[Mazer]

Originally Posted by TankGirl

This might not be a very good idea. Mixing higher quality rips to lower quality rips on the fly will just gradually degrade the average quality of the content pool and make it harder to spot original high quality releases apart from their more or less degraded versions. It is much better to try to distribute high quality releases as such, untouched, and thereby maximize the number of peers having them in the multisourced environment. If a lower quality version is needed for some reason, it should be distributed similarly untouched, so that the peers having it could form another large set of sources for downloaders.

This doesn't have to be the case if Ogg Vorbis files are used. It supports a feature called peeling: basically you encode a high bitrate file once and any lower bitrate file can then be peeled out of it without causing transcoding artifacts. Ogg also has a very flexible tagging system, and if the content creator so chose he could include information in the tag that pointed to the source of the original file along with its hash. This way if a user came across a low bitrate file and decided he wanted the high quality version he could easily find the right file to download. These are minor points in a world dominated by MP3, but if the p2p client supported Ogg peeling and Ogg tag searching then it would give artists that much more control over the way their art gets distributed.