[paddington]

The idea, Mr Loathing, is to not pollute the trading pool with MP3 junk. If you want to convert them for your own use, like for an IPOD, that's what they are for.

If you trade MP3s to someone and they decide they need WMA for their litle PDA device, the WMA now have been through two different compression schemes. If that guy's buddy wants a copy, but he can only use MP3s, then Mr WMA converts the WMA files to MP3 and now those MP3s are worse than the original MP3, which should have never been traded to begin with, see?

So, basically, trade in lossless audio only. If someone doesn't know how to listen or convert them, take a few minutes to teach them. It's for the greater good. Lossy compression blows goats.