
What.CD is shutting down - Paul_S
https://what.cd/
======
anguswithgusto
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.

A truly sad day. RIP What.cd. You will be missed.

~~~
throwaway2048
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.

~~~
shalmanese
It's like we discover the lessons of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op [1]
over and over again.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-
op](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op)

~~~
ccostes
Hasn't heard of this before. Really interesting!

------
clydethefrog
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.

[http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-
and...](http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and-the-
vulnerability-of-obscure-films)

~~~
rvern
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright))

– “Exclusive rights are a form of monopoly.”
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right))

~~~
ue_
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.

~~~
vedranm
Some libertarians do not accept the so-called "intellectual property" as a
valid form of property, e.g. Kinsella [1, 2]. It's a debatable topic.

[1] [https://fee.org/resources/intellectual-property-versus-
real-...](https://fee.org/resources/intellectual-property-versus-real-
property/)

[2] [https://fee.org/articles/how-intellectual-property-
hampers-t...](https://fee.org/articles/how-intellectual-property-hampers-the-
free-market/)

~~~
ue_
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.

------
JoshGlazebrook
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.

~~~
gioele
I cannot comment about the content, but for music metadata there is nothing as
good a [http://musicbrainz.org](http://musicbrainz.org) .

Incredible amount of data, versioned and CC0 licensed, great and diverse
community of music lovers, strong ties with archive.org.

~~~
sosuke
I've been a MB fan for a long time, recently found these scritps,
[https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-
userscripts](https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts), to help
import some other albums they were missing from
[https://www.discogs.com](https://www.discogs.com)

~~~
disposition2
You might also want to look at beets ([http://beets.io/](http://beets.io/))

~~~
uabstraction
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.

MusicBrainz Picard never cut it for me.

------
kristofferR
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.

~~~
pault
Why not decouple the community and metadata from the content to protect from
losses like this?

~~~
armitron
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.

~~~
kirushik
Ru is far from ideal solution, unfortunately. There's a reason it's more
rutracker.org instead of torrents.ru

~~~
armitron
.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.

------
lfam
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.

~~~
fuzzywalrus
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.

------
joslin01
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.

[1] -- [https://github.com/joslinm/CSL](https://github.com/joslinm/CSL)

[2] -- [https://github.com/joslinm/Description-
Generator](https://github.com/joslinm/Description-Generator)

~~~
brokenmachine
I'm very interested to see your code or an explanation of how you did that in
utorrent.

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?

~~~
joslin01
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.."

[https://github.com/joslinm/CSL/blob/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd44...](https://github.com/joslinm/CSL/blob/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd4447a3fed26103a099/uTorrentHandler.cs#L84)

~~~
brokenmachine
Thanks for that.

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.

~~~
joslin01
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.

~~~
brokenmachine
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.

------
dewey
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.

I'm crushed :(

Edit: In case you want to reconnect:

#what-refuge on [http://p2p-network.net](http://p2p-network.net)

~~~
johnnyfaehell
> 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.

------
dvcc
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!

~~~
vhost-
I felt the same. I'm now just waiting for the day that passthepopcorn.me
disappears. I'm very surprised this happened.

~~~
tachion
How do you even start using them, if there's no way to register? Aren't such
self-enclosed niche sites secure anymore?

~~~
ryanlol
The sites are closed to preserve the communities rather than for security. Any
determined party can easily get access.

------
stirner
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.

------
anc84
Time for a distributed solution that the users themselves keep alive. So much
gardening and organising has been lost.

Maybe we should start "pirating" pirate sites so their metadata can be re-used
if they shut down.

~~~
dublinben
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.

~~~
conradev
Wait, really? Do you have a link?

~~~
draaglom
This is what I've found:
[https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl&tab=about](https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl&tab=about)

Can't seem to get the actual data though.

------
tristor
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!

------
simplyluke
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.

End of an era.

------
deekayw0n
from [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-
mu...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-music-
torrent-site-goes-dark-after-french-police-seize-servers/) ... including
snippet here because the story has changed a few times:

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.

------
4ad
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.

------
nthitz
A French site has reported that their servers on OVH were raided. RIP What :(

[http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-
ch...](http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-chez-ovh-
free/)

------
Paul_S
I see it as burning down the modern day Library of Alexandria for music and
scattering the community that maintained it.

------
perenestrial
Unprecedented loss to the Internet community itself. This truly might be one
of the saddest things happening online since the inception of Internet itself.

------
resfirestar
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.

------
olalonde
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.

~~~
toyg
_> 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...

[1] [http://metro.co.uk/2012/02/15/jamie-oliver-finds-joy-
divisio...](http://metro.co.uk/2012/02/15/jamie-oliver-finds-joy-division-and-
new-order-rare-tapes-in-basement-319375/)

~~~
spronkey
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.

------
libeclipse
I can't put into words how this makes me feel. Maybe we got too comfortable
with it. Maybe we were naive in thinking it would last forever.

But fuck if it didn't have a long and epic life. Rip WhatCD. So long.

------
Nadya
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.

------
armitron
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.

Look to the russians for inspiration.

~~~
undefined0
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.

~~~
i336_
(Not OP)

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.

------
ryanlol
Luckily there was some efforts by the Internet Archive to archive content from
WCD. I wonder how those went.

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.

------
drakenot
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.

------
TYE7JIKED5JK
What altered the course of my life trajectory significantly. I've checked the
site daily for the past eight years. RIP.

------
MrBra
I did not know what.cd.

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?

~~~
bombtrack
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.

It's a truly great loss.

~~~
spronkey
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.

------
smilekzs
I only heard of this site just now. Having been suffering from lack of high-
quality music recently, I wish I had known what.cd earlier...

~~~
MrBra
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.

------
Fifer82
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.

~~~
FireBeyond
Watch out you don't get Saddam along with your goods...

------
macandcheese
Wow, almost 8 years I spent there after OiNK shut down.

Invaluable community for discovering music (I found SO MANY artists through
user's collages and the related artist graphs).

I owe SO much of who I am as a music fan and human being to this site (and
OiNK before it), and the community of people there..

------
jessewmc
A real shame, but I'm honestly surprised it lasted so long after Oink. Being
the largest private torrent tracker is having a big target on your back.

------
gkop
> 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.

[https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-
report...](https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-
raids-in-france-161117/)

------
sbarre
Would it have been illegal to simply provide the metadata of the site (without
torrents or magnet links), in a similarly organized database?

I wonder if that's retrievable from a backup or something..

~~~
chris11
They are claiming they destroyed all site and user data, I assume for privacy
reason. So I'm guessing that would be a no.

------
bwat48
I can't believe this... what.cd's library and organization was completely
unparalleled :(

------
chrismealy
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.

------
bdk
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.

Fuck you What.cd.

~~~
i336_
Wow.

Do you have any sort of record of what you uploaded? eg, hashes?

------
djmobley
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.

This is utterly devastating.

------
willejs
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?

~~~
kakkun
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...

~~~
armitron
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

------
kentt
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.

~~~
viral_krieger
A new tracker will pop up soon.

~~~
themarsupial
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...

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
WCD was unique in that they had the interview - good way to get in without
knowing someone. It seemed to work pretty well.

------
inostia
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.

------
laacz
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.

------
yolesaber
Truly tragic. My recommendation for...sampling music is to use Soulseek. They
have almost everything. Download speed can sometimes be an issue though.

------
willejs
I'm wearing my what t-shirt in memory of this sad event. This sucks.

------
thomastjeffery
Ironically, Metallica's new album is out tomorrow. (not pointing fingers or
anything, just thought I'd point that out.)

------
ePierre
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!

------
intopieces
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.

------
laxatives
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.

~~~
serf
I personally felt like that created a discovery mechanism unlike any other
service.

I _had_ to listen to music outside of my knowledge base in order to enjoy the
stuff that I wanted to listen to.

(although PyWhatAuto sort of changed that.)

------
callahad
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.

------
Bedon292
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.

~~~
acomar
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.

~~~
skeletonjelly
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.

------
i336_
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.

------
copperheart
Unbelievable! I wonder which motherless record company executive is
responsible for this.

This is a huge loss. WCD will be sorely missed.

------
mikehain
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.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
[Rip van Winkle]

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Green)
)

[/Rip van Winkle]

------
acobster
Anyone know specifics about the "recent events"?

EDIT: [https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-
report...](https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-
raids-in-france-161117/)

------
viral_krieger
I'm honestly speechless.

Let's hope that a better tracker will form from the aftermath.

------
jklinger410
I was on oink and I was on what.cd and I fucked up both of my accounts.

RIP

------
praveer13
This really sucks. Wow. Sadly I never got to participate in this community
which I've heard so much about, as all Indians are banned from joining.

------
meathouse
I'm devastated. Was on for a little over 7 years. It had become a huge part of
my life. I'm having a hard time believing it's over.

------
brokenmachine
All these comments about how great it was make me wish I completed the
application for what.cd when I first tried a year ago... :-(

------
cjwoodall
RIP :( I remember when oink went down...

------
thomastjeffery
I keep wondering when major torrent trackers like this are going to start
using things like zeronet.

------
kinnth
There must be a phoenix at somepoint, it feels like too much of the community
exists not to try.

------
Fej
Welp. There goes the greatest collection of music in the history of recorded
sound.

Is Waffles still kicking?

------
relyks
Does anyone know what happened? I was an active member. Going to miss this
greatly :(

------
mdevere
damn what a shame

------
leonphelphs
I'm crushed :( RIP What.cd

------
rublev
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.

What an absolute _shit_ day.

~~~
pbuzbee
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.

~~~
Asooka
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.

~~~
nagvx
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.

------
jack612
Shkreli...

------
blahi
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.

How did it get on the authorities' radar?

~~~
chris11
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.

~~~
rfrank
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.

------
legodt
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.

This is a mirage

------
draw_down
Man, what a bummer. I've been using this thing for years to find stuff I
couldn't get anywhere else.

------
NasEscobar
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.

