I'm not sure I totally understood your post. lol I have several audio apps for different purposes either due to their abilities or preference of use for purpose. You can pay reasonable money for a good audio editor. But Audacity is free & does much of what the pro apps can do. It's somewhat slower, but heh it's free.

If you're searching for audio material that's not in common supply then you get what you can, even if that means a copy made off tape or vinyl, or low quality encoded mp3's. Some people use very old comp's with very small HDD's just for the purpose of P2P. So with limited space they encode accordingly to share whilst not running out of space. As for the the other people who offer poor/low quality encoding ... ???? Attitude possibly. They take gold but give copper or tin in return. But for some it's perhaps the best they can give/offer.

well, fair enough. I`ll address your puzzlement with a question lordoftherings:

Which do you prefer: Dvd or vhs cassette ?
and..

Would you rather give someone rubbish or feel better in the notion you`ve been able to circulate something half decent. You`d have to be talking VERY old machines cause,surely,a standard minimum now is at least 40gigs?
I dunno how many windows 95 users there are out there but I`m willing to bet they have at least 12gb`s.

I made that suggestion b/c I have read of such people who have shown up on the forum running very old machines basically just for p2p; be they old macs or pc's or whatnot. And not only on this forum.

Why should I make any xcuses for them. I suppose people use what they can get their hands on or just an old machine that's lying around doing nothing better so puttting it to good use. The previous are people who don't have much money & can't afford to buy the latest & some have even rebuilt a machine from old parts. These people complain about not having much space. That's if I believe what I read.

But barely an xcuse when you think about it. I have just the same thoughts as suggested in my earliest post. It's probably better they share 20 decent quality rips than 50-100 crappy things that few people seriously want.

Most people really don't know anything about encoding, so "few people" is probably inaccurate.

And I suspect that the distortions in the sound result from mass-encoding files from multiple CD drives simultaneously. About five years ago I had a (unsurprisingly old) computer that created the exact same noises when I played back CDs, which tells me that those sounds result from not having enough system resources to get the sound to run in a steady stream for long enough. It is likely that the people ripping the CDs are more concerned with quantity than quality. You've probably seen the computer towers that are a solid stack of CD drives; get the picture? I say that because physical music pirating in China (roughly 1/4 of all music media in East Asia is pirated) generates the same noise artifacts, and they most definitely are doing things the massive quick way.

^ I think a lot of it might be attributed to original source:digital radio recordings that people are obviously making and then editing with bad quality programs.Some of those D.a.b
broadcasts reallyarent much better than analog. There are tracks with either way to much bass & static :a common mistake,the recording levels been set too high whilst recording(crackly distortion).

I think both pea_pod & Phyltre have made extremely valid points. Older processors & certainly the majority of older pc's used microprocessors that were not designed for graphic processing & their calculations were averaged, not accurate. Floating-Point Processor: 'is' very accurate; (I don't know about today's win pc's b/c it was used by macs & other high end computers) I read about it in an audio engineering book at university & was told about it by Apple when looking at a specialised video card some years ago that these were required. This point of course doesn't help.

Lack of knowledge/skills! Yeah once you had to do a course or learn from live mixing to know how to adjust sound properly. Too many novices with toys in their laps.

There's also 3rd party shareware softw for iTunes called Audio Hijack Pro which can equalise/clean mp3's etc. But if used in demo mode then after 15 days the mp3's will become more & more distorted (as stated by the company themselves.) I wonder! Read about it here! Strange in the manual it said 15 days. Oh well!

Good point about the broadcasts. I hadn't even thought about that.

hmmm... As well as quality reduction…
I noticed a few beginnings/endings on tracks that have been prematurely faded in/out & track times are reduced compared to official track listings (probably where the radio dj talks over the music ect...)

Yeppers, a few people with toys out there…