FAQ
- Who is the girl on your logo? From what series does she come from?
- How do I change my avatar for this blog?
- Why do you watermark box shots?
- How can I donate to Anime-Sharing Lossless?
- Can I request something?
- DDL and torrent are dead – how do I request a reseed/-upload?
- What is XDCC and how can I XDCC?
- Why are you doing V0 VBR (Variable Bit Rate) MP3 instead of 320kbps CBR (Constant Bit Rate)?
- Why do you rar your torrents?
- What is that “Compression Level” thing in your FLAC releases?
- Who is the girl on your logo? From what series does she come from?
- You mean our mascot? She's Kanemoto Akari from Noble Works, a fine eroge produced by YuzuSoft. Many among us (well, mostly Checkmate and Ignis) love YuzuSoft's artwork (drawn by their lovely artists Kobuichi and Muririn), which is why we made her our mascot. She's cute, don't you think?
Checkmate's note: She's a pure and innocent girl; her moaning during her H-scenes is great; and her fellatio skills are awesome despite being inexperienced.
- How do I change my avatar for this blog?
- The blog, which uses a WordPress platform, pulls avatar from your Gravatar profile. If you would like to have your own avatar shown when commenting, please register a Gravatar account and upload an avatar of your choice. When commenting on our blog, please use the same email that you used for your Gravatar account so that the system will recognize it and display your avatar. The email address will only be used for Gravatar to recognize your account - it will not be shown to public.
- Why do you watermark box shots?
- Free image hosts have various issues: very low bandwidth limits, unreasonable removal of files, low loading speed, pop-ups/advertisement, and more. Therefore, we designed and implemented our own image hosting system back in 2009, long before ASL was even created.
While we do not like watermarking images, it is sadly a necessary evil. Our image host is fast, advertisement free, extremely reliable, and we don't delete files. Those taking our releases and reposting them for their own profit are usually (extremely) lazy and are often just hotlinking our hosted images. This resulted in tripling our bandwidth consumption. This went to the point where it started to negatively affect the server's performance and greatly increased our expenses.
Due to such image thieves, we were literally left with no choice but to watermark all of our images. We would prefer to have things pristine, but some lamers effectively make that impossible. Some people suggested that we watermark our images for self-advertisement (ironically, they are the same people who repost our releases), which is just stupid. We post things exclusively on our own sites, so there is no reason for us to advertise to begin with. For those who still doubt our intentions, we invite you to look at some of our older (pre-ASL) posts on anime-sharing.com - we were not watermarking anything until we had to.
In the end it proved to be effective in deterring hotlinkers and reducing bandwidth usage by about 60%. Therefore, the watermark is likely going to stay.
Worry not though, the content inside our packages will never feature any form of watermarking. We always try our best to bring you the highest quality releases, being as close to the original as possible and with the lowest package size possible - something that is not in line with watermarking things insides archives.
- How can I donate to Anime-Sharing Lossless?
- Anime-Sharing Lossless is filly funded by the Anime-Sharing Project. Since the Anime-Sharing Project is not currently seeking donations, there is no direct way to donate to ASL.
You can still help us out in other ways, though.
Seeding our torrents (longer) is probably the easiest way to do so.
A bit harder is helping us by supplying CDs bought from Japan. You don't need to give us the physical copy, of course - all we seek is an EAC. Keep in mind that while we always try to rip everything available to us, the sheer amount of material released every month makes it impossible to actually do so. As such we sometimes have to skip an album/single even though we have the necessary EAC and information.
How do that and other assistance can be found in our IRC channel. By the way, lurking there is also always welcome. ;) - Can I request something?
- Please use the search option first. If you can't find what you're looking for, please drop by Anime-Sharing Forum and make a request in the appropriate section. Make sure to have used the search option first and remember - reupload requests belong in the appropriate thread, not the request section.
- DDL and torrent are dead – how do I request a reseed/-upload?
- If a release is no longer available over DDL or Torent, you can always drop by our forum - Anime-Sharing.com and ask for a reupload, reseed, or further assistance.
Optionally, you can always visit our IRC and grab a release from our XDCC serving bot.
We will do our best to respond as quickly as possible - quality and reliability are our core competencies, after all.
- What is XDCC and how can I XDCC?
- Please visit thread Downloading via XDCC on Anime-Sharing forum
- Why are you doing V0 VBR (Variable Bit Rate) MP3 instead of 320kbps CBR (Constant Bit Rate)?
-
This will be a bit longer, since it needs to touch a couple of subjects. Let's start then:
The first thing you have to understand is that MP3 is a lossy format. That means it will never contain all the data and quality of the original it was ripped from. Now, what you use lossy formats for is listening. As far as that is concerned, there is no audible difference between V0 and 320kbps.
The usage of 320kbps is for historic reasons. One of them is that CBR is simply older than VBR - encoding at a constant bitrate needs less resources and is easier to accomplish than using a variable bitrate. As such it became widespread before V0 was even around, and for some sad reason it has hold on until now. Another reason is that in the days when dinosaurs roamed the world and people had to spear down a daily mammoth bandwidth was too restricted to download a proper, lossless rip (like FLAC) - so they had to make do with inferior crap. The last reason is that 320kbps is labeled as ultimate quality in LAME, which noob encoders take to mean that it is the "best evar!", which couldn't be farther from the truth.
Last, but not least, the LAME programmers recommend 320kbps as storage option, while recommending a VBR encode to listen to on a day-to-day basis. As long as you limit yourself to MP3 this may be true, but with lossless formats easily available it's a no longer valid view. If you want to archive, you want to get FLAC.
You also want to get FLAC if you use any audio equipment where the difference between VB0 and 320kbps CBR becomes audible - because if you spend a couple grand on speakers/headphones, you should really invest those extra $50 for a 2TB disc, on which you can store more music than you'll ever be able to listen to. Even if it's FLAC.
That being said ASL may in very, very rare cases opt to replace the FLAC version with MP3 320kbps if no proper source can be found - we do not bloat our releases.
Here is an ABX from someone at head-fi.org for v0 vs 320kbps cbr, basically, in the A/B file A is a 320kbps cbr mp3 while B is a V0 mp3 one. The person ABXed the track for 170 times and guessed correctly only 85 times with a chance of the correct guesses happening due to luck at 53%. This means as said earlier, there is no audible difference between V0 VBR and 320kbps CBR.
TL;DR: We are sticking with VBR.
- Why do you rar your torrents?
- We use a strong distribution system to bring you, the downloader, the best in speed and reliability. The downside of this system is that we can't have more than one file in a torrent, so we need to compress them.
Trust us, you are saving more time downloading than it will take you to extract the album.
Additionally, rar have built-in CRC check, so if your download is damage, it will tell you instantly, you don't have to manually compare the CRC signature with ours, and we don't need to provide the CRC info. It's good for both party.
- What is that “Compression Level” thing in your FLAC releases?
- The compression level is comparable to the compressions you use when using WinRar or similar. Generally speaking, the higher the compression level, the less space is needed. On the downside high compression levels cost a ridiculous amount of processing time and do need more processing power to play.
For PCs the compression level matters little, since both space and processing power are there in abundance. It does come into play for mobile devices though. Here a higher compression level means you can save more files, but also drain the battery faster. During extensive testing we found that compression levels of 5 or 6 give the best balance between those two.
