[AAR.oner]

no questions a "duh" question when yer tryin to learn something new...hell, we're just happy you care enough to learn and not pollute the trading due to ignorance

spiritinaphoto answered a few of yer ?s, but i'll clarify on a few points:

Originally Posted by ZosoPlayer

I thought EAC and TLH were two competing programs that did the same thing? But after reading your post, it seems like TLH is used to help make an audio CD and EAC is used to help extract the show from an audio CD to your PC, correct?

EAC and TLH do two separate things...when downloading/trading lossless shows [flac, shn, etc] you won't really need EAC, since it is used strictly for extracting wav files from an audio cd...

TLH is for decoding lossless files to wavs [which you can then burn to audio cd], checking checksums [md5, st5, ffp, etc], amongst other more advanced tasks you'll get into later on

however, TLH does not burn discs, you'll need a burning prog such as ONES, Nero, Roxio, etc for burning

Originally Posted by ZosoPlayer

If I burned the audio CD correctly (ie good media, TLH, good burner, no errors, etc), is it still necessary to have them archived on a data cd? If I want to trade the show, wouldn't I just make a copy of my audio CD?

yes, keep a data disk of the lossless shows fileset for trading...making copies of audio cdrs leads to errors, and it is now the standard to trade in lossless

downloading a show from here, lets say its in flac fomat, and then burning an Audio CDR, and then extracting from that CDR for a trade [using EAC], and burning another copy makes an unnecessary generation and can lead to errors, i.e. quality loss

but if you have a data archive of the flac fileset, including the checksum & info text, you just drag the folder from the data disc to yer harddrive, then burn a data disc to send on the trade...no generational change occurs, and the person has a checksum to prove it

Originally Posted by ZosoPlayer

So if the original source is a DAT recording, and the taper tranfers the show from DAT to a CDR, that CDR is considered the 1st generation CDR, correct? So what, or how would we get to a second generation CDR? If you make a copy of the first gen CDR, lets say using NERO, is that now a second gen CDR?

there are a few different philosophies on noting format changes in a lineage...here's how i prefer to note lineages
--if the original recording was made on DAT, then it is the master: DAT(M) ***only the media the show was originally recorded to can be cnsidered a master***
--if the DAT(M) is then transferred to a computer and burned to a Audio CDR, then that disc would be considered a CDR(0), since it was burned directly from the master...NOTE: CDR generations only apply to Audio CDRs, not data disks of lossless filesets
--if that Audio CDR "CDR(0)" is then extracted to wav using EAC, and then burned to another Audio CDR, you'd label it CDR(1)...repeat the process with CDR(1) and you'd have CDR(2)...etc

the community wants to avoid any CDR generations in the trading pool, which is why people archive/trade/seed in lossless data format, and only burn Audio CDRs for personal listening purposes

hope that makes sense...i'm a bit tired