* (Updated) Music releases must have an average bitrate >= 192kbps, regardless of the format. There is one exception to this rule:
o (New) LAME V2/APS, V1 and V0/APX releases are allowed to dip below 192kbps. We strongly encourage the use of LAME 3.97 with the V0 switch for encoding. You can find out more information about LAME and its options at the Hydrogenaudio wiki. You can also find a thorough guide for good CD ripping on jiGGafellz' site.
* (New) Albums must not be ripped to a single track. Each track should be a seperate file. If you need a tool to split up an MP3+CUE into individual tracks, you could try musiCutter.
* Music releases must be properly labelled and ideally also have corresponding tags (ID3/APEv2/Vorbis comment).
* No transcodes or re-encodes of releases are acceptable here. There are no exceptions to this rule, no matter how rare you claim it is.
* Music releases must be a folder containing the music, not an archive (i.e. .rar, .zip, .tar). The only exception to this is if it is a single file where a torrent of a single file would be acceptable, though still not archived.
* CD Image files like .bin, .iso and .nrg are not allowed in music torrents.
* Radio, television, web rips and podcasts are not allowed. It does not matter whether it's FM, direct satellite, internet or even if it's a pre-broadcast tape (too difficult for us to moderate such things). Radio does not have enough bandwidth to meet our 192kbps rule. Plus, anything on the radio has already been through several conversions/reencodes.
* No audience recordings - no matter how rare or how good you think they are.
* Music uploaded here must not be freely available on the web (from official sources such as record label or band websites). If you could just download from the web, so can everyone else. Uploads can be from other torrent sites but you take responsibility for determining that the music is not transcoded.
* Music releases should be properly labelled. This means you should not be sharing a folder which is just the album name. The minimum you should have for a folder is 'Artist - Title'. A little extra effort from you saves a lot of time for others.
* File names must reflect the song titles. You may not have file names like track01.mp3, track02.mp3, etc.
* Torrents should never be tagged as [REQ] or [REQUEST]. If you fill a request using Requests then everyone who voted for it will be automatically notified.
* The Artist field in the torrent name should contain only the artist name. Any tags like [Advance] or sub-genres (if you must use them) should come at the end of the Title field.
* CD sourced music must not contain pops or clicks (rip/encode errors). They will be deleted if reported.
* Cassette and VHS sourced music is not suitable for this site, the frequency range is not good enough to meet the high quality we strive to maintain here.
* All music torrents must be encoded with a single encoder using the same settings. This means you cannot create a torrent which contains both CBR and VBR files, nor can you upload torrents containing a mix of APS/V2 and APX/V0.
* Duplicate torrents are not allowed. For example, if a torrent exists on the site at 256kbps, no further torrents at 256kbps or lower bitrate are allowed. Significantly higher bitrate rips or different file formats of the same content are allowed (applies to lossy codecs only). There is one exception to this rule:
o A LAME --alt-preset-extreme (or the newer equivalent, -V0) rip is allowed on the site at any time, even if a higher CBR rip is already on the site. Only 1 APX/V0 rip, though. Lying about the quality or transcoding a release in order to meet this condition will result in severe consequences.
Multi Album Torrents
* Multi-album torrents are now not allowed on the site under any circumstances. That means no discographies, pitchfork compilations etc. Discographies make it a hassle for users to download individual albums, result in a lot of duplicate albums being uploaded and are generally very poor quality.
* All music torrents must be one release, so if an album is 2CDs, it is fine to upload that as a single torrent. However, uploading 2 or more different albums in one torrent is strictly forbidden. Greatest hits and best of compilations with several CDs are ok. Boxsets may be uploaded as one torrent so long as they do not contain any discs that are available as another individual retail release.
Lossless Torrents
* A FLAC release which contains a .log of the rip process can be uploaded when there is already a FLAC without a .log, or the existing torrent has CRC mismatches. In the latter case, the existing torrent must be reported or your new one will be deleted as a duplicate. If a FLAC torrent already exists, no alternative lossless format may be uploaded.
* Uncompressed WAV files are not allowed. Many lossless compression routines exist which are cross-platform and severely reduce the filesize. We recommend FLAC.