I was never on OiNK but I ended up being a moderator on What.CD for half a year or so, made some lovely memories there and it was my first time being exposed to real nerds building unconventional things. The people I met there are the reason I installed Linux for the first time, learned how to build IRC bots and went on to dive deeper into technology as a passion and hobby. The quality of coders you'd meet there was exhilarating for a 16-17 year old. One guy was building a new BitTorrent tracker, another was exploiting CSS vulnerabilities to see what sites someone had visited and another was building a bot that would download the first 5 seconds of songs on the website and check whether the specified bitrate was correct. It was a formative time that nurtured my interests. RIP.
I was a TM on w.cd and still miss it. I don't know what I'd do if I lost ptp now. Their size is immense. Are there any other repositories of human creation that are larger?
It goes to show how terribly we have been robbed by the current copyright system.
SoulSeek allowed you to browse the entire directory being shared, so you only had to search for one thing you wanted and then could look through everything an individual was sharing.
Oink was used by A LOT of A-Level artists and musicians.
IIRC The only one who openly spoke about this was Trent Reznor, but having the chance to speak with big name producers it was the place to go for extremely hard to find whitelabels, clean rips of completely forgotten releases from the 50-80s... Quoting LCD Soundsystem, "I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody".
Oink closing had a tangible effect on the choice and audio quality of samples used in several commercially-released albums.
If you are the same Solar Fields I’m thinking about, I’m pretty sure I discovered your/their music, specifically the album Until We Meet The Sky, via what.cd. Cheers!
Man! I would have missed that username if you hadn't commented about it. Thanks for saying something!
I will always associate Until We Meet the Sky with a roughly two week period late in my undergrad during which several of my friends were moving away and I was pulling all-nighters helping people pack, blasting this album on the dorm's speakers to a deserted campus and generally thinking about impermanence. Strong album.
Didn't find them via What, though - I think it was by branching out from the Mirror's Edge soundtrack.
My memory of that specific detail is a bit fuzzy, however I’m pretty sure it was a staff pick. That or via the fantastic similar artists feature at the bottom of an artist’s page, the star/spoke map that was user generated/voted: thicker the line between artists, the more user votes that similarity had gotten.
I am not Magnus, only a fan of his music. Sorry to disappoint :)
I actually discovered Magnus via Pandora ages ago, but WCD allowed me to really discover the full discography and subsequently Ultimae records which puts out a lot of great music in that genre
After what.cd died, I used Google Play Music for a long time before Google discontinued the product. I stumbled around a bunch of streaming music services and have been disappointed ever since. Streaming services have a terrible UX. Some artists are completely missing from the services. I often find one of my favourite artists has released a new album, but I end up finding this from third party sources. Scrolling through the library is incredibly slow because of infinite scroll and no concept of a local library. Lyrics don't always work and if they do it's always presented in a big font with no way to change it. I could go on and on.
I'm now transitioning to my own curated music library and I'm currently running Navidrome on my home NAS. It has a Subsonic API that I use with Strawberry, a player which is reminiscent of Amarok - my favourite music player ever. New releases are tracked by Muspy. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and subreddits to discover new music. Works well for me but I imagine it's not for everyone.
I grew up in the 90's and CDs typically ran in the $15-20 range. This was when minimum wage was something like $5.15 an hour. So it would take 3-4 hours of work to buy a CD. This led to having to really pine over purchase decisions. Pre-Napster, this meant using a few things as filters: the radio, label compilations albums that featured a lot of songs by artists and were usually cheaper to buy, or pirating via IRC, which was fun at the time, but looking back was quite tedious.
Then Napster came and went. In it's wake, consumer expectations changed but nothing really worked as well as Napster. It's replacements were unreliable, were risky for installing adware/spyware, and there were lots of scare tactics by the music industry going after downloaders in court.
This was also around the time of the iPod but pre-iPhone, so you could carry around digital music but it wasn't really streamed. At this time, I had an iPod but mostly consumed music in my car through burned CDs.
Enter Oink. Oink brought you back to the time where you consume full albums instead of single songs but also solved a ton of problems with music sharing programs -- the shady software, unreliable availability of songs, inconsistent, if not totally absent tagging, shitty encoding, etc. Since there was still some work involved in downloading and burning the albums, you had to still make some choice over what to listen to, but not labor over it like a few years back when a CD meant half a days work. Oink had SO much stuff as well. I cannot recall a time when I didn't find something I wanted. Even though it was stealing, it felt like you were getting something of quality and not taking a gamble on something from a music sharing site.
I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I got my first iPhone in 2008 and buying music from the iTunes store became much more appealing with it instantly showing up on your device, so I did more of that. I remember using Rhapsody on Desktop for a while and later on the iPhone as well, a year or so before Spotify took over music.
I'm still salty about the loss of OiNK and the cruft of junk that is streaming services.
Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week.
Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week.
Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting".
And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore.
Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.
This annoys me to no end. I'm sure there are more curated playlists on Spotify out there, but having it always shoveling music at me based on whoever is paying them the most to push it is exhausting. And as others have pointed out, the app experience has seemingly deteriorated over time to the point where my Offline music is difficult and frustrating to get to play... when offline!
I'm slowly returning to curating my own music files and integrating them into my homelab via Jellyfin and Fintunes (can be found on F-Droid). I currently keep Spotify around for its podcast archive but those days are likely numbered as well. I'll end up supporting them forever though, since weaning my family members off of its convenience is unlikely to happen.
Edit to suggest "Cloudspeakers Weekly Chart" as my recommendation for a curated Spotify playlist with a wide variety of new music with updates on Saturdays. Occasionally includes pop hits, but I've otherwise found lots of new artists in there. Found it through a recommendation on here, definitely not through Spotify itself.
No matter which is your starting track, if left to their own devices the "For You" and "Music Station" features will start veering into Top-40 pop music just after a few songs. They should be renamed "Six-degrees of separation from Bad Bunny generator".
I haven't experienced the top-40 veer, but it seems like any jazz song from absolutely any subgenre will eventually lead to Freddie Freeloader off Kind of Blue, and then the algorithm just continues to generate from that direction. It's become a running joke between my partner and I. "Just threw on a Cal Tjader album - how many radio tracks do you think we'll get before it's a Miles Davis station instead?" I recall back when I used Spotify, that service's radio similarly insisted that any playlist incorporating even a single indie rap song MUST become a radio featuring JPEGMafia.
It really highlights the limitations of these automated discovery services. I would love a service that makes it easier to explore the vast amounts of recorded music in jazz's various subgenres, and current streaming services are not it. The human curated playlists on Apple Music are pretty good for exploring a genre, at least, but relatively surface level. You are unlikely to discover the deep cuts I'd expect to surface two hours into a generative radio off an album that was itself kind of obscure.
Gosh, I miss what.cd. The industry destroyed it and never replaced it with anything close to it. I have to imagine so many of those cassette rips, like lost Dilla tapes handed out at shows in the 90s, are just gone forever now.
I don't have this problem with Apple Music at all?
My 'for you' gives me a weird melange of stuff I love, stuff I forgot I loved, and occasionally 'wow what is this new stuff that's awesome', with the rare 'oh god I like this band but not this album' kind of thing.
It's pretty spot on, and has led to discovery of quite a few new artists I like.
I have a pretty wide taste, so it's sometimes...jarring to listen to, but it never veers into Top40.
You might want to try YouTube Music, which also includes whatever YouTube users upload (so you get rare mixes and other otherwise unavailable music), and will apply the usual “people who liked X also liked Y” recommendation algorithm. You won’t get any tour or merch info though.
I miss curating local files and playing them with Winamp (just noticed the red squiggly under that name, god I'm old). The mobile-first streaming interfaces with miles of whitespace and big touch targets annoy the heck out of me.
When I'm actively listening to music I want the interface to serve that purpose; just give me a list of albums, artists and song titles and let me filter them. Easily managing a playlist is also not a thing anymore although maybe that's just me. It's unintuitive.
I have recently missed that as well (after feeling very strongly about having access to all the world's music, all the time, and immediately). Fortunately I still have most of my CDs and work from home, so I can jockey my discs in and out of a ripper pretty easily, and land them on my Plex server. Plexamp isn't WinAmp, but it's got a nice CarPlay interface and lets me control the end to end, so it'll do. Maybe that would scratch your itch as well? I even found that I bought two new CDs recently of music I streamed pretty often and wanted to add to my permanent collection.
You can just do that then. I have files in my library I encoded in the 90's. foobar2000 has been continuously developed for over 20 years and is very good at playing and managing a library. And runs well under Wine. Still, I pray for an actual Linux port. Dev is wasting his time on a Mac version.
Nowadays I don't trust SaaS and other hip cloud stuff anymore. I learned that lesson with exactly this topic. I was relatively young and naïve and left my ripped and pirated collection behind when Spotify rolled around. Partly because it was easier, partly because it felt better to pay for the service than piracy did. Back then the interface was dedicated to the desktop [0].
I still have a CD collection. Piracy feels risky (not in the least due to increased legal liability and the possibility of getting caught) so I think I'll just start ripping again.
It's such a shame these great freeware programs for Windows tend to be proprietary. I never really understood why because they give it away for free anyway.
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at getting rid of Spotify. Not because I'm against paying to stream audio (my account is very old), but because the UI around playlist and library management, plus it's very basic search / filter functionality, is built around highlighting the Spotify service and not what I want to do with the library.
If that alleviates your pain a bit, know that there are some Spotify playlist managers around. I never tried any of them so I won't drop names, maybe someone else can recommend something?
You can still do that and it's still superior to streaming. I have my mp3's on my pc and listen to them with AIMP (I did use winamp until very recently) For when I'm out and about I sync the files in my mp3's folder to a 512GB microssd card in my phone, so I have my full music collection with me at all times. I use Neutron player to listen to them (Its just an Android music player that is able to browse and play mp3's by folder and not just id3 info, cus half of my mp3s were ripped from cd and have no id3 info)
For better or worse WinAmp is back after a long long hiatus - latest version 5.9.2 released on April 26, 2023, previous version was a leak of unreleased development in 2018.
OiNK changed my life. I discovered it in high-school and found so much good music that I never would have experienced otherwise. I still think about it at least a few times a year.
WhatCD was pretty damn good, I'd say it rivalled Oink. Remember the bounty on that MSFT forensic tool? The copy of the unreleased JD Salinger novel? Both fulfilled...
What.cd was certainly better than oink in terms of the library (largely because it was started by seeders who already had the entire oink library) but was definitely missing the charm.
I ran a handful of trackers from 2006 to 2013. They were money machines like you've never seen. I ran a British TV tracker. Everyone in the industry used the site. Sometimes we would get pre-release stuff. I remember Charlie Brooker emailing me one time asking us to take down an item until it had been broadcast and then he was fine with it being up there. CB is a hero of mine, so there was no question of complying.
The new radio is now silent, and it's just a streaming service's algorithm that decides what new music you'll be exposed to. I feel like we really lost something.
Maybe I just entered a different phase in life, but back in the heydey of piracy I actually bought a lot of albums. I followed artists and was frequently excited for new releases. With so much of my music coming from piracy, it felt important to support bands I really wanted to hear more from. Now I spend a small fraction of what I used to spend on a streaming service and that's all.
I was both on OiNK and What.cd and both were awesome places to find new music and bootlegs.
I was always after show recordings with different version of songs which would never reach anybody’s ears if it wasn’t for the people sharing them.
I understand the whole copyright discussion but at least for music I understand that people there were really lovers of music, not just people wanting to pay nothing for the artists work.
I still believe there is a space for a streaming service sharing raw show recordings (which I somewhat use YT music for).
What is easy to overlook is that it's not just cultural artifacts in the sense of the recording itself. These kind of sites also had fans meticulously fill in all the metadata about the history and context of a song, film or whatever.
I remember a blog post by a historian lamenting the loss of all that community-build knowledge when these sites where shut down (and I bet it wasn't just one historian who felt that way).
>These kind of sites also had fans meticulously fill in all the metadata about the history and context of a song, film or whatever.
Absolutely, the metadata on What was beyond wikipedia level all completely user managed meticulously. Slightly different versions of releases all catalogued and rips verified to a high standard. This is before we even get into the fact it was all connected so similar artists were navigate-able you could actually start from a band you enjoy and dig into other similar music right from the same site.
The cataloging goes way beyond anything Apple offered at the time and anything Apple, Spotify, Tidal offer today.
Soulseek was pretty sweet - people would chat me up when downloading an album they shared and ask if I wanted anything else they hadn't ripped yet - or recommend something similar.
It was more like napster though and not torrent based iirc.
Soulseek is very much still around. I recently logged in for the first time in a long while, and I was able to get all kinds of rare recordings. That said, it seems a less social place than 20 years in terms of using the chat feature. I would suspect that the majority of heavy Soulseek sharers are now in their 30s and 40s, with careers and families, and not so interested in making new music friends.
I think part of the reason is that audio streaming is relatively cheap and easy. I was never on oink but I was on what.cd, and I remember I started using it less and less as services like Spotify got better and better in terms of quality and content.
If we compare music to movies and TV where the official ways of accessing content are such a complete shitshow, you have amazing sites like passthepopcorn and broadcasthenet, which to me are of a similar quality to what.cd was for music.
I think it just demonstrates again the fact that piracy is in large part driven by difficulty and cost of access to official releases.
I mean, I'm not badly-off, I have a very well paying job and I /could/ afford to spend the money on a load of subscriptions, it's just such a hassle. Much easier and less frustrating to just check PTP or BTN for something I want to watch.
I remember it well. Before their store went offline I ended up buying two T-shirts. I wore one and the other one might still be in the bag brand new. Has to be worth something by now.
Not everything is on Spotify, though. I have a lot of CDs I've had to look for second-hand because they're not on any streaming services or digital stores, and long out of print. I'd probably been able to find a lot of them on OiNK or What.CD and nowhere else online.
It's difficult and expensive sometimes, and it also feels wrong not to be able to share them with others.
