Really Dumb Flac Fingerprint Questions...

[velvetsailor]

And probably dumber still because I bet the answers are around here somewhere already. I'm not even sure I know how to ask intelligent questions on this stuff actually...

But this seems like stuff I should know before I take it upon myself to start uploading things, right?

I'm wondering why the flac fingerprint thing isn't a user-end option like making things into mp3 or whatever, i.e., the part of it where people make changes to flac files like tags or whatever. If a flac file can change without changing the fingerprint, how do you assure that those kinds of changes aren't made to a torrent in progress? Or that someone isn't going to get the "99.9" error trying to help seed a torrent that they *think* the have, but has altered flac files, for example?

Some of that may be unlikely but computers being equipped with an increasing amount of stuff that tries to be helpful in ways I don't understand or didn't actually ask for, I have no idea if I have anything on board that thinks it's doing a service by adding tags to flac files if they're played on the computer, inbetween my having downloaded a torrent and trying to seed it.
(Not that I play flac files on the puter but eventually that would be handy).

Is it preferrable / permissable to include both whole-file md5s and flac fingerprints?

And are the flac fingerprints required to be amongst the uploaded files themselves, or just in the post?

And, um... after reading a number of pages about all this, I still seem to be missing the how-to of flac fingerprints. If I open FLAC Frontend, select my flac files, and click "fingerprint", then it's going to create a file that contains the information that is required to be posted with the torrent and can be copied and pasted into the upload form? Or is it more complicated than that?

Also, can anyone recommend good links on shntool - where to get it and how to use it? There are some links in the introductory how-to here (RainDawg's site?) that were probably great but the links don't seem to be good anymore.

Thanks in advance for any light that might be shed on my confusion here.

P.S. If it helps make it less complicated to try to explain this to me, I don't have EAC up and running, so anything I'd want to upload comes from a lot of shows that I downloaded from some tracker or another most of which already arrived as flac files, but a lot of them that didn't come with a list of fingerprints.

[AAR.oner]

Originally Posted by velvetsailor

Is it preferrable / permissable to include both whole-file md5s and flac fingerprints?

yes, you can include both, but more preferrable than an md5 would be an .st5 [shntool md5]

Originally Posted by velvetsailor

And are the flac fingerprints required to be amongst the uploaded files themselves, or just in the post?

yes, the .ffp should be included in the set of files, as well as in the post

Originally Posted by velvetsailor

And, um... after reading a number of pages about all this, I still seem to be missing the how-to of flac fingerprints. If I open FLAC Frontend, select my flac files, and click "fingerprint", then it's going to create a file that contains the information that is required to be posted with the torrent and can be copied and pasted into the upload form? Or is it more complicated than that?

here is a tutorial on fingerprints...like Five says in the tutorial, we recommend the program Traders Little Helper, since it'll do just about everything you need when it comes to trading lossless:
http://thor.prohosting.com/roh0205/