Say what you want about the ethics of piracy, but this truly is a sad day. No where else was there such a vast collection of music nor any other community as passionate, knowledgeable, and collective about all things music and audio as what.cd. Not to mention all of the friendships made and lost on the site, it truly was unique.
There are literally versions of albums and other musical releases that you cannot buy or find anywhere else that are now lost to the sands of time.
It's true; the members of sites like what and waffles were dedicated to quality. People would go to great lengths to ensure quality was upheld: from keeping detailed logs of the ripping and transcoding processes, to generate spectrograms to weed out sub-par webrips and fake encodes.
Well, to be fair, the music never was on what.cd itself. So it wasn't destroyed. So it's still somewhere out there… Somewhere. On somebody's computer. The problem is to find them and to connect with them again.
What made what.cd unique was the way everything was organized with tags and correct information about every release. It's going to take quite a lot of time getting all that right again.
True, no arguing about that. I just wanted to point out that no music is really, really lost yet. Unlike with the Library of Alexandria, if the community wishes so, it is still possible to rebuild it. Even making it more, uh, fire-resistant.
I already have a personal archive that is probably larger than the library of Alexandria. If this kind of stuff matters to you get a hard drive and start your own today. Once it gets large enough, put it on a NAS with RAID5 and a hot spare.
And if you can afford it, you really should use RAID 6.
The amount of RAID 5 arrays I've seen die during the rebuild process (because one of the other drives, with an equal level of wear of the failed drive, failed due to the increased IO) is non-zero.
If you have the drives, of course. Also try to obtain your drives from different retailers if possible. They have bad lots from time to time. Getting the drives off different pallets is cheap insurance.
Agreed, two is one and one is none. I say some sort of RAID as I have read it might be somewhat preventive of bit rot. I hope for my archive to last generations, unfortunately it does not appear that any current storage technology will permit this yet. Write once media like CD's and DVD's and Blu-rays apparently won't last the decade from what I've heard.
You seem to be serious about this, but rather vague on the details, so I wanted to reply, just in case. If you don't already know about ZFS, please look into it. A properly provisioned server with ECC RAM and a ZFS RAID6 will provide the best possible defense for your archive in the years (or decades?) to come. Current filesystems don't come close.
If this is all new to you, look at FreeNAS for a "turnkey" solution. As well as being a solid piece of software, their guides can help you configure the necessary hardware.
I started a long time ago. Still don't have many awesome stuff that was on what.cd. And there's much more I don't even know about yet, which probably also was on what.cd already. To continue using our metaphor, a vast personal book collection is still less than a real public library. It's still a lot about sharing. I'm proud of my collection, but in terms of significance it's not comparable to that of entire what.cd, not to say the Library of Alexandria.
That said, we still should think about fire-resistant public libraries, not just personal collections.
Not good enough. RAID6 is the absolute minimum, as with current disk sizes it's too easy to lose the whole array due to an additional disk failure while one disk is being replaced.
I've just got started with beets. It takes a lot of work to organize a music landfill that has accumulated over 15 years, but it may be the best tool for the job - even if the job will consume man-days.
That's simply not true. musicbrainz tagging is quite poor, to be honest. Properly moderated music torrents (not only what.cd) in general have much better and more relevant metadata for each release. Unfortunately, it's not that available and usually requires a human to be interpreted.
Discogs is vaster, but still quite disorganized. For rather obscure music you still don't have anything better than the metadata that comes with the torrent (and is required on all quality music torrent trackers).
Apparently 12 servers were seized by French authorities. This is huge and completely surprising. I felt like What.cd would just always be here but I guess everyone felt the same about Oink as well.
They just had their nine year anniversary too, ten was so close!
There was actually an arrangement where Archive.org saved a copy of all the metadata that was added to the site. It should still live on in that capacity.
I made some pretty good friendships on what -- their community was great. Their music torrents were as rich as could be -- great metainfo, organization, depth, rarity, you name it...
The first major program I made was for what, so I can download many albums at once after my hard-drive failed. What had a feature known as "Collector" which gave you a zip of an artist's discography. With my program, you could dump that zip right in and it would send it to utorrent downloading in a structured directory (per user settings). I would have never taken it as far as I did (GUI from command line tool) if it weren't for the community loving it and giving me feedback to make it better & better. I called it "collector's secret lover".[1]
Another one I did was for nice looking release info of torrents called generically "description generator". It gave users an easy way to grab all relevant info (from discogs) for an album upload so they can copy and paste [2]
This is a sad day, what.cd was much more than a place to just download music.
I used the command line as well; actually you can't fully control download location. I would specify "Artist/Album/" but it would end up in "Artist/Album/the_original_folder/files.."
I've been using the same command but I was really hoping for being able to set the label from the command line, because I like to have them download to a temp folder and then auto move into folders by label when complete.
Cool no problem. It's pretty disappointing lack of support on uTorrent's end here, and I can't speak for now, but I researched lots of different clients back in the day and couldn't find any that had any decent extensibility.
Yes I did the same research and came to the same conclusion. I ended up with utorrent v2.2.1 and it works very well through wine on ubuntu as well. It's just a pity it doesn't have any more sophisticated command line control or interface.
I wish there was a great linux/opensource client that worked as well as utorrent, but everything I've tested has had some aspect of it that I didn't like.
Unprecedented loss to the Internet community itself. This truly might be one of the saddest things happening online since the inception of Internet itself.
Travesty. Biggest trove of classical music lost forever. I found CD's on there of even local friends bands, EVERYTHING was there. My friends dads bands discography that they themselves lost over 40 years ago was on there!
I made great friends from there and w.cd was a daily topic in my life amongst me and my friends. Sharing new music, keeping track of eachothers latest DL's etc. Top 10's, collages, related artists, bounties. I loved waking up and browsing a collage like "House music from the Congo in 1973" or something and going on a journey. All lost.
It's going to take forever to get out of this depression, that was my last community, and I've been there for a decade.
I have the WCD community to credit for who I am today as a musician and developer, as the community exposed me to all sorts of things when I was 15/16ish that I probably otherwise wouldn't have discovered. I'd probably be working sales right now or cash at some grocery store if it wasn't for WCD.
The internet is now dead to me for anything other than work. Between this and all the surveillance and social media and fake news and other bullshit, it's just another tool to me now. All the magic is gone.
Fully agree with your comments on how the magic of the Internet is leaving. It seems like piece by piece we lose the parts that made the Internet an exciting place.
Next one? There are already tons of alternatives, but I do fear that Spotify, Tidal, Apple, and Amazon will eat much of the demand for this in the future.
But that's not what has happened. The internet hasn't progressed as much as it has calcified into a couple of monolithic walled gardens. Remember when it was a wild west of creativity and everyone had their own website with painstakingly designed sprites and css? Yeah, scrolling through an instagram is so much more fulfilling. /s
Folks felt much the same in the CompuServe, AOL and MSN days where the aforementioned big wigs had a complete monopoly on what most people saw online.
In fact during the 90s it really felt like there was no technological future possible beyond what Microsoft saw fit. They would literally buy out, copy and crush every upstart who had even moderate success in the technology sector.
Never know where the future will take us, or indeed where we (techies) will take it. For all we know the next what.cd might be something far beyond its current incarnation (a distributed Spotify + Slack/IRC on steroids - anyone's guess!)
Said magic was a blatant violation of copyright law and gleeful disregard of common decency. You should be happy that the Internet is finally growing up and becoming part of real life. This would never happen as long as we allow and champion unlawful websites, or allow toxic discussion.
Your comment puzzles me - as others have repeated, what.cd was a fantastic archive of music that no current museum or library has come close to achieving. This community performed preservation and organization of art and culture (and many rare works) on a huge scale. How can you perform the mental gymnastics to call that a "gleeful disregard of common decency"? If anything, the destruction of that effort is what is so "indecent".
It is obviously unfortunate that the collection was illegal, but this seems clearly to be a situation where copyright law has run counter to the interests of civilization as a whole. Preservation should always trump licensing - licenses will expire, music will be passed from generation to generation.
I do not understand the philosophy behind your comment. I think there's a lot of things unsaid in such a deceptively simple three sentence post and I'm not sure if I'd even like to ask you to elaborate to ascertain what lies behind your thinking. However in the spirit of open discussion: why?
If there was pirated stuff on that site then yes, the shutting down of it would be the moral thing to do. I understand the love for music but hey. Ya' gotta pay.
what do you think gave the collages more value than a playlist on something like spotify? i definitely think they felt more valuable, but cant place exactly why.
I think it's the audience, the people participating. What.cd had a lot of very enthusiastic, competent, knowledgeable users while Spotify features a rather mainstream, general user base that takes a more passive role when it comes to music and its discovery. Obviously results will differ.
Furthermore, Spotify hardly provides any tools to promote and showcase a high quality, carefully compiled playlist. I can share a link, sure, but that's the most basic of paths to new potential listeners.
What.cd to me was a live feed of every piece of music released anywhere, tagged well enough that I could go through each week and pick out potentially interesting things I had never heard before.
Whether I actually use the downloads or not, it allowed me to discover new bands, new genres, and music from different cultures that I would never have been able to listen to before. Where is the commercial service that offers anything close to this?
>Travesty. Biggest trove of classical music lost forever. I found CD's on there of even local friends bands, EVERYTHING was there. My friends dads bands discography that they themselves lost over 40 years ago was on there!
It would be great if this part of the community was somehow at least saved. I can't imagine anyone suing over sharing a CD of Bach online (is that even possible under copyright law?).
Oh yes, and actually classical recordings are highly litigated over. While the pieces themselves may be in public domain, differing arrangements are often under protection, and most importantly the recordings are the property of respective rights holders. So the sheet music, melody, etc. is not protected, the rights to each recording works just like other genres of music
I would pay to go to a classical concert where the entry fees were donated to charity and the recordings put in the public domain, they could be immediately uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons.
I don't think stuffy execs at Sony getting rich is necessary for people to enjoy classical music. Those guys and girls should go find something useful to contribute to the humanity if their role in profiting off of dead artists has been obsoleted by technology.
Yea exactly. I was thinking if a charity or organization was able to put up the money to make it happen (not just musicians pay, but facilities fees, supporting staff, etc), any extra earned through entry fees would all be donated to charity.
I don't see any reason why, especially young generations, should need monetary privilege to enjoy classical music.
Not just London -- I used those examples because the website is in English and easily recognized.
Sometimes it's a lot cheaper -- I saw an opera in Vienna for 3EUR, and a youth orchestra (presumably a skilled one, given the venue) playing in Paris tomorrow is free!
I'm a passionate music enthusiast, buying about 5-10 releases a week, often rare stuff. While I really disaprove of using it as exclusive source of music, what.cd has always been my last-resort-source for music that would otherwise be lost or only available on 3-digit-priced vinyl. There were still a lot of gaps in the catalogue but it's probably the most complete collection of lossless music, organized in a way that is rare for user provided content online. A sublime experience.
Same, I've always used last.fm for discovering quality music and after it came back to life (after a period in which it was not working) I kept using it as my main source.
I am surprised to see how no one is talking about it here.
That was a very "upscale" tracker. You couldn't just go in and register. You had to go through a vetting process. They didn't serve a shitloads of ads (or at all, I think). You are not even supposed to know about the site.
Yeah, it takes like a week tops to go from knowing nothing about private trackers to knowing what all the majors ones are. What.cd has been extremely well-known for a long time now. The exclusivity was less about actually being hidden and more about avoiding being the low-hanging fruit. What's been known to every government and anti-piracy initiative practically since its inception. It was just a matter of getting around to doing something about it.
What.cd was pretty well known. It had a large userbase and items were leaked on there that made international news. A radiohead song was leaked before it was released, rumored to have been done by the band. COFEE a forensics tool made by Microsoft for law enforcement was leaked. And unpublished stories by JD Salinger that were forbidden to be publicly released until 50 years after his death were also leaked. So the site has definitely gotten a lot of publicity.
hah, I remember the COFEE leak from back in the day. For those who don't know, what.cd requires users to maintain an upload:download ratio to keep using the site. You could contribute a portion of your upload total to a "bounty" on requests for material not currently on the site. Uploader of the content gets the bounty applied to their upload total. The COFEE bounty was over 1TB if I remember right.
The interview process (to join the site) was out in the open and promoted on other trackers, reddit, twitter. It was never about staying secret, the entry barriers were to educate people about the ripping / encoding / ratio rules not about staying under the radar or elitist.
There are no "legal" music stores that approach the breadth and quality of the music library that was available on what.cd.
As the music industry's revenue stream changes from music sales to low-bitrate streaming services, we will see our shared musical heritage regress to the pre-compact-disc era in terms of audio quality and long-term availability.
We'll be lucky if recorded music of today survives long enough to exit copyright and be added to public libraries before being lost forever, or at least before we lose the "master" recordings.
Most of my downloads were of out of print / rare releases. Want the Oh My God CD Single that featured a few A Tribe Called Quest remixes? They had it. Want a Willie Hutch vinyl that never made it to CD? They had it. Wanted a Beatles album, specific release/print? They had it. Heard a punk 45 single from the late 70s? They had it.
Ouch, where are people moving now. Waffles? Pedroes? I haven't been around this for a long time so I just sort rode my good ratio on what.cd for years assuming it would always be there.
I use a combination of the 4chan /mu/ archive (https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/mu/, just searching for "title + mega") and soulseek. Never left me wanting. Also if you download the music be sure to go to the artists shows to support them directly!
Yea it's true. Rate Your Music is a decent place to do discovery. Also even though 4chan is a cesspool the /mu/ board can be surprisingly great for finding out about obscure artists old and new
That is all well and good but if it is invite only how will people get in. I was on what.cd for so long I am not even sure how to get back into the privates...
Go check last.fm, I've written other comments about it here but I am not trying to spam, I am just trying to share what I think it's still the best resource for discovering music you should listen to.
I'm speechless...utterly speechless. As with all pirate sites, it's always been "just a matter of time" but WCD has been around for so long it felt like that time would never come.
This is an extremely sad day for me, as there are members of the community I will likely never get in touch with again. Only one has me added on Tox, the rest would message me through WCD. This sucks...and that's an understatement.
Are there no backups out there that could be shared? Isn't that something TPB did, create a torrent of all the torrents and metadata about them? Then at least all that information would not be lost.
They hit the self-destruct button. It's reasonable to expect that it's all gone at this point. The community will have to build something new and hopefully more resilient this time.
I've also read the self-destruct was for the encryption keys. The servers were taken but as everything was encrypted the destruction was of the aforementioned keys.
I would pay $200/month for a legal service of the quality of what.cd. Someone on reddit called it "burning down of the library of Alexandria of digital music" and it's absolutely true.
Absolutely nothing compared to the quality of the library aspect of what.cd.
Wow. I never thought I'd see this day. Perhaps I'm naive, but What.CD has weathered so many storms and has maybe the most involved community of any private tracker I've been a part of, including many members who were musicians that distributed their music freely. What.CD was so much more than just a place to download music, it was a place to /understand/ music, to discover the essence of musical styles across the entire history of recording and from all over the world. I know of no similar resource in existence anywhere, for any price, or any cause.
This is in essence the same as if we were watching the greatest art and history museums burn to the ground, except in digital form. A sad day indeed!
A real tragedy. More than a torrent tracker, What.cd was a beautiful, vibrant, and positive community. Knowing someone in real-life who was a fellow What.cd'er was enough to form an immediate friendship. (Knowing someone who'd give you an invite was another way ;)
I found high-fidelity versions of albums, singles and EPs I couldn't find anywhere else on What.cd. It was faster, more thorough, and cleaner than every other music resource (let alone torrent tracker) around. When I was young and broke, it was my primary way of engaging with music, discovering bands that I'd never heard of, and to this very day remained a crucial part of my music discovery "stack".
With that said, What.cd had been dying a slow death for a while now. With the rise of Spotify et al., the need for a private torrent tracker and the requisite accessories (seedboxes, external HDs) has been dimming. What.cd used to be far-and-away my #1 music resource; today it was probably the 3rd or 4th, suitable for finding obscure releases or ones unavailable on streaming sites because of byzantine licensing deals. Back in the day though, What.cd was THE SPOT for hearing popular releases before anyone else. Today, leaks are less prominent, as labels have gotten tighter about protecting their music, and musicians have gotten savvier and prefer to "leak stuff" themselves. For that reason, total download numbers on What.cd have been in decline for years, the community has gotten a bit quieter, although it's still been an extremely valuable resource to fill in the gaps between all the big music streamers.
I'm very worried about the content. So many recordings in my library are sourced there; many aren't available anywhere else, not on the internet or in stores. A sad day indeed.
It's good to hear it's gotten better. I haven't actually used Soulseek in years, but there's a few things in my library I haven't seen anywhere else. I have mp3s from Soulseek that are as old as middle school kids, that's a weird thought.
I had roughly the same reaction when I saw it was still up fairly recently haha. Waffles' problems had me thinking about the evolution of p2p over the years (downloading LimeWire Pro with LimeWire was my favorite), and I was pleasantly surprised to see them still chugging along.
Spotify (by a large margin), then YouTube (for discovery) and /mu/ (for community).
I still used What.cd for music I wanted offline access to (for running, flights, etc.) as well as the occasional leak or obscurity. But before I got Spotify I was downloading multiple albums a day.
Spotify really sucks for discovery! After 4 songs you will be listening to vague (not tailored) musical hits that seems to be recommended by someone discovering music for the first time. Pathetic!
You really ought to give Spotify Discover a chance - my Discover tab is amazing - it feeds me a constant stream of new wave, dream pop, outsider music, early electronic music, ambient, underground rap - stuff that I like, but haven't heard. The more you use Spotify, the better Discover gets. Don't write it off before giving it enough data to help you.
The radios I find to be pretty shit for me (I read somewhere that Google Play Music has a better version of that). However the "Discover Weekly" feature on Spotify I've been very happy with and every week I have new music to listen to and it's mostly things I like.
Maybe it's worse for recommending certain genres? I know my friend complains about its hardstyle recommendations.
Is anyone ignoring the existence of last.fm (with regards to music discovery only)?
To me it's has always been the best recommendation engine ever, hands down, compared to all others (Spotify, Deezer, ecc).
It works by tracking what users with similar tastes are actually listening to (they call this feature scrobbling) which allows them to provide further recommendations and let you adventure on unexplored territory.
Then on your profile you will have a YouTube player playing all those recommendations, or a custom tag, genre, and so on.
It also has a great community where you can see how much you are musically compatible with other users.
- My bandcamp feed - we have a great community of like minded music lovers over there. And while I keep track of new releases anyway, Bandcamp will notify me of new release by my favorite labels.
- Small, human curated, online record stores. Piccadilly Records, Soul Jazz Records, Norman Records, clone.nl, Pacific Beach Vinyl, Red Eye Records, Phonica. You don't have to buy there if you prefer digital releases - I do and still value the selection and recommendations.
- magazine / review sites. Testpressing.org, Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Fact, Music Is My Sanctuary, Stomp The Wax, Inverted Audio, A closer listen and many more. Of course that's my taste, but there are sites catering to every niche music interest. Find yours.
And when it comes to buying I require lossless audio, which thankfully isn't a problem these days:
- Bandcamp
- Boomkat
- Bleep
- Qobuz
- Label stores
- Physical copies from online or local record shops if there isn't a digital release available.
I have exactly the same set of sites for getting music. For electronic music, if you're fast and follow what's happening it's pretty easy to buy all the music you want. If you miss a release from a name like Ricardo Villalobos or one of the Romanians, good luck buying them from discogs with hundreds of euros. What.cd of course had them available.
For other music, I usually check http://dr.loudness-war.info/ for the best version and try to buy that from somewhere. Discogs used cds are a cheap and easy way to get the non-remastered versions delivered, stores like Qobuz usually only have the most recent remastering and nothing else.
Some artists like Björk have their best versions released only as rare double vinyl prints. For these what.cd was the only option if you didn't want to spend hundreds of euros to a couple of albums.
> If you miss a release from a name like Ricardo Villalobos or one of the Romanians, good luck buying them from discogs with hundreds of euros. What.cd of course had them available.
Yes, I'm not a fan of vinyl-only releases either. Whenever I have to buy vinyl, I do it rather reluctantly - while I actually like the idea of physical releases, I know I'll rip it, add it to my digital library and consume it from there. It's a necessity rather than a pleasure, but I'm not willing to pass on those Mood Hut or Music From Memory releases, let alone old rarities.
I have my turntables, a mixer and hundreds of vinyls. I've been recording them to flac format throughout the year and decided I prefer buying flac instead of physical if possible. Such a waste of resources to press plastic copies. The only plus I have to give for vinyl is that it forces the mix to be not that loud what the digital copy can be...
id say the primary reason for the decline of what.cd downloads was their draconian ratio restrictions, meaning that as a new account (or even old, if you weren't able to take advantage of free leech from times past, which quickly dried up into "neutral leech" without granting ratio) it was almost impossible to actually use the site.
What.cd's ratio model was zero sum, so in order for you to get ratio, somebody else has to lose it. In Economic terms that means the entire "ratio economy" freezes up and its very hard to do much of anything.
It was a continual, deep flaw with the site that admins refused to acknowledge, i hope any successors keep it in mind.
Getting punished for actually using the site and seeding makes no sense whatsoever.
This restriction hindered my usage of the site for a long time, and I ended up "getting around it" by actively waiting for freeleech events and grabbing as much as I possibly could during that time. With everyone else downloading as well, it was entirely possible to build up significant upload credit.
One way to get upload credit was to get the users who exploited the ambient genre by automatically downloading every ambient album to download fabricated paulstretch albums.
I was a What.cd member years ago (early college) and had two issues: 1) disk space, 2) connectivity/laptop
It was hard to maintain content long enough to seed if you want to consume content but don't have much disk space. And with just a laptop it can be hard to keep an internet connection to seed.
Eventually it became more effort than it was worth and I just used the top charts to find the music elsewhere. tbh I haven't since found a better source for high quality music recommendations.
Very. Even downloading new releases on the top charts, I found that I could only get about 1-5% seeded in an entire month. Unless you're one of the first 10 people to start seeding that torrent, it's basically hopeless to get a high ratio just from that.
Freeleeches (you get upload credit, without being counted for downloads, in the same way), tokens (get to download a free item), and uploading original material (you get credit (potentially) without ever having downloaded) would inject new resources into the economy. Also having someone leave the site with <1 ratio effectively injects resources. However, If someone with a surplus left, it would hurt.
edit: just explaining terms for non site members, but you're right, definitely something you need to get right. Too strict and the economy dies, too permissive and there isn't incentive.
I lost my account there many years ago due to leaving torrents behind, and I had a few TB surplus ratio, and I've learned many times that I'm not a special snowflake, so I tend to agree with GP, that ratio game really stifled the flow of data(if flow is the metric you want to reach). True of most private trackers.
A friend of mine was once a member of a similar tracker geared towards television (though I cannot seem to think of the name of it right now) where there were no ratios, only a minimum amount of time required to seed after a leech. He said that this system worked a bit better than the classic ratio system.
There are people who use Private Trackers who don't understand the point, don't give back to the community, only seed things they personally want, and wonder why they have a hard time building ratio...basically use it like a public tracker that they can get "locked out" of.
i uploaded dozens of albums to what.cd, it didn't help with my ratio in the slightest, because some seed-box grabs one copy, then they take all the rest of the ratio because they have much faster internet than me. Out of everything i uploaded, with all qualities/encodes included, i got maybe 2-3GB of ratio.
Again, what is the point of a torrent site that punishes you for actually using it, even if you are fully willing to contribute via seeding, or albums, etc.
As a heavy user for years, sorry, the what.cd system was fundamentally broken if you didn't have a fast seed-box to slurp up ratio fron everyone else. Because its zero sum, the seedboxes win, and everyone else loses. Which is totally insane when bits are 100% free things that can be copied endlessly, isn't that the whole point of BitTorrent to begin with?!
I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks. I had the upload and actually had to wait out the time restriction. I had uploaded and transcoded/cross-seeded hundreds of albums.
You have to give a lot more than you take - and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.
> and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.
Are they? Surely after a certain point, adding more bandwidth to the network doesn't make a difference. If you add another fast seedbox, maybe some people could download an album 5 seconds faster, but that's only if they could pay the ratio for the album in the first place, which they might not be able to if they weren't a seedbox user themselves. I think what.cd had more than enough seedboxes and that it probably would have been more important to the community to upload new 100% FLAC rips or seed unpopular or poorly seeded torrents than to add another seedbox that just auto-snatched popular/2016 releases and freeleech torrents.
> I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks.
Remember, not everyone has a good enough home internet connection to do this. Back-of-the-napkin calculations say, even if I spent the whole time uploading at full speed, my shitty 0.5 Mb/s connection would still take more than 2 weeks to upload 100GB.
Point is, there's no low-powered user option. You can't be a casual and survive. I can't just engage every few months when I feel like it if I have to pay a subscription. A user has to put in a lot of effort BEFORE they get anything out, and then has to keep up that effort.
What use is a glorious library if you have to work there for free a few days a week before they let you read any of the books?
>A user has to put in a lot of effort BEFORE they get anything out, and then has to keep up that effort.
Fill a request whenever you need more upload. There are many low hanging fruits for 25-75GB and $15-35. Requests are "high value" uploads that don't rely on you seeding to multiple people, just uploading and claiming the reward. Very low effort and sometimes the requester even links you to where you can purchase the material.
Requested uploads hold more value to the community (or at least a single member) than {random local band that had two shows and gave out poorly mixed CD's one time}.
I always felt so annoyed at the stupidity of the ratio requirements that I do feel some vague satisfaction imaging that it destroyed them (I have no idea what actually happened to cause a shutdown). Everyone buying seedboxes so that they could have fast enough internet to actually earn ratio was ridiculous.
Broadcasthenet still has no ratio requirements at all and is doing fine.
Broadcast the net has a very strict 1 week seeding policy on every download though which makes having a dedicated seedbox almost a requirement. Having been flush with what.cdupload after stocking up years ago on big freeleech files, I kinda preferred the ratio model but can definitely see how it could be restricting for new users.
This was definitely an issue at PTP. You start off with whatever you got invited with as a gift, and if you don't start making up ground quickly, you're basically in a hole, except by freeleech. I realized I had to pay attention to freeleech and participate that way, which worked pretty well, until I built up a suitable buffer, but it takes some doing.
The rule changes made... around 2 years ago now I think? Kinda made this complaint obsolete.
They changed it to allow your ratio to dip well below the "required" ratio as long as you kept seeding. Keeping your ratio up wasn't strictly necessary anymore - though it was still required to keep your "rank" and the little perks that came with that. The admins did this largely in response to their inability to "fix" the ratio economy that overly disadvantaged people with low bandwidth.
Do you think Spotify played a role in supporting the French police?
What.cd was an incredibly potent force for disseminating leaks. One can reasonably suspect that the closure of What.cd will slow the velocity of music piracy, and give more power to streamers/labels when it comes to marketing a new release.
I think this is a good opportunity and time for the rebuild - WCD's front-end infrastructure and database was a spaghetti of PHP and hastily constructed database architecture and the API's left a bit to be desired - though the underlying C++ driving the tracker is probably still pretty solid.
I've been a WCD member since 2010. It was my first private tracker. I enjoyed the flavor of the WCD atmosphere, could taste the quality of volume after volume of the essential, goofy, ridiculous and down right trash this amazing site had to offer. What's the old saying? "One man's trash is another man's treasure". From sublime to sensuous; from ordinary to extraordinary; from books to manuscripts, with a keen eye and a sense of self worth, the world was at your fingertips. What.CD was more than just a music site on a private tracker. It was a community...a family! There were people who had resources of commonality and rarity that if you knew how to connect, maaan you had the world on a string.
I refuse to believe such riches are lost forever. WCD will be back in one form or another, and when it returns I hope to be there to greet the new with an open heart and open arms!
286 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadThere are literally versions of albums and other musical releases that you cannot buy or find anywhere else that are now lost to the sands of time.
It's really a shame...
The amount of RAID 5 arrays I've seen die during the rebuild process (because one of the other drives, with an equal level of wear of the failed drive, failed due to the increased IO) is non-zero.
RAID is for data availability, not backup.
If this is all new to you, look at FreeNAS for a "turnkey" solution. As well as being a solid piece of software, their guides can help you configure the necessary hardware.
That said, we still should think about fire-resistant public libraries, not just personal collections.
Not good enough. RAID6 is the absolute minimum, as with current disk sizes it's too easy to lose the whole array due to an additional disk failure while one disk is being replaced.
Incredible amount of data, versioned and CC0 licensed, great and diverse community of music lovers, strong ties with archive.org.
MusicBrainz Picard never cut it for me.
Discogs is vaster, but still quite disorganized. For rather obscure music you still don't have anything better than the metadata that comes with the torrent (and is required on all quality music torrent trackers).
Incredible amount of data, versioned and CC0 licensed, great and diverse community of music lovers, strong ties with archive.org.
http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-ch...
They just had their nine year anniversary too, ten was so close!
Maybe we should start "pirating" pirate sites so their metadata can be re-used if they shut down.
For something like this I think IPFS is about the right balance though. Zeronet does already have a torrent site called "play" though.
Can't seem to get the actual data though.
The first major program I made was for what, so I can download many albums at once after my hard-drive failed. What had a feature known as "Collector" which gave you a zip of an artist's discography. With my program, you could dump that zip right in and it would send it to utorrent downloading in a structured directory (per user settings). I would have never taken it as far as I did (GUI from command line tool) if it weren't for the community loving it and giving me feedback to make it better & better. I called it "collector's secret lover".[1]
Another one I did was for nice looking release info of torrents called generically "description generator". It gave users an easy way to grab all relevant info (from discogs) for an album upload so they can copy and paste [2]
This is a sad day, what.cd was much more than a place to just download music.
[1] -- https://github.com/joslinm/CSL
[2] -- https://github.com/joslinm/Description-Generator
I can add torrents from the command line but I couldn't work out how to put them in a desired category or manually set download locations, etc.
How did you do it?
https://github.com/joslinm/CSL/blob/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd44...
I've been using the same command but I was really hoping for being able to set the label from the command line, because I like to have them download to a temp folder and then auto move into folders by label when complete.
I wish there was a great linux/opensource client that worked as well as utorrent, but everything I've tested has had some aspect of it that I didn't like.
I made great friends from there and w.cd was a daily topic in my life amongst me and my friends. Sharing new music, keeping track of eachothers latest DL's etc. Top 10's, collages, related artists, bounties. I loved waking up and browsing a collage like "House music from the Congo in 1973" or something and going on a journey. All lost.
It's going to take forever to get out of this depression, that was my last community, and I've been there for a decade.
I have the WCD community to credit for who I am today as a musician and developer, as the community exposed me to all sorts of things when I was 15/16ish that I probably otherwise wouldn't have discovered. I'd probably be working sales right now or cash at some grocery store if it wasn't for WCD.
The internet is now dead to me for anything other than work. Between this and all the surveillance and social media and fake news and other bullshit, it's just another tool to me now. All the magic is gone.
What an absolute shit day.
The internet is boring and shitty now.
In fact during the 90s it really felt like there was no technological future possible beyond what Microsoft saw fit. They would literally buy out, copy and crush every upstart who had even moderate success in the technology sector.
Never know where the future will take us, or indeed where we (techies) will take it. For all we know the next what.cd might be something far beyond its current incarnation (a distributed Spotify + Slack/IRC on steroids - anyone's guess!)
It is obviously unfortunate that the collection was illegal, but this seems clearly to be a situation where copyright law has run counter to the interests of civilization as a whole. Preservation should always trump licensing - licenses will expire, music will be passed from generation to generation.
Spotify's library isn't even close to what WCD's was and is missing some copies of tracks/albums and/or just has the wrong versions flat out.
And the efforts of hundreds of thousands of engaged music fans who deleted bad tags, promoted good ones, made the connections.
Furthermore, Spotify hardly provides any tools to promote and showcase a high quality, carefully compiled playlist. I can share a link, sure, but that's the most basic of paths to new potential listeners.
Whether I actually use the downloads or not, it allowed me to discover new bands, new genres, and music from different cultures that I would never have been able to listen to before. Where is the commercial service that offers anything close to this?
It would be great if this part of the community was somehow at least saved. I can't imagine anyone suing over sharing a CD of Bach online (is that even possible under copyright law?).
I don't think stuffy execs at Sony getting rich is necessary for people to enjoy classical music. Those guys and girls should go find something useful to contribute to the humanity if their role in profiting off of dead artists has been obsoleted by technology.
I don't see any reason why, especially young generations, should need monetary privilege to enjoy classical music.
The same for the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which is a registered charity.
At least in Europe, the cheapest tickets being around that price is typical.
http://lso.co.uk/whats-on/2016-17-season.html
https://www.lpo.org.uk/
Sometimes it's a lot cheaper -- I saw an opera in Vienna for 3EUR, and a youth orchestra (presumably a skilled one, given the venue) playing in Paris tomorrow is free!
I'm a passionate music enthusiast, buying about 5-10 releases a week, often rare stuff. While I really disaprove of using it as exclusive source of music, what.cd has always been my last-resort-source for music that would otherwise be lost or only available on 3-digit-priced vinyl. There were still a lot of gaps in the catalogue but it's probably the most complete collection of lossless music, organized in a way that is rare for user provided content online. A sublime experience.
I am surprised to see how no one is talking about it here.
If someone had all the torrent data saved it wouldn't be much of an issue to spin up a new tracker and continue operations.
Edit: you'd only need the torrents for indexing, you could spin up a tracker without them.
How did it get on the authorities' radar?
Same way you know about it, I guess. An open secret really isn't a secret.
Not to be confused with user "coffee". Dude was a legend.
The interview process (to join the site) was out in the open and promoted on other trackers, reddit, twitter. It was never about staying secret, the entry barriers were to educate people about the ripping / encoding / ratio rules not about staying under the radar or elitist.
As the music industry's revenue stream changes from music sales to low-bitrate streaming services, we will see our shared musical heritage regress to the pre-compact-disc era in terms of audio quality and long-term availability.
We'll be lucky if recorded music of today survives long enough to exit copyright and be added to public libraries before being lost forever, or at least before we lose the "master" recordings.
I wonder if that's retrievable from a backup or something..
Something happened to Wayne Green's What CD magazine?
(Ah, wait, that was CD Review. Oh, he also founded Byte. Great run: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green )
[/Rip van Winkle]
go bang your bongos.
you're all idiots.
This is an extremely sad day for me, as there are members of the community I will likely never get in touch with again. Only one has me added on Tox, the rest would message me through WCD. This sucks...and that's an understatement.
Absolutely nothing compared to the quality of the library aspect of what.cd.
This is in essence the same as if we were watching the greatest art and history museums burn to the ground, except in digital form. A sad day indeed!
I found high-fidelity versions of albums, singles and EPs I couldn't find anywhere else on What.cd. It was faster, more thorough, and cleaner than every other music resource (let alone torrent tracker) around. When I was young and broke, it was my primary way of engaging with music, discovering bands that I'd never heard of, and to this very day remained a crucial part of my music discovery "stack".
With that said, What.cd had been dying a slow death for a while now. With the rise of Spotify et al., the need for a private torrent tracker and the requisite accessories (seedboxes, external HDs) has been dimming. What.cd used to be far-and-away my #1 music resource; today it was probably the 3rd or 4th, suitable for finding obscure releases or ones unavailable on streaming sites because of byzantine licensing deals. Back in the day though, What.cd was THE SPOT for hearing popular releases before anyone else. Today, leaks are less prominent, as labels have gotten tighter about protecting their music, and musicians have gotten savvier and prefer to "leak stuff" themselves. For that reason, total download numbers on What.cd have been in decline for years, the community has gotten a bit quieter, although it's still been an extremely valuable resource to fill in the gaps between all the big music streamers.
A truly sad day. RIP What.cd. You will be missed.
Haven't been let down yet and I listen to a lot of rare experimental stuff.
I still used What.cd for music I wanted offline access to (for running, flights, etc.) as well as the occasional leak or obscurity. But before I got Spotify I was downloading multiple albums a day.
Maybe it's worse for recommending certain genres? I know my friend complains about its hardstyle recommendations.
2. /mu/ archive (sometimes obscure stuff can be found in sharethreads)
3. everywhere else (TPB, DC, Soulseek...)
4. Spotify for when I'm not at my machine
To me it's has always been the best recommendation engine ever, hands down, compared to all others (Spotify, Deezer, ecc).
It works by tracking what users with similar tastes are actually listening to (they call this feature scrobbling) which allows them to provide further recommendations and let you adventure on unexplored territory.
Then on your profile you will have a YouTube player playing all those recommendations, or a custom tag, genre, and so on.
It also has a great community where you can see how much you are musically compatible with other users.
- My bandcamp feed - we have a great community of like minded music lovers over there. And while I keep track of new releases anyway, Bandcamp will notify me of new release by my favorite labels.
- Small, human curated, online record stores. Piccadilly Records, Soul Jazz Records, Norman Records, clone.nl, Pacific Beach Vinyl, Red Eye Records, Phonica. You don't have to buy there if you prefer digital releases - I do and still value the selection and recommendations.
- magazine / review sites. Testpressing.org, Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Fact, Music Is My Sanctuary, Stomp The Wax, Inverted Audio, A closer listen and many more. Of course that's my taste, but there are sites catering to every niche music interest. Find yours.
And when it comes to buying I require lossless audio, which thankfully isn't a problem these days:
- Bandcamp
- Boomkat
- Bleep
- Qobuz
- Label stores
- Physical copies from online or local record shops if there isn't a digital release available.
Pretty much in that order.
For other music, I usually check http://dr.loudness-war.info/ for the best version and try to buy that from somewhere. Discogs used cds are a cheap and easy way to get the non-remastered versions delivered, stores like Qobuz usually only have the most recent remastering and nothing else.
Some artists like Björk have their best versions released only as rare double vinyl prints. For these what.cd was the only option if you didn't want to spend hundreds of euros to a couple of albums.
Yes, I'm not a fan of vinyl-only releases either. Whenever I have to buy vinyl, I do it rather reluctantly - while I actually like the idea of physical releases, I know I'll rip it, add it to my digital library and consume it from there. It's a necessity rather than a pleasure, but I'm not willing to pass on those Mood Hut or Music From Memory releases, let alone old rarities.
What.cd's ratio model was zero sum, so in order for you to get ratio, somebody else has to lose it. In Economic terms that means the entire "ratio economy" freezes up and its very hard to do much of anything.
It was a continual, deep flaw with the site that admins refused to acknowledge, i hope any successors keep it in mind.
Getting punished for actually using the site and seeding makes no sense whatsoever.
It was hard to maintain content long enough to seed if you want to consume content but don't have much disk space. And with just a laptop it can be hard to keep an internet connection to seed.
Eventually it became more effort than it was worth and I just used the top charts to find the music elsewhere. tbh I haven't since found a better source for high quality music recommendations.
edit: just explaining terms for non site members, but you're right, definitely something you need to get right. Too strict and the economy dies, too permissive and there isn't incentive.
Again, what is the point of a torrent site that punishes you for actually using it, even if you are fully willing to contribute via seeding, or albums, etc.
As a heavy user for years, sorry, the what.cd system was fundamentally broken if you didn't have a fast seed-box to slurp up ratio fron everyone else. Because its zero sum, the seedboxes win, and everyone else loses. Which is totally insane when bits are 100% free things that can be copied endlessly, isn't that the whole point of BitTorrent to begin with?!
You have to give a lot more than you take - and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.
Are they? Surely after a certain point, adding more bandwidth to the network doesn't make a difference. If you add another fast seedbox, maybe some people could download an album 5 seconds faster, but that's only if they could pay the ratio for the album in the first place, which they might not be able to if they weren't a seedbox user themselves. I think what.cd had more than enough seedboxes and that it probably would have been more important to the community to upload new 100% FLAC rips or seed unpopular or poorly seeded torrents than to add another seedbox that just auto-snatched popular/2016 releases and freeleech torrents.
> I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks.
Remember, not everyone has a good enough home internet connection to do this. Back-of-the-napkin calculations say, even if I spent the whole time uploading at full speed, my shitty 0.5 Mb/s connection would still take more than 2 weeks to upload 100GB.
last time i checked 100GB of storage with 1-2TB caps at 1GB in and out was close to $5 month
You can pay in bitcoin if you're concerned about "privacy" but they all take paypal.
What use is a glorious library if you have to work there for free a few days a week before they let you read any of the books?
Fill a request whenever you need more upload. There are many low hanging fruits for 25-75GB and $15-35. Requests are "high value" uploads that don't rely on you seeding to multiple people, just uploading and claiming the reward. Very low effort and sometimes the requester even links you to where you can purchase the material.
Requested uploads hold more value to the community (or at least a single member) than {random local band that had two shows and gave out poorly mixed CD's one time}.
Broadcasthenet still has no ratio requirements at all and is doing fine.
Their servers were raided by the French authorities.
They changed it to allow your ratio to dip well below the "required" ratio as long as you kept seeding. Keeping your ratio up wasn't strictly necessary anymore - though it was still required to keep your "rank" and the little perks that came with that. The admins did this largely in response to their inability to "fix" the ratio economy that overly disadvantaged people with low bandwidth.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op
the currency was upload
i only bought music so i could exchange it for a the more valuable upload it gave me.
gutted
What.cd was an incredibly potent force for disseminating leaks. One can reasonably suspect that the closure of What.cd will slow the velocity of music piracy, and give more power to streamers/labels when it comes to marketing a new release.
I've been a WCD member since 2010. It was my first private tracker. I enjoyed the flavor of the WCD atmosphere, could taste the quality of volume after volume of the essential, goofy, ridiculous and down right trash this amazing site had to offer. What's the old saying? "One man's trash is another man's treasure". From sublime to sensuous; from ordinary to extraordinary; from books to manuscripts, with a keen eye and a sense of self worth, the world was at your fingertips. What.CD was more than just a music site on a private tracker. It was a community...a family! There were people who had resources of commonality and rarity that if you knew how to connect, maaan you had the world on a string.
I refuse to believe such riches are lost forever. WCD will be back in one form or another, and when it returns I hope to be there to greet the new with an open heart and open arms!