[RainDawg]

As to the contents of this thread, which Lynne asked me to comment on, here's the concept that I came up with about a year ago:

Every torrent, after being uploaded, would have a unique database entry added. It would record the fingerprint that was submitted when the seed was started. It would also allow certain users to "rate" the shows, filling in information in a simple form such as "sector aligned", "digitally flawless", etc. That way, when someone down the road would grab a show, they could look it up on TTD, compare the audio checksums, and see what other people had to say about it. They could cerify that their audio was identical to what was uploaded, make sure it was digitally flawless, etc.

The project was stalled because I was unable to convince enough people that we should require ONLY shntool md5s and/or ffps to be sent. As you all know, wholefile md5s would make the database obsolete before it was even rolled, as the etree database has become with the widespread adoption of flac seeds.

After going through many months of discussion on the topic, and too many people unwilling to budge on learning to use shntool, I abandoned it. Many of you may recall my since-abandoned project to bring the world an shntool frontend, which would have facilitated the adoption of this project. My free time dried up, the project steadily slipped on my priority list, and eventually both the frontend and the database got shelved due to my not having anyone with time/motivation to help.

But yes, what has been mentioned in this thread is very similar to my idea. In the months since then, I've learned enough php/mysql to do this project myself, but right now I do not have the time to pick it back up. In fact, over the past 1/2 a year I've not really had much to do anything music related, and my collection has fallen into a bit of disarray....but that's a topic for another thread I suppose.