BitTorrent 101 – Seeding Live Music Shows

Seeding shows

Most of the links in the BitTorrent 101 summary are for using an existing torrent, since of course that’s how most people start out. If you’re ready to try to seed a show, here are some useful links. Unless noted, all the software is freeware/shareware.

Remember that you have to read and follow the policies for the site and tracker where you plan to upload the torrent.

The most important thing by far is to start with a good quality source. It’s always good to listen to or watch your version before seeding hundreds of copies; and if need be check around or ask around to see if there’s a better version in circulation.

Some other useful general principles are:
– Try to seed the best available version of a show. Some shows have many versions, with varying sources, such as audience tapes, FM broadcasts, copies of pre-FM tapes, etc.
– Preserve the quality of that version by doing a careful job of creating the seed.
– Take the time to get the seed into good shape before creating and starting the torrent. It may take a little more time to do things like using real track names (not “Track01.flac”!). But if the seeder doesn’t do things right, it’s a lot more work for all the downloaders to fix problems.

And of course, look at how some other torrents are seeded and try to follow the better examples of that.

This should go without saying, but unfortunately it doesn’t: Don’t ever, ever, ever convert a lossy format to a lossless one. The compression to mp3 takes out some information. Just leave it as mp3, the sound quality never gets improved by format conversions. Any further format conversions can only lose quality (if lossy to lossy, like mp3 to mp4, or real audio or DAB to mp3) or just take up more space (like mp3 or DAB to flac, shn, wav or CD).

Please don’t seed commercially available or officially released material.

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