule and post lossy sourced material, there are ways to test for this and it will be discovered, resulting in your seed being deleted. Please respect the high quality standards we have put in place, and bring your mp3s elsewhere. If you are unsure of whether or not your seed is lossless, please post in the Technobabble forum and ask for assistance...we are glad to help. |
| Rio Karma |
| Rio's Karma is a compact hard drive based portable player player with a slick interface and unbeatable file format support, including FLAC, OGG, MP3, WAV, WMA. The easy to use and attractive software reads Vorbis, id3, and id3v2 tags making navigation through huge collections of properly tagged files incredibly easy. The Karma's firmware is way ahead of many of it's competitors as well, allowing true gapless playback of all supported filetypes; a feature that is essential for collectors of live music.
Riovolutions Discussion Forum : Unofficial discussion board dedicated to support, wishlists, and tips on this fantastic little player. |
| Hermstedt Hifidelio |
| Hermstedt's Hifidelio is a breathtakingly beautiful wireless standalone stereo component with an 80GB internal hard drive for playing FLAC and a whole slew of lossy formats (AAC, MP3, OGG, and more). It is also a CD player, standalone CD burner, USB2.0 device, and Ethernet server. It's visually appealing and functionally robust enough for any audiophile to be a master of digital audio. If anyone has personally used one of these devices, please forward us a review or at least some comments so that know for sure that this thing is as good as it looks. |
| foobar2000 (PC) |
| foobar2000 is the ultimate audio media player for the Windows platform. It has a rather utilitarian interface and lacks many of the resource-sucking graphical features of it's competitors. The list of features that it does have, however, should make all of the commercial players out there embarassed. The open API license for foobar2000 permits users to create plugins for features that may be missing from the default installation, and thus the amount of features available for this player is only limited by the resourcefulness of it's userbase. For lossless audio traders, this program is a godsend. Here's a list of the advantages this program has over any other media player out there:
Here's a list of helpful links for download, setting up, and getting support for foobar2000: The foobar 2000 blogsite contains the Special Installer, which comes packaged with a ton of plugins including the SHN plugin, the essential Columns UI interface, masstagger, and tons of others. To stretch the legs of this fantastic little program even further, here's a list of foobar 2000 3rd Party Plugins. For discussion, support, and new tricks & ideas, check out the hydrogenaudio.org official foobar2000 forums Finally, look at the foobar2000 entry on my personal website which contains a few tricks I've personally configured and some nice screenshots. |
| How can I use the Lineage provided with DVDs to my advantage? |
| When trying to decide whether or not to download a DVD, there are many things that should affect your decision. The band, venue, and setlist, will obviously help you in your decision, but the information that is required for all DVD seeds at The Trader's Den is required for a reason. It can help distinguish between a seed that has gone through questionable compression and encoding practices, and one that was done by an experienced seeder using the best possible techniques to preserve all possible quality. Ideally, all seeds will include these 8 pieces of information, but, only TV System, Video Bitrate, Audio Codec, and Audio bitrate are currently required. Here is an expample of the optimal way to convey all pertinent information in a well organized fashion: VIDEO ATTRIBUTES: Source: Mini DV Master > Firewire > Vegas 6.0 > DVD Architect 3.0 TV system: (NTSC) Aspect Ratio: 4:3 Sys Bitrate: 7000 KB/s CBR AUDIO ATTRIBUTES: Source: FOB Schoeps Audio Coding mode: LPCM Wav Sampling Rate: 48kHz Bitrate: 1536 KB/s For each attribute, there are many things that can vary from seed to seed: Video Source: All seeds will include information about the journey of the video to the digital realm. For concerts less than 5 years old, optimally, it was recorded in DV (Digital Video) and will suffer no quality loss going to digital, as it was natively recorded in that format. MiniDV is the current standard in camera's. outside of the digital realm, Hi8 is the best tape format and can be converted to digital video with ease. For recent concerts, there should be no reason for the tape format not to be known, and there should be no reason for a VHS generation to be included. With all recent concerts seeded here, the Master MiniDV or Hi8 cassette should be used if at all possible. VHS tapes are equivilent to the cassette tapes of yesteryear. Eventually, they will only be a memory. Like Cassettes, VHS tapes suffer from generational loss. Each copy furthur from the master will be of lower quality than the one before. In situations of older shows where the master tape is not readily available, the use of the best quality VHS tape is acceptable, and will, hopefully, be at absolute most, 3 generations away from the master. Most seeders will include information about what programs they used to render the video to the MPEG-2 files that are needed to create the DVD files. Common PC programs include: Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, and Avid Express. There are more camera manufacturer-made porgrams, but they are expensive and are not commonly used by the community at this time. Sony Vegas is the most commonly used program and is the considered the best that the PC world has to offer. The Macintosh world is ruled by Final Cut Pro (FCP). vegas cannot hold a candle to FCP, but the PC/Mac divide is still very present and so the majority of seeds will be made on a PC. Another possible situation that you will see outlined in seeds is where a new audio source is synced to an already made dvd that was lacking in audio quality. This will be denoted in the video source line as "DVD > TMPGEnc > ...." If done correctly, the original video quality from the dvd will be preserved. This is not always the case, especially if the seeder is relatively new to the process. Unfortunately, it can be difficult, if not nearly impossible to determine if the correct procedure was used by simply looking at lineage. TV System: Can be either NTSC or Pal, the difference is addressed here. Aspect Ratio: Can be either 4:3 (fullscreen) or 16:9 (widescreen) There is the possibilty of a concert being recorded in 4:3 that is then converted to 16:9 for the dvd at the choice of the taper or in the case that certain problems consistent with older VHS tapes are present in the upper and lower regions of the viewing area, and the producer of the dvd felt that the change to widescreen would benefit the viewing experience. Obviously, if the concert is recorded in 16:9, there is no going back to fullscreen. Sys Bitrate: The bitrate used in DVDs can be a very valuable piece of information, yet it can be deceiving. DVDs will vary anywhere from 4000 KB/s to 9800 KB/s. This number denotes how many megabytes each second of video is taking up on the DVD. Obviously, a higher number is going to be better in almost all cases. When the source of the video is a MiniDV master or, depending on the camera, a Hi8 Master, There is more than 9800 KB/s of data preserved on the cassette. This means that, in order to fit the video and audio on one single layer DVD, some of the information must be discarded. This doesn't mean the picture will now look bad, it is just a neccessary step. at 9800 KB/s, only about 45 minutes of video can fit on one DVD, so although, the encode might have been at 9800 KB/s, most discs (with sets of music around 70 minutes) will then need to be run through DVD shrink, which will simply do another pass (or hopefully 2) of encoding that will eliminate the most useless pieces of information still present and will leave you with a dvd at precisely the amount of information that can fit on one disc. As with MP3's, there are two options you can use when encoding the video files. Constant Bit-Rate (CBR) and Variable vit-Rate (VBR) are the two options. The choice of which to use is up to the encoder. For example, even the most experienced viewer will not be able to tell the difference between a video encoded at 7000 CBR and one at 7800/8000/8200 VBR. When a video is encoded with a VBR, three numbers are neccessary to describe the rules set forth in the encode. The first is the minimum bitrate allowable, the second is the average bitrate used, and the last is the maximum bitrate. These numbers can be close together, as in the previous example, or could easily be more like 4000/6000/7000. Audio Source: The audio source can be from a Soundbaord Feed (SBD) or from an Audience recording (Aud) or when neither is available for a particular show, the audio from the onboard camera microphone might be used (Cam). for those un-familiar with etree and the audio trading community, this site provides some background information on some of the abbreviations used in the audio taping world. Audio Coding Mode: Will, almost always, be AC3 or LPCM Wav. AC3 is a lossy format commonly used on commercially released dvds. 5+ channels of sound can be included in AC3 files, but it is still lossy, and because of that, is not optimal for use in a site such as The Trader's Den, where quality is of the utmost importance. To solve this problem, the audio included on dvds should be encoded in Linear PCM Wav. Shn or FLAC filesets download from TTD, Bt.etree.org, The Archive, or some other source can easily be converted loss-lessly to Wav by using the mkw Audio Compression Tool for shns or FLAC Frontend for flacs. Sampling Rate: The sampling rate for DVDs will always be 48kHz Audio Bitrate: For LPCM Wav files at 48kHz, the bitrate will always be 1536 KB/s. For ac3 files, the bitrate is adjustable, but nominally, will be 226 KB/s. Conclusion: The Key to understanding what you are downloading comes from having a handle on the process that was used to create the DVD. It is not as simple as looking at the Video bitrate, or any one of the pieces of information. Having some idea of the information provided in the lineage is the most helpful thing you can figure out. Screenshots will be provided with most, but not all, DVDs seeded here, and they can give a good idea of the angle of the shot, and the quality. One last thing to be aware of, is Handheld vs. Tripod. a concert recorded with a $10,000 camera being handheld will probably be much more undesireable than the same concert recorded with a $500 camera set up on a well placed tripod. There are a lot of things that can affect your viewing experience when it comes to DVDs that are not professionally manufactured, and noone knows everything there is to know. This community can only grow from people questioning the seeders if there is some question as to the production or quality of the seed, so feel free to ask. Happy downloading. Thanks to outpostnorth for writing this item. |
| RSS and Podcasting |
Can I use RSS to keep up with new posts? If the administrator has enabled RSS syndication, this lets you view newly created threads in guest-viewable forums without visiting the board. The feeds are currently provided in two formats, RSS and RSS v2.
Most modern browsers have facilities for reading RSS feeds and will automatically detect the availability of feeds on bulletin board pages. Where can I find the RSS feed? Some popular RSS feeds: The forums to which this applies can also be limited to specific guest viewable forums by adding another parameter to the URL containing the forumids as follows: Other than the Audio and Video Torrent forums, the forum must be viewable as a non-logged in user in order to receive as an RSS feed. Also, the ONLY way to receive the torrent forums feeds is to specify them as written above. You will not receive them if you just subscribe to the site feed. How do I listen to podcasts? A podcast is a means of distributing audio files (such as .mp3s) over the internet. They can be played on a wide range of media players and computers. If the board administrator has enabled this function, then you may sometimes see links to podcasts within threads. Podcasts contained within threads are only accessible using RSS feeds. |
| Winamp (PC) |
| Winamp is perhaps the most widespread audio media player on the market. Their freeware distribution model and early jump on the mp3 player craze fastened Winamp as a permanent fixture on many people's PC. It has a simple and attractive layout and offers a plethora of plugins (some free, some not). In recent years, Winamp has succumbed to the overwhelming push to make their software profitable, and thus have included some rather sketchy additions to their free version, as well as offering pay-for-use versions. Many Winamp users have kept their older versions of Winamp to be free from the adware, spyware, nagware, and excessive resource usage of Winamp's newer versions. Winamp comes packaged primarily as an mp3 player, which makes it of little use to lossless file traders. It can, however, be configured to play all of the lossless file types that are traded at this site, however each plugin must be individually installed and configured. |
| DVD Video BitTorrent Seeding Policy |
To maintain the highest quality and purity for the trading pool, we have compiled a list of rules for making good seeds. Please read this list carefully before seeding here as our rules are likely the most stringent you'll find on any music sharing tracker. Each of these regulations are absolutely mandatory, and seeds that do not comply will be deleted from the tracker. Some rules will seem overbearing to some users, but these regulations are in place to ensure that we only spread recordings in "as good as it gets" quality so that all traders have equal opportunity to obtain the same music. If you have a question as to why a certain rule exists or are unsure if your seed complies, please feel free to contact The Video Mods or post in Technobabble. If you have questions regarding this FAQ and wish to discuss them in a language other than english, please post in our multilingual forum, Babylon.
1. All seeds must be authored DVD-Video file structures. 2. No official or out-of-print material is permitted. 3. All seeds must have a properly named DVD file structure, including an appropriately named main folder and a VIDEO_TS subfolder.
4. All seeds must contain a correct md5 checksum of the contents of the VIDEO_TS folder. Until we get something written in this FAQ, here is a short method written by feralicious: Grab md5summer from www.md5summer.org
Just open it up, navigate to the folder of your DVD and click on "create sums" Choose "select all" and then "add" and then "ok" Wait a while for it to do its thing When it's finished it will open up the "save" window, just make sure you save it with the .md5 extension and your good to go! One thing I usually do when I remember is go in and edit it by right clicking on the md5 and selecting "edit" and take out the md5summer references because if you use a program other than md5summer to verify that text shows up as an error and I find that annoying. Good applications to use to create checksums include Trader's Little Helper (PC), www.md5summer.org (PC), and xACT (Mac). Please do NOT use Easy MD5 Creator as it creates non-standard md5 checksums. Other applications you may use are listed in the Freeware Software Links. Look Inside If You're Stuck! FAQ. 5. All torrents must consist of a complete set, no partials will be permitted. If you are concerned that your torrent is large and will take a long time to be shared amongst the community, consider this option. Make a few copies of your show you would like to seed, mail them to several other people (approximately $1-2 per copy), and have them help co-seed the show with you. This not only allows you to get your show out to others more quickly, but it also saves bandwidth, especially if your ISP tightly regulates how much upload you are allowed per month. 6. All seeds must contain a complete and accurate lineage. Also, ANY TV Broadcast or AUD recorded video from 2005 on MUST have COMPLETE & ACCURATE lineage!! There is NO EXCUSE for a show recorded in the last couple years to NOT have this.
What is the complete and accurate lineage?
Format the show was recorded with and onto? Transfer from Source to Hard Drive and What format? Program/Software used to do the transfer and author? All equipment, cables, cards, etc involved in the process to achieve the above. We would honestly not like any shows on here that do not have complete & accurate lineage, however we understand its not likely to track down the taper/transfer/author for a show from 10-20 yrs ago (this is why there are examples of lineage listed above). If you got a show from this point on in a trade, please do some research on it to get all the information available on it before seeding. You either know the information or you don't (ie, you did the transfer/authoring work from the VHS or you didnt). If you don't know the information because you received a dvd via trade or downloaded it from another site where the capture/transfer info was not provided, then the lineage would read something like one of these: - For a SA (StandAlone) DVD (does not have correct chapter marks, usually 5 min chapters): - An authored DVD (At least has correct chapter points, but may have menu's): *Pick one Look at what you have. Picture quality wise, what does it look like (master, 1-2 Gen, High Gen VHS)? Is it authored or a SA (Standalone)? If you can't tell the difference in quality from a Master & other Gens of tapes, I'm truly sorry. Generation's of the copies of the actual dvd are misleading BS, period. Some examples of correct lineage: Example 1: Video: AUD (Tripod) Master
Master: JVC Single Tube Camera, Nak 300 Shotguns > 0 Decks > Panasonic AG-7400 > S-VHS Master Transfer: S-VHS Master > Panasonic AG-7150 > Canopus ADVC-100 > iMac G4 > Final Cut Pro 3 > DVD Studio Pro 1 NTSC 4:3 D1 & D3 8400 kbs, D2 7400 kbs 720X480 29.97 fps Audio: SBD > DAT > CDR LPCM 1.5 Mbs Example 2: Video Source: TV > Master broadcast VHS > Sony SLV-D300P > AVT-8710 TBC > Sony RDR-GX 300 > Vegas 6.0d > TMPGEnc MPEG Editor 1.0.1.59 > DVD Architect 3.0c (720 x 480 29.97 fps NTSC 5836 Kbps VBR, Peak = 9016 Kbps).
Audio Source: SBD > Cassette Master (Maxell MX90) > Sony TC-WE475 > Sony R500 (Pass Through) > SEK'D Prodif Plus > Samplitude Professional v8.01 > FLAC > WAV > DAW(Bertha) > FLAC > WAV > Adobe Audition > Vegas 6.0b (Dolby AC-3 Stereo 448 Kbps 48Khz) Example 3: Video: AUD (Tripod) > Master > Firewire > Vegas 7.0 > Architect 4.0 > DVD PAL, 720 x 576 5 MB/sec variable
Audio: SBD LPCM Example of Incorrect Lineage: Generation: TV>VHS(1)>MINI-DV(1)>DVDR(3) ->HDD -> DVDR(4) when burned
Lineage for Silver DVDs: Silver DVDs are allowed if they meet the following considerations. If a known lineage source already exists on the tracker, Silver DVDs may NOT be seeded. Remasters of Silver DVDs must include source information for adjustments and be an improvement from ac3 to LPCM. Improvements within audio codec will NOT be allowed without previous approval based on undeniable proof. Proper lineage would look something like: Audience shot > ? > Silver DVD
TV Broadcast > ? > Silver DVD or the following Silver DVD with remastering. Audience shot > ? > Silver DVD
This audience shot video is the same as the already released DVD by *insert username*, *TTD Link*, with improved (LPCM, approved AC3) audio. I have attached samples below. new audio source - AKG 481 > SD 744 @ 24/48 7. All seeds must include the video system (NTSC or PAL), audio codec and bitrate information in the info file.
See our FAQ, How to get Video Stats for your DVD for help in obtaining this information. To see what this information tells us, please read "How can I use the Lineage provided with DVDs to my advantage?" 8. Digital cable and satellite broadcast rips are permitted so long as a complete listing of the software and hardware used to make the rip is listed. No video webcasts are allowed. 9. Only DVDs produced from MPEG-2 may be seeded here. 10. No Transcoded or Re-Encoded DVDs are allowed. We normally do NOT allow any sort of re-encoded video, however it has come to our attention that there are a very few number of shows that originated in PAL being rebroadcast in NTSC. We have decided to allow these ONLY if the following information is provided when the torrent is uploaded and plainly clear in the first post of the torrent thread (this is in addition to all other required information): rebroadcast date, rebroadcast country, rebroadcast channel. If this additional information is not clearly stated in the thread, the show will be pulled. NOTE: Due to a poor quality encode on the fly done by ConcertTV, we will not allow NTSC Rockpalast or any other broadcasts originating in PAL countries on this channel to be seeded.
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| Audio BitTorrent Seeding Policy |
To maintain the highest quality and purity for the trading pool, we have compiled a list of rules for making good seeds. Please read this list carefully before seeding here as our rules are likely the most stringent you'll find on any music sharing tracker. Each of these regulations are absolutely mandatory, and seeds that do not comply will be deleted from the tracker. Some rules will seem overbearing to some users, but these regulations are in place to ensure that we only spread recordings in "as good as it gets" quality so that all traders have equal opportunity to obtain the same music. If you have a question as to why a certain rule exists or are unsure if your seed complies, please feel free to post in Technobabble. If you have questions regarding this FAQ and wish to discuss them in a language other than english, please post in our multilingual forum, Babylon. 1. All seeds must be CD quality, lossless audio in FLAC, APE, or SHN format. 2. All seeds must be digitally pure (no diginoise) gapless audio files. 3. No official or out-of-print material is allowed. 4. All torrents must contain a complete seed. Spanning a single set over multiple seeds is not permitted. 5. CDR rips of material available on Silver CD and rips of CDRs burned from previously downloaded lossless files are not permitted. 6. If you rip an audio CD to lossless files, you must use an error correcting ripper. We understand that some people may have older rips where the result logs may not have been included. In this case, please give your files a close listen to ensure that they are error-free before seeding. All new rips should contain result logs. 7. Audio ripped from an MPEG video or DVD is not permitted. 8. All seeds must include a complete and accurate lineage, indicating what formats and media the audio has previously used. Starting June 1, 2009, if a show is dated after January 1, 2005, it MUST have complete and accurate lineage. There is really no reason for a show taped in the last couple of years to not have this info. In other words, unknown gen CDR > EAC > wav > flac type of lineage will no longer be allowed for shows taped after that date. (If you have questions about a particular show, please PM a Moderator.) Here are some examples of legal lineages:
9. All seeds must include a text file with complete recording information, including bands, dates, venues, lineages, and setlists. 10. All seeds must include either st5 checksums or FLAC ffp fingerprints. We understand that this is a radical departure from what many users are used to at other trading sites, but we are looking towards the future. Though it's not ready to be presented to the public, we will be making an archive of every seed made here, including the checksums. With traditional md5 checksums that look at the entire file, users cannot convert, tag, or re-compress their files, and thus are pigeonholed into the originally seeded format in order to have the checksum verify. St5 checksums and FLAC fingerprints only consider the audio data in a file, NOT any additional header information. Therefore, users are free to manipulate the files any way they choose and, so long as they do not alter the audio, the checksum will remain identical. Checksum naming for Audio (posts on or after November 6, 2023): Checksum file extensions (no quotes) are ".ffp" or ".st5" per the Windows OS (we know on MacOS and Linux it doesn't matter, but Windows is still the majority desktop OS). The filename part before the extension is up to you. Suggested filenames: Posts before November 6, 2023: The checksum naming before this date was undefined and thus older posts have been grandfathered in. Moderators, please do not delete an audio torrent for an incorrect checksum extension if it was posted before November 6, 2023. Fingerprints.ffp.txt is fine if it was posted before November 6, 2023. If you reseed a torrent originally posted before this date, rename/create the checksum file as per the now defined naming. Please read this guide Checksums Demystified for more information, or post in the Technobabble forum for more clarification on this issue. 11. Mini-disc is accepted ONLY if it's from the original source master. 12. Audio only Webcast Rips and Digital Broadcasts are not permitted on The Traders' Den. 13. Remasters are NOT allowed as of June 1, 2011. NOTE: You may post torrents here from other sites provided that they meet the TTD Policy standards. Sometimes other sites are a bit more lax on allowing commercially released material on their tracker. We are not a completely private tracker and therefore we cannot allow this. So, please, if you are reposting something from another site, you need to do a little bit of homework and make sure you are not uploading something that is commercially released. Sometimes this is just a couple of tracks. Just omit them from the torrent and then it is fine to upload it here. (You should make note in the thread that you removed the tracks.)
modified 2012-02-01, added dbpoweramp as an approved ripper in rule 6. modified 2023-11-05, rule 12 applies only to audio, not video. |
