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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
- 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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
What.CD achieved something that the magical efficient market never did. So it smashed it. In capitalism, it's perfectly legal to destroy an archive full of art and culture because of the loss of profit. Can't have the dangerous resistance of a vibrant, positive community being intrinsically motivated to gather knowledge and make an archive of culture without the exchange of money! What if Marx was right?
Let me link to an ode to Karagarga, a tracker specialised in obscure movies - you can easily replace movies with music.
>The myth that Netflix and iTunes offer a frontier where “everything” is available to watch instantly is a bad joke to anyone with a serious interest in movies. That crowd is forced, by the market itself, to fend for itself. Many of us would indeed buy an Out 1 Blu-ray or cue up Out 1 on Netflix if such a thing were possible. But in the meantime Karagarga will be cherished for the rare and valued access it affords.
What.CD did piracy and this is why it achieved these things. Piracy is a violation of copyright. Copyright is a monopoly granted by the state. Monopolies prevent competition and are counter to capitalism. The shutting down of What.CD is the doing of the government, not the doing of capitalism.[1]
Free market capitalism means economic liberalism. It doesn’t mean “big evil companies making big money.” In a real free market, the government wouldn’t grant these monopolies. What.CD would be more convenient than Netflix and iTunes because it costs nothing and doesn’t have DRM, so Netflix and iTunes would disappear and What.CD would remain. This is literally what would actually happen in an actual free market.
Economists aren’t stupid. They don’t literally believe there is a magical invisible hand guiding the market any more than biologists believe there is a magical deity guiding the evolution of species. Magic isn’t required for a free market to be efficient: it's just a phenomenon that happens and that we have a logical, non-religious, non-faith-based explanation for.
[1]: I’ll quote Wikipedia on this:
– “Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright)
What rubbish. Capitalism requires one (or a government) to enforce property rights. The more one can declare as valid property (e.g IP) the better it is for the holder of that property. These motivations for more property do not simply evaporate when the government stops granting monopolies over works.
I'm as against copyright as anyone, but to say the push for it does not arise out of the conditions created by capitalism is false. Besides, in "free market" capitalism, there is still exploitation of the workers and disregard for the environment so long as that disregard does not hamper profits. The fact that there would be no copyright is hardly motivating in these circumstances.
Precisely, but my point is that it would be good for any capitalist to consider as many objects as property as possible, for the purpose of claiming rights on that property. The fact that it's not actually property (which I agree with) is irrelevant. If the government were to agree on this point, great. But capitalists don't just throw up their arms and go home.
Capitalism has no regard for philosophies such as libertarianism. It crushes everything or finds a way.
No, what would happen in a free market is that the "big evil companies" would hire muscle to shut what.cd by other means. Like, let's say, seizing their servers. And justifying it by saying that they are the only ones allowed to redistribute this music.
That sounds awfully close to "using police to seize servers and justifying it with copyright", doesn't it? But yes, clearly, the government is to blame. It hasn't been lobbied by those companies to extend copyright duration, or increase punishment for copyright violation. Nope. A free market would totally make that better because they would never do such evil.
If you're reading the above comment and nodding your head or even feel the argument is wanting, I highly encourage you to read Postcapitalism by Paul Mason. There's even a chapter entitled "Was Marx Right?" Well worth the read.
I wholeheartedly second your post Sir. For me this feels like loosing Wikipedia, it's oink and what.cd the ones that got me lost in music (and accordingly buy 100s of records ever after) as opposed to disposable .99 tracks lost in some folder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
This is horrific, this is probably the worst "book burning event" so far this century.
I vividly remember the days after OiNK had just shut down and the effort on IRC to start up replacements (which became Waffles and What). I actually was one of the first 100 users on What, and it was amazing to be able to follow it from the start to the cultural giant it eventually became.
Now there's a need for yet another replacement. Like how What improved on Oink in several ways (most noticeably with Gazelle), I hope the replacement can make things even better yet again.
The future of collabrative archiving/piracy communities are probably not as private clearnet bittorrent trackers though. Someone needs to develop a next-generation solution that's both more user-friendly and more resistant.
#what-refuge @ irc.p2p-network.net seems to be the new place to go.
Yeah I understand that, but obviously explicitly linking to the content is enough to get you an IRL ban hammer. Seems like there should be a happy middle ground where you can provide the metadata and keep the actual links on "burner" sites that can be easily replicated when taken down.
Lots of private trackers already do this by essentially importing their metadata from websites like discogs. They import that data into their databases so that it's available, but then they end up expanding on it themselves for things that are being shared that aren't in those databases.
He meant further decoupling the torrents, not the metadata. Obviously you need the metadata to come from your users and community, not just 3rd party providers. Otherwise what would be the point?
The wealth of the metadata present in what.cd that represents years of work far surpassed anything available in public 3rd party sites.
Exactly. Anyone starting a community like this should be planning for plausible deniability from the beginning. You can build a metadata community that is seamlessly interoperable with a tracker without actually containing any links to the tracker. Think something like trakt.tv, but make the IDs on the metadata site match the IDs on the torrent site and otherwise completely firewall the two. Different owners, different infrastructure, etc. I don't see how a community that simply collects data and ratings can be shut down.
So theoretically, if I made a torrent site where the torrent IDs were all IMDB IDs, is IMDB a torrent tracker? My comment above was mostly thinking-out-loud, but I was assuming that there wouldn't be any concrete link between the community site and the tracker.
It won't matter, if they become a big enough threat to powerful interests they will be taken down. The only solutions I see are: hidden service in TOR, tracker hosted in .ru (nobody took down libgen yet and you can bet plenty have tried), or a decentralized solution that can serve metadata over the swarm in addition to torrents.
This is actually part of I2P, there are hidden trackers that are only accessible on the network, and that use the inbuilt Torrent manager that comes with I2P.
.ru was an euphemism, I meant the country [Russia] not the specific .ru tld.
rutracker.org is hosted in Russia.
libgen and sci-hub are using a more complicated setup with lots of fronts (in various countries) run by people who know what they're doing. I believe the backend infrastructure is in Russia.
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.
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.
I've been a member for over 7 years and considered this my home on the internet. I'm incredibly sad today and the news hit me like a truck. Trying to reconnect with friends on IRC right now but there'll be no replacement for the huge collection of rare music, the collages built for all kinds of niche topics, the notification system that worked better than all other music sites combined and the knowledgeable forums. There were user meetups at concerts and organized camps at festivals and most users probably bought way more music than an average person just because they liked to support the artists.
Most people I know didn't even use the site for it's original purpose but for the recommendations, the discussions about music & concerts and chatting about a lot of other topics on IRC. Even with subscriptions to various "legit" music services there'll be no replacement for that in the near future.
> Most people I know didn't even use the site for it's original purpose but for the recommendations, the discussions about music & concerts and chatting about a lot of other topics on IRC. Even with subscriptions to various "legit" music services there'll be no replacement for that in the near future.
It seems to me that a good replacement for What.CD is actually two different replacements. One being a music community site that just cares about the meta data such as new bands, albums, reviews, forums, etc. The other being an API based project that would allow the sharing that What.CD allowed, the API based project would allow for browser extensions to extend the meta data site. Legal issues surrounding the sharing logic shouldn't in theory effect the meta data one.
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 were two factors that made What special. The first factor was its unparalleled library of music (some of which was only available on What). This is lost forever, though the data is still distributed worldwide, and a lot of it will probably be reuploaded once a replacement tracker becomes popular.
The second factor was the log checker, which verified that rips were actually lossless, direct CD rips using the log file produced by Exact Audio Copy or X Lossless Decoder. The degree to which a rip's log conformed to he log checker was displayed next to the download link. This allowed the users to be confident that a rip wasn't just a transcoded lossy version that someone found on the internet. I hope somebody has the script saved so it can be used by whatever replaces What.
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.
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!
It's been said many times in this thread, but what.cd was so much more than a torrent tracker for piracy. It had one of the largest collections of music that was literally impossible to find anywhere else, and an amazing community of music lovers behind it. The chatrooms and forums alone were a rare community to find online, and the collection itself was unparalleled.
UPDATE, 11:59 p.m. Eastern: Ars has received a response from the operator of What.cd's Twitter account. The respondent would only identify him or herself as "an administrator" of the former site, but the person alleges that the torrent site's operation was shut down by its administrators, not a police or government force.
"The facts are pretty skimpy right now," What.cd's representative says. "We have no official confirmation that servers were seized, but all available evidence does support that, so we are operating as if it is true." That being said, what.cd's administrators are confident that its major database of user information was not seized by French authorities: "The site was operational until we shut it down."
That shutdown decision was made by What.cd's operators out of heightened precaution, as opposed to being forced by an authority to do so, the representative tells Ars. That person also noted that issues with the site's IRC server match up with information gleaned from today's Zataz report.
"I wouldn't be surprised to see some other site try to fill the void, but for now, we have no plans to try to return," the What.cd administrator says.
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.
Unprecedented loss to the Internet community itself. This truly might be one of the saddest things happening online since the inception of Internet itself.
I hope that 2 years from now we have a site with a catalog worthy of the name "What.CD successor" as well as better technology. As many users know, some of the site's core software was aging, and efforts to create a replacement had stalled.
Frontend improvements are probably inevitable, but I don't see a move to something more decentralized as likely. As far as I'm aware, there's no precedent or clear plan for a large moderated filesharing site on Tor or I2P. This is the time when people are willing to try something new, and it just doesn't exist. That's probably okay, the private tracker model is flawed but hardly broken: WCD lasted for 9 years, apparently hosted in a commercial data center within arm's reach of US authorities.
I've read a few comments claiming that they went to What.CD for the "out of print" or "rare" releases that are not available anywhere legally. Does anyone have a clue why that is? Are copyright holders so apathetic that they won't upload older songs/albums to iTunes/YouTube? I'm co-founder of a startup in the copyright space so that is especially intriguing to me.
There are three groups of people who want to preserve rare or obscure recordings:
1) The creators themselves
2) Music aficionados
3) Music historians
The consumer public, copyright holders, licensees, and paid-distribution entities (where most of the money exchanges hands) do not.
Record labels and other aggregate copyright holders don't care about each individual catalog entry much unless its currently generating revenue worth the overhead to be on top of, if that makes sense.
At a certain point it's a liability in the large.
Places like what.cd thrived on the obscure, and just as a bittorrent client prioritizes grabbing the rarest fragments first, what.cd's ratio bounty system and community also rewarded those who would unearth and organize everything; catering to groups 2/3 above, and sometimes even 1.
All you could trade on there is expertise, access, and time.
> Are copyright holders so apathetic that they won't upload older songs
Man, a lot of copyright holders don't exist anymore. Masters have been lost or destroyed, contacts have disappeared or died, labels passed hands so many times nobody is sure who owns what... Large companies own so many labels and so many catalogues, they don't even know what they own and they don't have the time or inclination to care. In many cases, royalties are split among various parties, and the record company can't be arsed to pay whoever needs to get paid, so they just stop selling anything that is not a big hit.
A few years ago, a bank in Manchester sold a building they had occupied for decades, which included a vault with safe boxes. They tracked down all the owners they could, to make sure they could move their stuff, but in many cases they didn't get a reply, so they just left the stuff there. The new owners went through the remaining boxes and found, among other things (guns, jewels etc), original master tapes for old Joy Division and New Order albums [1]. This is normal. The "industry" has always been a bit of a shambles when it comes to conservation. Heck, even the BBC reused the original Dr. Who tapes...
Yep - group of us found some original recordings, never released, from a bankrupt company once upon a time. Assets were never purchased by anyone. If we hadn't preserved, they would have gone to the tip and never been released.
Some might be legitimately lost outside of digital versions preserved illegally. I'd assume only a number of copies are owned by people who have purchased the music legally (who may not know where the music is located or know how to go about sharing it) and that the record label has lost it in their archives at some point (or may no longer be around at all).
I know with a lot of 'lounge' music that I listen to, its impossible to find a lot of the obscure albums. If they did print them, only a few thousand people would be in the market.
Outside of this, there are albums that I own that weren't ever released as a CD, MD, etc -- and I lack the hardware to make a good digital copy.
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.
There are 3 (and only three) solutions here, for whomever thinks of doing something similar again:
+ Hidden service in TOR
+ Tracker/forums hosted in .ru (Nobody took down libgen or sci-hub yet and you can bet many have tried)
+ Decentralized software solution that can serve metadata and forums over the swarm in addition to torrents.
The first solution forces TOR on everyone, not ideal.
The third solution is not quite there yet, but should be the future.
So, at the moment, I would say that if you're not hosting your shit in Russia, don't even bother ...
The only reason other private trackers that are hosted in western countries have not been taken down is that most of them are too niche for any special interests to bother. If/when that threshold gets crossed, as it was for what.cd, they will all be destroyed. This should provide a powerful disincentive for people to contribute their time and resources to such communities, unless of course they implement any of the solutions I mentioned. Alas, most private tracker operators are clueless idiots on a power trip and lack the vision (nevermind the technical expertise) to deal with or implement proper solutions to well-known issues.
I'm sorry but that's just incorrect. I'm not going to provide my background info but I can say for sure that Russia is a very bad place to host now. Pre-2012 it was good but now they enforce copyright laws and pro-actively censor the internet.
For domain extensions, always go directly to the nic site if they sell directly (tonic.to, nic.is, nic.cr, vunic.vu etc) as then you don't have to rely on multiple companies - eg, if you remember, ThePirateBay had a 'hydra' of domain extensions but used the exact same registrar rather than using the direct nics so they all were suspended. As for hosting, you need both a safe country and a safe datacenter. Switzerland (Private Layer) hosts many warez sites. Looking at the hosting providers of popular torrent/warez/file host sites is always the best way to find a reliable datacenter.
libgen/sci-hub are ebooks, What.CD was for music. Russia has been clamping down on music piracy significantly.
I like how rutorrent nuked their artist blacklist in response recently. It's a consumer's market again :P
Thanks for the NIC suggestion, that's very cool.
Apparently libgen are using Novogara, but sci-hub are hiding behind CloudFlare. I wonder who they're using.
If you notice this reply, for a while I've been curious about a hosting provider that's reasonably resilient to security-testing type traffic, run-of-the-mill P2P, and moderate poking around the less-than-white areas of the web (which I've never done and am curious yet reserved about; FWIW I have zero interest in the darker things I know are on there).
I'm not just looking for just-VPN service because that market is IMO hugely inflated, and for ~$10/mo I can run OpenVPN exactly how I want and do compute tasks on a machine with a nice disk and PHY.
A little while ago I was sharing space with a friend on Contabo; performance was so-so (QEMU) but nobody seemed to notice me compiling Chromium, playing with OpenVAS, or torrenting all over the place (via VPN), so that's my base.
I was thinking of going with Online.net next (dedicated Atoms for <$10/mo? I realize what I'm getting, but sure!) since their T&C approach seems interesting (Redstation have a "no nmap" policy!), but I'm unlikely to go exploring since I value my account.
Interested in any ideas you may have. My email address is in my profile FWIW.
I keep waiting for the next evolution of file sharing to come around. Something fully distributed and with no single point of failure.
It seems like a lot of the building blocks have been invented: DHTs, Blockchains, onion routing, etc. I realize that this is a tough problem to solve. But when it does come, and I do think it will, it will change everything.
Reading the comments here, it seems this service represented for many what to me is last.fm, with regards to music discovery only (not downloads).
How was what.cd different from last.fm, with regards to that aspect? I think last.fm has always had the best tagging and recommendation engine ever, easily crashing Spotify and the alike, even today (I hate Spotify recommendations, after 4th song you will listen at rubbish).
Last.fm also allows to see compatibility with other members based on your tastes, (I understand this aspect was a big part in what.cd).
Actually I think Last.fm was the "first Spotify" ever. 10 years ago they were hosting music on their server and had a premium plan but back then it didn't work. Instead of shutting down they decided to remain as a recommendation engine and community, embedding music from Youtube.
Does anyone uses it here? Any opinion on how the two compare?
I've had my last.fm account for over a decade and a what.cd account for most of its existence. You're correct that they provided similar resources for music junkies.
You could probably recreate most of last.fm's (non-scrobble) data from sites like musicbrainz or discogs. It's definitely great for the reasons you mentioned, like recommendations and neighbors. But to be honest, last.fm is pretty bad at being a source for discography-type information. There's duplicate albums, incomplete album information, weird track names, etc. It's gotten better with their recent update efforts though. I love last.fm and will continue to scrobble and use it for music discovery. But discovery is only half the battle. You need to somehow find that 2001 release from that post-hardcore band in Ohio that only existed for a couple years. If it was anywhere, it was on what.cd, ready for your ears.
I would say what.cd had a significantly more unique offering. You could browse endlessly, bookmarking artists or albums to come back to later, or make your own collections. You could watch an artist or record label to be notified of new uploads/releases. There were comments on artist/album pages going back years, not to mention the forums which were their own trove of great musical discussion and discovery.
It had user-created collages of various themes or purposes, with hand-picked selections and staff recommendations. An elaborate request system existed where users could request albums (down to specific source and bitrate) and donate ratio "bounty" to whoever fulfilled the request. All artists had ranked tagging and a web of related/interconnected artists. Artist discographies were extensively curated, not only with full album lists, but with multiple version/formats/releases of each album.
I mean, any non-obscure album could easily have 10+ versions well-seed and available. You didn't just get "The Postal Service - Give Up", you got "The Postal Service - Give Up 2007 Deluxe 2LP Reissue Vinyl" in your choice of FLAC, FLAC 24bit, 320CBR or V2/V0 VBR -- or maybe you wanted the 2008 Korean Reissue with bonus tracks? Also available in multiple formats. Releases would be flagged and trumped if album tags were incorrect; elaborate ripping rules and guides were established; people posted spectrographs of new releases to identify transcodes and immediately flag anything not up to par. It was so serious.
Yeah, the key to What.cd was the obscure stuff, and the various releases for each, well, release.
It's stuff that just isn't available on iTunes, spotify, basically anywhere. And, unless the music industry actually starts cooperating, never will be.
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.
You know you are an old timer on the net when you are brought up attached to the nipple of XCopyPro, and 30 years later, seeing kids talking like "Spotyify" is an acceptable alternative to WAREZ.
> According to the French news site Zataz, the cybercrime unit of the Gendarmerie (C3N) raided twelve servers operated by [What.cd] at hosting provider OVH, and one server that was stored at Free.
For me the amazing thing about what.cd was having different masterings available for albums. You don't have to be an audiophile to appreciate how well records were mastered before the loudness wars. Hearing vinyl rips of rock albums from the 1960s and 1970s was a revelation.
I was a member since 2006 as I was Oink. It’s sad, but fuck them. I had an archive of thousands of 12" singles, of which I uploaded hundreds of them at lossless quality. I spent thousands of hours restoring them, having the vinyl vacuum cleaned, removing the clicks and pops. Then they changed the file naming rules and anyone who downloaded my music could trump me and have my torrents deleted by renaming the files and uploading them as theirs. As if I didn’t spend enough time making this music available to the world. Long lost vinyl, such as Michael Jackson, Kelly Marie, Chaka Khan, etc. After they changed the rules, I never uploaded another song. When I told them of this, I was banned from commenting on anything.
Although we always knew this day would come, nothing could prepare me for it.
Whilst I am sure What could be replaced, in due course and with sufficient effort, I fear with the rise of streaming music services, the desire to put that much effort in is no longer there.
I'm now left wondering what is next and how I can help in creating something even remotely as amazing as what.cd. What and waffles rose quite quickly from the ashes of oink, anyone got any ideas?
Same here.
I remember the private tracker scene being referred to as a hydra (cut one head off, and two will grow back) back when oink went down. I wonder if that hydra is still alive...
It makes no sense to put time and effort into a community when it can be taken down once it becomes popular. Rather the technical issues should first be solved so that the community will grow without limits. Solutions are plenty, the will and expertise to use them .. maybe
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
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.
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...
I have never heard of this. Does anyone else still use Soulseek? I recently started using it again after years and there's tons of obscure experimental artists. Still going strong.
I don't want to oppose tragic nature of this. Yet, it's interesting that w.cd being pure piracy site is praised for content and community which kept it online and supported.
So you must understand now, why piracy is such an issue in small countries. There is no way to get so much stuff legally. And when piracy is the only option, it gets acquitted by most people.
When we are asked about piracy in our lives, this is the answer. We have no way to access so much of the content people in other countries take for granted.
It even goes much further than that. When you land in one of our airports, your iphone and android device goes blind and dumb. Many of services (uber, yelp, google play, amazon, maps) are not available here or are crippled beyond usability. But there is no solution to that :)
While we live in mostly free border-less world, we are still slaves of copyright laws and strategies of large companies.
Actually, there is discussion between EU legislators and librarians to cut copyright years for newspapers. It's a shame we cannot use internet to access anything written in our country's Soviet era newspapers because of this, though everything is already digitised, OCRed and available over web browser when you are on-site.
My friend mentioned this to me this morning and he's devastated as well. (edit: I just realized he helped me to download out of print Jazz albums from the 60s on that website so I guess I am devastated as well!)
Since we are on a tech-friendly site, I would like to ask: what are tangible solutions to avoid a disaster like this? I don't think a centralized website and bittorrent tracker is the answer, since it can be taken down pretty easily.
So what other options are there? A few years ago, everyone was about peer-to-peer protocols and technology, but it seems to lack the "centralized" bit that seems mandatory to create such a vibrant community.
This is a genuine question and I'm really interested in any information in that regard!
I was able to screen shot my ratio using the old safari tab on mobile -- not the full page, just the preview that iOS 10 shows when you hit the button to view them. Then I opened the page and it faded to white -- the last time I'll ever see that website.
That website was amazing, but it actually surprisingly difficult to maintain a positive ratio without making a decent effort. For every album I wanted to download, I had to download 1-3 others I had no interest in for the sake of seeding.
So... what's the next best alternative for obtaining lossless (FLAC) audio? Buying physical CDs seems a bit wasteful, but a bunch of artists only make their digital catalogs available in lossy formats.
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'm late to the discussion, but I'm having a really hard time understanding why the metadata couldn't be leaked. The fact that they pulled the plug and wiped everything sounds incredibly suspicious to me, like they were made an offer they couldn't refuse, or something.
In other news, what daemon clients for Soulseek are decent? I've just heard of it.
That place was my home on the internet for nearly a decade. It was a wonderful community and I'm glad to have been a part of it. I'll really miss the "What Are You Reading?" thread. Everyone on there had such fine taste. We had a good run, friends. I guess I'll move along.
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.
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!)
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.
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?
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today the last bit of magic on the internet died. What.CD represented the true potential of the world wide web. It was a community of variety and love that came together to share and grow. Data was completely decentralized and the organization grew organically with the users and community. There was nothing like it before, and there may not be anything like it again. Goodbye, What.
I had a bad experience on that site. After leaving my shitty old Dell Dimension seeding for days/weeks at a time, I was banned for "account sharing". To this day I have no clue what happened. My password was fairly complex and not shared with anyone, or reused on any other sites. I argued my case but was told to go pound sand. Fuck what.cd.
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.