Re: The future of trading

["Jason Peterson" <Presence@xxxxxxxxx>]

While I doubt my free SHN server (or anyone else's) will kill trading, it
does raise some interesting thoughts.  Perhaps trading will become more of
an "over the internet" venture than through snail mail.  And video still has
a long way to go -- I am terribly disappointed that digital video (MiniDV,
Digital8, etc) did not catch on at all outside of the camcorder market.
Digital video would do for live Zeppelin video what DAT did for audio: MUCH
better circulation of MUCH lower generation material.  I guess people are
sitting on the fence waiting for home DVD recorders.

Whoever posted about the storage space is right.  SHNs, though smaller than
pure WAVs, still take up an enormous amount of space.  That is why I
discourage modem users from downloading SHNs; it simply takes too long.  An
average Zeppelin show (two or so hours) takes 1 gig of space.  The longer
1977 shows: 1.3 gigs each.  But I figure on two things: it will take me
awhile to get all the shows up, and during the course of that time larger
capacity hard drives will become cheaper.  On another note, my server now
has 360 gigs storage capacity, and I wonder if that might be enough already.

Some have asked why I don't drop SHN and host MP3s instead.  MP3 is a
compression scheme that loses certain parts of the recording during
conversion.  To an untrained ear a highly encoded MP3 still sounds pretty
good, but I guarantee if you convert MP3 to WAV back and forth a few times
you'll end up with absolute crap.  SHN, on the other hand, is a compression
scheme that loses none of the original WAV's material.  WAV>SHN>WAV and
you'll end up with exactly the same WAV.  It's a bit like a ZIP file, but
for audio.  So I host SHNs so that when you convert it back to WAV, you have
a copy as good as anybody else's.