Guidelines For Seeding A New Show
[WheelToTheStorm] flows with TradeFriendly music mastered at the show, as well as donated from the community. The long document below takes you through each step of preparing your donation- your seed- for proper distribution as FLAC files. What is covered:

• Quality Control
• DAT Transfer or DAE
• Tracking (Aesthetics and Sector Boundaries)
• NamingStandards
• Compression and Fingerprinting 
• Info File 

Quality First

• Check around for best-available copies within the trading community for your band, and consult available references. Sometimes fans maintain circulation guides.
• Visit the ShnDatabase. This resource lists many performances that have made it into lossless format already. Will yours be an upgrade? Don't just duplicate previous efforts.
• Listen carefully to your show. If there are flaws in your copy, are there flawless sources available? Do a little research into the recording's lineage, contact the person from whom you got it, and make sure that the flaws on your copy are on every copy in that line. If not, you could use a new copy as well!
• Do not start with source material from lossy compression such as mp3, mp4, or aac. It has already lost some frequencies that cannot be regained. Instead, track down the original .wav source from which the .mp3s were made. You might want to do a little source analysis on a couple sample tracks of a show to see if what you see is consistent with the type of source you're supposed to have; and to see if the transfer was done properly.
• Quality is much more important than speed. Take your time during seed preparation to do a careful job. Don't let all the people begging to get a new show lead you to cut corners - once a quality show is out, they'll forget the wait. The wait is temporary, flaws in a seed last forever.
• Do not seed EAC rips of already existing lossless sources. Adding DAE generations is frowned upon and has potential for loss of quality.
• Alter source text files for existing lossless sources with care. Please do so if you have also made a change to the source itself. You can also update source text files to correct or expand on source/lineage information and track listings.

Transferring Your Seed

From Laptop No "transfer" step since recording occurred directly to computer, but recording may have to be downsampled for 44.1kHz audio CD format. References: [24-bit FAQ], [laptop-tapers]

Tracking the Seed for CD

Aesthetics

• Place inter-disc cuts at a quiet spot in the performance (preferably at a set break, or at a pause between songs) and not in the middle of a killer jam. This sometimes means leaving a disc only partially filled so that all the segues are together on a disc. It's more important to have the music hang together cohesively than to have totally-full CDs. Discs are relatively cheap.
• Find appropriate places in the performance so that it will fit on standard 74-minute CDs. 80-minute discs are plentiful and widely available now, but not everyone uses them. If you want to keep everyone happy, try to keep the discs to 74 minutes or less. (Though at this point, this is far less an issue than it once was, especially if it means fitting a show on one less disc.)
• If crowd noise or a spoken story is present between tracks, track it so the crowd noise is at the end of one tune, not at the beginning of the next. (If it's a really long story, consider tracking it as a separate track.) This way, eager listeners can skip right to the beginning of a song instead of waiting through some cheering. However, if there is a short kick-off or an introduction to a song, consider putting it at the beginning of the track. Don't cut off any musical notes at the beginning of a song, even if there's talking or intro over them.

Tracking at Sector Boundaries

• To avoid sector boundary errors (SBEs), just use the right tool in the right way to do your track splits. The simplest and best tool for tracking a show is [CD Wave], for Windows. The program's sole purpose is to split .wav files into proper CD sector-aligned tracks. The interface is very simple and easy to use. CDWave does not delete your original wav file; instead, it generates a separate set of tracks. Also, you can save a cue sheet with the split points for the tracks. This allows you to generate a set of split tracks and see how you like them, and if you decide to make changes you can go back and generate a new set of tracks from the original long wav file.
• Most audio editing programs (e.g., Sound Forge, Cool Edit, etc.) do not automatically cut files along sector boundaries. Either change their settings to force them to split .wav files correctly (to cut on a 1/75th second CD sector boundary), or avoid them for CD tracking.
• For the Mac, there is no direct equivalent of CD Wave. Dave Mallick notes, "[SoundEdit 16] is quite capable of splitting a transferred DAT into tracks. Just set ruler units to frames, set 1 second = 75 frames, and have at it. As long as you enter a whole frame value into your selection box, you get perfect sector boundary cuts every time." This is also the case for [Felt Tip Sound Studio].
• Do any editing or "mastering" before doing your track splits. Never add fades or edits to .wav files after you track them. Doing so can push them out of alignment.
• An easy way of checking for sector boundary errors is by use of [shntool]'s len function. If you see a -b- flag next to the listing, that indicates a boundary error. 
• For Linux (UNIX), there is a program called [wavbreaker] that will allow tracking on correct sector boundaries.
• For Unix, there are two programs called [cdrdao] and [gcdmaster] for tracking CDs. gcdmaster comes in handy because writing toc/cue files for cdrdao with a text editor, by hand, is usually slightly boring at best and frustratingly tedious at worst.
• If you are reseeding, recent versions of FlacFrontend have a working "align on sector boundaries" feature which can repair improperly cut files.
• SBEs will sound louder or softer depending on the CD player. They may be very loud and annoying for some listeners, even if they are not noticeable on your own system.

More Quality Control

File Naming

Compression and Fingerprinting

FLAC 

Creating an Info File

• Create a new file in a text-viewing program (like Notepad, Wordpad, Windows, etc) and start typing and/or pasting from your reference material. Include info as directed below. When done, save as plain text, not a fancier format like .doc, so that anyone can read the file on their own platform.
• Include the band name, date and venue.
• Include source information that is as complete as possible: full genealogy, DAT transfer method, etc. This greatly helps the many people who know how to interpret source info. In contrast, having very sketchy info will cause many traders to shun your seed. Feel free to ask your trading partner for more info, or his trading partner...
• Include a track listing with disc and track numbering, song titles, and ideally track timings as well. If you don't know the song title, leave a ? next to the track number- someone may be able to fill it in later.
• Add track and disc timings to help people decide what length disc to use (74 vs 80 min), whether or not to move songs between discs to their taste, whether to add filler, whether to use one of your tracks as filler, etc. 
• Add any observations and notes. Point out flaws or splices, and any need for 80 min discs. People appreciate being forewarned.
• Feel free to give credit to others, especially the generous taper(s) who made the recording (unless they wish to remain anonymous).
• Take credit (and responsibility) yourself. If you produce good seeds, people will look out for your name in the info file, as a mark of quality. Add your email address if you like, so you can help address any problems that might come up.
• Do NOT place restrictions on what people can do with your fileset. Once you release it, it's in the public domain, subject only to the band's trading policy. Not only are "restrictions" like "Do not convert to .mp3" and "Do not remaster" completely unenforceable, but they are obnoxious, impractical and go against the spirit of the community.

If There Are Problems