Question about formats

First off, excellent site and community. Thanks for all that you do!

I'm new here and want to contribute anything useful that I can. But I'm a bit confused about preferred formats. In the world of GH/RB type content, in order of preference, what are the preferred formats? A single mogg, ogg tracks, flac, mp3 etc.

And then if it's not a single mogg, what's preferable, every track from the source mogg? Tracks that can be summed to a single stereo track summed (ex: 4 drum tracks summed to a stereo track)?

I know there are varying quality content out there and like most, I want the best quality possible.

Thanks

RB Content: Best is the original decrypted mogg file. This is almost always 44.1kHz. If it is 48kHz then you have a mogg re-encode of a rip. For rips you want FLAC.

GH Content: Best are the original decrypted MP3 files. After that you want FLAC conversions from XMA. Anything else is a re-encode of a rip.

If you have a lossy encoded file, you should never re-encode it. If you have to, encode to FLAC to save space and not introduce generational loss. But in general you want to have as few conversions as possible, because encoding a lossy file to FLAC does nothing but increase the filesize.

When you are posting, just post the source files that you have. There is no reason to encode to a different format or change anything.

And what you were doing with Van Halen is reposting tracks somebody else already posted as less-convenient WAV files. Reposting is not something you should ever do unless you are posting a higher quality or better-separated track.

Perfect. Thanks for all the info!

As for the VH stuff. I'm 99% sure I didn't repost (paying close attention to the site rules). That one mega post was after my few. At any rate, I now understand about the re-encode and formats.

Mucho Gracias!

I also corrected my 6 VH posts. I still had the original zip files so I imported the .mogg files and removed all the wav's. Replaced the old zips with the new ones (keeping the name the same). This allowed me to keep the old links in place. Tested links.

I was also wondering about this myself, but one thing I'm not sure of is exactly how to use or process the mogg files. I have a lot of this, but to my knowledge thought they were all encrypted? Or is there a way around that?