Some Questions

[Maximus]

Ok, i'm a fairly new to bootlegs and i have a few questions...

I have been downloading mp3 boots so far and burning them on cd for myself to listen to but since no one seems to want mp3's, i have decided to try lossless bootlegs. I know about the whole 2:1 and 4:1 thing to get started but why to if i can download them from the internet.

So here are the questions about lossless:

1. What are the best/most usual filetypes. Is .mkw good?
2. You cant listen them on winamp, right? So you have to burn them on cd, right?
3. Can you burn them on a regular 700mb cd-r with with regular nero burning cd-rom? Can you listen to them with a typical cd player?
4. Can you convert mp3 to lossless? Is it recommended?

Hope you understood what i was trying to say, thank you for the aswers...

 

[BoBo]

I know about the whole 2:1 and 4:1 thing to get started but why to if i can download them from the internet.

You can get them from the internet (Lossless hub for example), but to have them all, you have to do snail mail trades. You can't find all bootlegs available for download on the internet. That is why we request mail trades from hub members. Everyone has to do his part.

1. What are the best/most usual filetypes. Is .mkw good?

In the hub it is APE. But they are all the same quality. They are lossless. MKW is the rarest one in use.

2. You cant listen them on winamp, right? So you have to burn them on cd, right?

You can get plugins for APE, FLAC and SHN for WinAmp 2. For other versions I'm not sure do they work.

3. Can you burn them on a regular 700mb cd-r with with regular nero burning cd-rom? Can you listen to them with a typical cd player?

Yes. It is not an audio compression. It is similar to ZIP or RAR compression, but it takes advantage of WAV format and it can compress it more then those two. You can convert them back to WAV format and burn them to CD. WAV file is identical before and after compression.

4. Can you convert mp3 to lossless? Is it recommended?

NOOOOO! MP3 is lossy format. When you compress audio to mp3 it losses quality and you can't get it back when you convert MP3 to WAV. Lossless formats do not losse anything. So converting MP3 to lossless is the same as converting MP3 to WAV. That is why we hate when we get mp3 sourced CDs. You don't have to download full CD or go through mail tarde when you can download mp3 from the internet.

 

[MetalPrincess639]

Yeah DO NOT convert them to mp3, you'll end up getting in trouble some way when you are trading, because most of us don't except mp3 bootlegs. Nor do we accept ones that were converted to mp3 or mp3 sourced in any way.

I have Winamp 5.01 (I think) and it plays FLAC files just like WAV or mp3, but I still haven't found a decent plugin for SHN files yet.

As for any audio CD, if you burn it out as an audio CD on Nero you'll be able to listen to it on ANY CD player you come across.


MP

 

[ead666]

To listen to APE, FLAC, SHN, you can use foobar2000 which supports all these formats. You can read a whole concert without hearing blanks between the songs. Moreover, foobar2000 allows you to burn APE, FLAC, SHN, again without these damned gaps between the songs.
Very good software !!

Cheers