I've made a few friends over at easytree. A lot of great traders and archivists there, but yer right, wow, are they crabby about lineage and source. We have so much mp3 source material in our trade circles that it makes it hard to share what we have on that site. It still seems a waste to start a Fleetwood Mac torrent site when that one works so well. We should make more use of what's there but just torrent the good stuff we can verify.
First, we need to clean up our sources by getting back to the original cd and tape like you've mentioned. Another way I've started to clean up my stuff before trading with the torrent guys is to rip good audio from my video sources. I have some VHS and dvds with better source audio than a lot of audience boots floating around the trade community. I know they don't want mp3 material on the torrents, but just because something is sourced from an original tape doesn't mean it's worth trading either. There are a lot of lousy uncompressed audio boots going around that are not as good as the audios I've ripped from my old video tapes and dvds.
We can put out the best things on easytree and people can download or not as they wish. Not everything there is perfect but alot is much better than what you find floating around FM trade circles. We need to make the effort to put only the best stuff out so everyone will be cool with it. It might take some time to get other traders on board with what we FM fans torrent but that's only because FM boots have a bad reputation. I haven't seen any complaints so far about the FM material uploaded to date. As long as the door is open we should take advantage of what's there and do what we can to bring the FM music up to standard and get it out to more listeners than our own camp. Fans of other bands are still sitting on gems we'd want because they know we'll poison our own well (had to say that
) if they allow us to get good source material and degrade it amongst ourselves.
The point about the industry torrent backlash is important to note. However, if anyone in the band got serious about attacking fans trading home made audience recordings, some of their own camps have some splainin to do about how stuff gets out that wasn't home made by fans.
