This particular release you've warned me about (The Mountain Goats - All Hail West Texas) was made by the artist sitting in front of his own Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox with a guitar recording these songs directly into the little boombox mic to cassette, and then the label released the pressed cd (from which I ripped) from that cassette master. There are no other recordings of these songs unless you make an audience bootleg. Quality is of course crucial and I appreciate that about this site, but isn't good music the ultimate reason we're all here? And I would argue that this cd IS quality! After all, a lossless copy of a cassette mastered release is going to sound much better, and retain all of the artist's intent in choosing to record to cassette, than a lossy copy of the same.

Now, I would also argue that an artistic decision to record to cassette is different than what the rules say about being vhs or cassette sourced. That implies no encodes from a consumer's vhs or cassette that they've listened to and played out, not what the artist as an artistic decision decided to record to as his medium! e.g. if Trent Reznor decided to, say as an artistic statement against 128k aac itunes songs, encode one of his tracks at 100k and then re-encode it to PCM WAV before mastering and pressing. Thus providing the only possible way for us to listen to it apart from at shows as being "sourced" from a 100k audio file! Would you then ban that song if the album was uploaded here? I think not...

Anyway, this Mountain Goats a.k.a. John Darnielle album contains some of my favorite songs of his--and of his fan base in general if you were to judge from the people singing along at his concerts--and it doesn't seem right to prevent people from having access to the highest possible quality recordings of these songs.

On the same note, I notice that Nirvana's box set "With The Lights Out" is available in several bitrates and formats on this site including lossless. This contains many songs whose masters (being the medium originally recorded on, which were later pressed to the consumer available cd the rips were taken from) include: boombox-recorded band practices; a live performance (which I assume is a bootleg); Cobain's 4-track home recordings; Cobain's acoustic performance on Calvin Johnson's college radio show; Cobain's boombox-recorded home demos; etc... This box set--in the same way as the cd I uploaded--is the only place for us to hear and enjoy these songs.

Please reconsider banning my upload and my warning.

And again, thanks for reading.