Does it really matter if its a first or second gen (or 3rd, 4th, etc) CD surely its all 1s and 0s.Edited by: #Ian#

I could be corrected here, but I don't believe it matters.


Regardless, though, thats what md5s are for. Im in the process now of adding md5s to the trading archive (text files will be up by the end of today) and it should be done soon.

Once that occurs, you'll be able to just match a download or trade to the original md5 to ensure it is the same recording.

md5?

Here is information on md5s from etree.org (a great resource):

it matters in that any time a copy is made it may contain new defects and then they are passed on, it's best to get low generation shows and when you're seeding for an ftp or bt you should try to ensure yours is an early generation cd, this is mostly for shows that are in wav format, with shn shows you can check the md5, and flacs have fingerprints and i guess that is similar, though i'm not certain how they work

Is it better to rip the show from your own CD with something like EAC and burning it from those wavs or copy directly from cd to cd?

Can't answer that last question.

But the whole generation thing can still be avoided through md5s. Even if you trade, all you have to do is rip it to your computer, convert to shn, and run md5 verification. Then, just delete the files from your computer. If it passes, you know that the wavs on your cd are uncorrupted.

Aren't file corruption a think of the past? I never had one with a DSL modem.

i think its in the decompressing and burning not in the transmission

I've been burning CDs for six years so I'll just share some of my thoughts and experiences..

re: generations of CD
You should be able to make 100 copies of a CD and the hundredth copy will still sound exactly the same as the first copy. If you try to copy a CD and it has a defect then you will see the message 'Data Verification Failed' when the burn has stopped! I always bin CDs that failed the data verification check, no matter what. In the bin straight away.


re: copying a show
I always do a straight CD-to-CD copy, I don't rip off the individual tracks as .wav first. If you're worried about buffer underruns, choose the 'Image Recorder' option in Nero, and it will make a dump of the entire contents of the source CD to the hard-drive first before writing to the destination CD.


I'm really really surprised to hear that people here aren't checking the MD5 files for verification of their downloads [img]smileys/smiley3.gif[/img] Do people not do CRC checks on their zip files either?

File corruption is rare but it does still happen on all types of media. If I had a penny for every corrupt floppy disk/CD I've seen people with... I used to own a Realtek RTL8029 network card years ago that used to corrupt files transfered across our LAN. We later discovered that the problem was caused by the Microsoft driver that installs by default. When we installed the proper Realtek driver, no file corruption.


One question I've wanted to ask for a while: Why do people not use ISO images to transfer the Damien shows ?
You would solve the problem of people inadvertently burning 2 seconds gaps between tracks, every CD would have the exact same volume label so you could download each shows details from the CDDB database.. the only reason I can think of is that there is better compression on the SHN files?

I know people *cough* who trade the latest betas versions of Windows and all the leaked releases are done through ISO format. there are other technical reasons behind this too (the fact that the CDs are bootable from DOS and must meet certain technical CD format requirements).


Anyway, people should really be checking all CDs that burn, especially data CDs. I've been archiving my collection of data CDs to DVD over the past few months and all but 1 out of several hundred CD's read successfully.

my poor lost Smashing Pumpkins documentaries [img]smileys/smiley19.gif[/img]

oh I forgot to say, I think the reason CD generation came up in the first place was that Mario was refering to people who make MP3s from Audio CDs and THEN burn them back as Audio CD's for their friends (from the MP3 source rather than the prefered CD source)

so you have....


CD source (good quality) ----> encoded to MP3 (not quite as good quality) ----> burned to CD (still not sounding as good as the first CD they came from)


So you can imagine if enough people kept doing this over and over it would degrade the quality of the recording and 'pollute the trading pool'. This seems to be the main concern of Mario and the other guys..

Awww... you know, I noticed that, too. On one of the data discs I burned (a collection of videos) one of the videos didn't playback from CD properly, though I could copy the file back and forth.

Now I got so paranoid about loosing stuff that I run through all videos I burn in real time before I delete them from the HD. Well, the ones hat would be really hard to replace.

I never had a problem with burning audio files ever that I remember. No, I never check those nor zip files [img]smileys/smiley5.gif[/img]

There is a great free program called CDCheck that's only 300K that will check any CDs that you want. It can also compare the contents of two CDs aginst each other or compare a directory on your hard-drive to a CD (very handy for that situation you mentioned Angela)

http://fusion.zejn.si


(yeah burning audio tracks usually works no problem..)

I am surprised that you do this, to be quite honest. I don't even leave my computer running programs at work when I am burning a CD, let alone burn my music from CD to CD. What if there is a tiny glitch in your system, or the most minute fluctuation of power? I have never trusted the stability of burning on the fly, and have always extracted my Wav files with EAC before reburning them with Feurio! or a similar program. You seem to take all of the other precautions; this just surprises me, that is all. I guess the Image Recorder option on Nero is similar? Why not use EAC?


(In the jamband community, that is the only/preferred way of burning shows, fwiw.)

Actually my reason for raising it was that I was reading the rules for notation on the trading site and thre was all this cd(1)->cd(2) stuff that I found strange. I realise that bit errors do occour on occasion but I'm with Loveless in thinking that CD's should be indentical.

That looks useful - thanks.

My last Dell came mistakenly with a CD-R drive and a CDR/DVD-writer. I decided to keep them both and there is nothing cooler than copy at 16x on the fly from one drive to the other.

I mail them out without testing (obviously I'd redo whatever goes wrong), but in a year of pretty heavy trading I never had a problem at all, other than the one file mentioned above.

I use my computer normally while I'm burning the discs, too, though Windows multitasking is a joke, so it's not exactly what I'd call smooth.

If anything goes wrong, Nero will just barf.

I was supossed to edit that second part of the FAQ on the DRTS before we opened up. You can see the first part is written very different from the latter half.

Instead, we put the Archive together. (.txt are up, now Im getting ready to start on md5s)

In the next month or two the FAQ will be much more encompassing and clearer.

Awesome! I ran the program against the disc that has the problem (video plays buyt I can't copy the file to HD) and it detected the problem.

I just burned all my Damien videos to CD, so I'm going to check and double check that now [img]smileys/smiley36.gif[/img]

i think the main reason we use shn or flaq rather than ISOs is that


a) flaq > shn > iso in terms of compression


b) less chance of corruption of you download each shn or flaq individually instead of a whole ISO. for example, mario uploaded a show to me today and during the upload i had to reboot so he would have continuedon that last shn instead of the whole thing. i have used ISOs for *cough* games and also sharing the groove.





everyone should check their md5s before they burn.





also, mario dont forget to link my ftp faq to the faq here