[U2Lynne]

Five can probably answer this much better than I, but I'll give it a shot.


With Silver CDs, we know that they are out there en masse and that several people have a copy. So, we don't think it is a big deal to expect that one of those people will be able to EAC and flac the show to be shared.

With other shows that never get mass produced, you have a single person who has the master. They may only make one copy and send it out or they may make several copies. Hopefully someone early on in the chain finally EAC and flacs it to share. Sometimes it is from CDR(1), but sometimes it isn't until CDR(4) or more. Then that becomes the commonly circulated gen of the show. (This could be the same for tapes or CDR). We want the lowest gen possible to be shared, but sometimes the lowest gen is about 4 or 5 gens away from the master. Sure, we would love to have the master itself shared, but that just isn't always possible.

We have a taper here who doesn't torrent or flac stuff. Instead, he makes copies of his CD(M) and sends them to users and they EAC and then flac and torrent his stuff. So, CD(1) is the lowest we will get from him.

When I make a CDR rip from a silver disc, I use EAC. I have my read & write offsets configured perfectly so that my .LOG files generated by my rip have 100% error-free rips. I also include a .CUE file so that a truly perfect copy can be made by the next person who snatches these files. So if these are perfect extractions from silver CDs & perfect CDR writes (according to EAC logs, etc.) - how come those aren't allowed but cassette lineages are?

If you rip a Silver CD and share it, they can share the flacs you generated. But, they can't share a Silver CD > CDR(1) of the show unless they can somehow prove that their copy is exactly the same as your original copy. Do they have shntool md5s of your rip to compare to their rip? I would guess not. When you have a Silver CD > CDR(1) situation, you don't know for sure that the copy was made perfectly.