As if it never happened?

[Rothchild]

Where (why?) did the FLAC comparison thread / poll go?

[Frankyc2003]

+1
for a minute I thought I'd dreamt it!
:eek:

[The Grand Wazoo]

We had to delete it as it had AoS effectively acting as a host to illegal file sharing.
What's the problem with that, you might ask?
Well, it seriously jeopardises our Google search rankings for one thing, and that's not something we are able to risk.
We had a similar problem with needle drop threads a while back.

[Rothchild]

Fair enough, I did wonder when I listened to them what the legitimacy of sharing them was.

Would it be accptable if I were to provide the OP of that thread with some original pcm .wav material for which I have permission to distribute (as it's stuff that I made) that he can perform the same flac encoding experiment upon, so we can continue the experiment?

The music won't be as exciting (cos we're not AC/DC, or whatever it was in the OP) but the ability to perceive sonic differences (or not) should still be in there.

[Alan Sircom]

Fair enough, I did wonder when I listened to them what the legitimacy of sharing them was.

Would it be accptable if I were to provide the OP of that thread with some original pcm .wav material for which I have permission to distribute (as it's stuff that I made) that he can perform the same flac encoding experiment upon, so we can continue the experiment?

The music won't be as exciting (cos we're not AC/DC, or whatever it was in the OP) but the ability to perceive sonic differences (or not) should still be in there.

Unfortunately, no.

We were planning on publishing MP3 interviews on our new website, but were told that Google's spiders would view it as an illegal file-sharing site and push us way down the Google ranks.

No matter how well documented the rights management, it's the automated systems that cause problems.

[synsei]

That is absolutely ridiculous. Well, there goes the free internet... :steam:

[Yomanze]

Unfortunately, no.

We were planning on publishing MP3 interviews on our new website, but were told that Google's spiders would view it as an illegal file-sharing site and push us way down the Google ranks.

No matter how well documented the rights management, it's the automated systems that cause problems.

This is ridiculous advice. In fact, having a clear content development strategy in place, putting mp3 and video content on your site would have an impact on *increasing* your Google traffic as you'd be putting rich content out there that is more likely to be shared and, crucially, linked to from other websites. Provide text transcripts where possible of audio / video content & this also helps with accessibility & of course text for search engines to index.

If you were just hosting download links to illegally shared content or just 'scraping' other websites' content then you might run into problems, but this isn't the case. There's so much misleading advice that goes on in the digital marketing / SEO industry, I should know, being agency-side for over 7 years.

[Alan Sircom]

This is ridiculous advice. In fact, having a clear content development strategy in place, putting mp3 and video content on your site would have an impact on *increasing* your Google traffic as you'd be putting rich content out there that is more likely to be shared and, crucially, linked to from other websites. Provide text transcripts where possible of audio / video content & this also helps with accessibility & of course text for search engines to index.

If you were just hosting download links to illegally shared content or just 'scraping' other websites' content then you might run into problems, but this isn't the case. There's so much misleading advice that goes on in the digital marketing / SEO industry, I should know, being agency-side for over 7 years.

Thanks for that. We have a lot of 'not invented here' syndrome on our corporate identity. I have suspected some of that comes down to "I don't know how to do that. Let's blame Google" and what you say suggests I'm not far from the truth.

However, if there isn't a content strategy in place - which is going to be very difficult if the content is posted by forum members - it's probably best not to host links to music, because it's hard to distinguish legally owned from illegally shared content.

[nat8808]

Unfortunately, no.

We were planning on publishing MP3 interviews on our new website, but were told that Google's spiders would view it as an illegal file-sharing site and push us way down the Google ranks.

No matter how well documented the rights management, it's the automated systems that cause problems.

aaargh...

Best thing to do then for a free-er internet is to reject the need for Google rankings and use of AdSense etc.

How do news websites or journalistic sites or youtube or bandcamp work then? Seems like one rule for the big guys and another controlling hand for the little guys.

In fact, a website truly using copyrighted material would benefit from the lower profile given to them by Google rankings - Google would in effect be helping to hide them.

[nat8808]

Thanks for that. We have a lot of 'not invented here' syndrome on our corporate identity. I have suspected some of that comes down to "I don't know how to do that. Let's blame Google" and what you say suggests I'm not far from the truth.

However, if there isn't a content strategy in place - which is going to be very difficult if the content is posted by forum members - it's probably best not to host links to music, because it's hard to distinguish legally owned from illegally shared content.

Just realised what you're saying, that the self-policing, the worried about getting blame for poor performance, of those running the website is the problem here.

Forums like Gearslutz have many A/B surveys of self-made content on without seemingly suffering for it, A/Bs of real plate reverb v artificial etc.

[nat8808]

Where (why?) did the FLAC comparison thread / poll go?

The guy who posted it up says in his Welcome forum thread that one was .flac and one was a .wav but given the .flac extension (on the assumption that the player would distinguish the different playback because of the file header embedded in the file).

He's not yet said which was which.... I'm wanting to know ! Really wasn't much in it if at all.

[Alan Sircom]

Just realised what you're saying, that the self-policing, the worried about getting blame for poor performance, of those running the website is the problem here.

Forums like Gearslutz have many A/B surveys of self-made content on without seemingly suffering for it, A/Bs of real plate reverb v artificial etc.

Sort of. It's not so much self-policing, as self-invention that's the root cause of the confusion. As in, instead of using an open source off the shelf CMS engine like Joomla! and spending a few grand making it look unique, our transatlantic counterparts wrote their own proprietary CMS engine and spent hundreds of thousands making it look identical to WordPress sites!

[Rothchild]

How come you didn't just delete the links to the offending material and leave the thread intact to see where the vote and commentary had got to?