it seems ironic that someone who complains so vociferously about the quality of an old FM recording, is at the same time saying we should ignore the quality difference between lossless and lossy files.
When the Smiths stuff was recorded, there was only cassette tape and the post. Each time a recording was copied and traded, the quality would decrease noticably. So it was quite possible to get a recording sourced from the soundboard, which after many copies sounded worse that a master audience recording. It was understood that the source of a recording and the quality of the sound did not neccessarily corrolate.
An FM recording has many variables. How the orginal recording was mixed ... some stations used to mix up the audience to make it sound more live on air for instance. How good was the radio signal. 80s English local radio didn't have much range, so signals could be pretty crap. What was it captured on ... equipment in the 80s wasn't always that great. Given those things, and then add a few generations of copying, and you could quite likely have an FM broadcast that didn't sound that great ... especially compared to something recorded today from satellite radio, which has always been in the digital domain.
Some of us unreasonable tapers from the old school, who for some unfathomable reason seem to care about the sound quality of our bootlegs, do differentiate between the source of a show, and it's quality. We like to know the lineage of a recording as much as possible, so that we can work out if we can get a better quality version of a recording. This is why many of us don't like to have lossy versions of the files widely circulated. Once you have an MP3 of a file ... you've chucked away most of the information which you'll never get back. Recordings may be coverted back and forth between various formats, each time getting worse and worse ... not unlike casette generations in a way.
Then someone ungreatful soul comes along, downloads a crap MP3 and complains what a load of shit the recorder is.
I understand that poeple want to listen to MP3s. But surely they want good quality MP3s? Why not download the lossless version and convert it to MP3 to listen to. OK ... I know a lot of people can't be bothered. They want everything for free and they want it now. I know asking people to not convert things to MP3 is pointless ... once the cat is out of the bag ... its out! But I also understand why people ask that.
Its mainly beacuse the people who are most vocal about MP3s are so obnoxious about it. Tapers spend a lot of time, effort and money to make the best recordings they can. They do it beacuse they love the music, and think that its worth preserving. I think the Smiths were the best live band that ever played, and I've tried to document as much of that as I can. To me, part of that is getting other people to hear the stuff I've recorded, which I'm happy to share with everyone for free.
It pisses me off when I come on sites like this to see so many of my shows here, which have been converted to MP3 by someone who effectively claims ovwnership of the recording beacuse they did the conversion. I've seen so many posts by self important people who are pretty much saying ... I'm such a great guy, here's another recording I've provided for you, more great work from me. As if it was particularly hard to go over to smithtorrents, download a flac version, and convert it to MP3. Then they go on to call them fascists because they care about the quality of their rercordings. Its not the fact they are now in MP3 ... its the attitude.
So I can understand that people decide not to 'share' their recordings any more. I trade with many people, who let me have stuff that's not generally available on the understanding that I won't trade it on. I can tell you that you're missing out on some really great stuff ... and the majority aren't sharing this stuff beacuse of the attitudes shown in places like this.
Personally, I've decided to ignore you as much as possible. When I read some of the posts in threads like this, I feel like saying ... f*** you, I can't be bothered to give you anything else. But ultimately, the reason I got into this in the first place was to document and share ... so I'm not going to let a few self-important loud mouths spoil things for everyone.
How many of you have actually contributed anything to the bootleg pool? Probably not many. How hard is it then to have some manners and show the people who did all the hard work, creating the recording you enjoy, a bit of respect.
