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• Ratings
• Audio/Video Formats

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Ratings

Essentially there are three things that can currently be rated: a song, a song performance, and a recording (whether official or otherwise). We decided in designing the ratings that a song's rating should not be the average of the ratings of its performance (as one performance can be bad for any number of technical reasons not related to the actual song quality). Secondly, a song may be decided to be better live than on recording or vice-versa. As such, you can rate individual performances, each song individually, and each recording.

The one exception to this rule is if there is a single performance of a song (take ...And Nothing Less for example) in which case you can only rate the song and not the performance (since there is no real distinction). Should another performance be added, the song and original performance will be individually rateable.

If you have rated a song, your rating will show up in green. The overall rating shows up in gold. Unrated songs are completely gray.

Example #1, You rated it a 3, the average rating is a 4:

Example #2, You rated it a 4, the average rating is a 3:

Example #3, You have not yet rated the song, the average rating is a 3:

Example #4, The song is unrated:

 

Audio/Video Formats

Lossless codecs

Lossless means that the original waveform is compressed without losing any of the original quality (conversely, mp3 and other formats are lossy).  The tradeoff for lossless compression is that the file size of a lossless song will be much larger than the file size of an mp3 of that song.  You can read much more about lossless compression at Wikipedia.  Because lossless codecs preserve the integrity of the original source, many traders only share their material in lossless formats and forbid sharing of encoded mp3s.

FLAC

FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is (as the name suggests) a lossless compression codec.   You can read more about FLAC on Wikipedia.  You may need to download a plugin for your media player in order to properly play FLAC files.  You may also need to convert FLAC files to mp3 or another format if your digitial audio player does not recognize FLAC.  The wikipedia article on FLAC links to many such plugins and encoders.  Here is a link to the winamp FLAC plugin.

 

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