[scratchie]

Well here's the thing. To clarify my original point...

First off, it wasn't my intention to denigrate the work that goes on at sites like this to propagate high-quality material. Obviously. I'm a heavy consumer of the stuff offered here.

But more importantly, I think it's a complete red herring to worry about people sharing shows in MP3 format.

I got my first CD burner in 1999, which means I've been trading bootlegs digitally for almost ten years.

In that entire time, I've heard dire warnings about sharing recording in MP3 format, lest we "poison the well" or some such.

And also in that time, two trends have been pretty hard to deny:

1) MP3 sharing of every possible type of music (including bootlegs) has increased exponentially.

2) The quality of digital offerings has gone steadily up. Every year it seems we see new, improved, sources for multiple classic shows, as well as new (formerly "unknown") performances by our favorite artists that are widely available for the first time due to lossless digital file-sharing.

Conclusion: The proliferation of MP3 trading has absolutely ZERO effect on the prorogation of high-quality lossless material. End of story.

The way to ensure that high-quality lossless material is available is to do exactly what the trading community has been doing all along:

1) Insist on material with known lineage.

2) Standardize the distribution formats (i.e. SHN or FLAC rather than audio CDs that require extraction).

That way, everybody knows what they're getting, and when a new version comes along, it's easy to tell that it's new. Those are the practices that have improved the stock of available bootleg material to a degree that was almost unimaginable 10-20 years ago. And whether some other people are sharing the exact same material in MP3, or Xvid, or anything else is 100% immaterial.