17 ms·

What.CD is shutting down

607 points by Paul_S 10y ago

blahi 10y ago
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?
- mattdotc 10y ago
  >How did it get on the authorities' radar? Same way you know about it, I guess. An open secret really isn't a secret.
  - somestag 10y ago
    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.
- chris11 10y ago
  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 And unpublished stories by JD Salinger that were forbidden to be publicly released until 50 years after his death were also leaked.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.
  - iamdave 10y ago
    >COFEE a forensics tool made by Microsoft for law enforcement was leaked. Not to be confused with user "coffee". Dude was a legend.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    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.
- dewey 10y ago
  There was always a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD), articles in a lot of mainstream newspapers and they never had any ads. 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.
JoshGlazebrook 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- underyx 10y ago
  I've seen commenters on reddit calling it the 'burning down of the library of Alexandria of digital music'.
  - mattdotc 10y ago
    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. It's really a shame...
    - derrickdirge 10y ago
      It's amazing what humans can accomplish if they're allowed to cooperate.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - copperx 10y ago
        Just look at the Linux kernel.
Paul_S 10y ago
I see it as burning down the modern day Library of Alexandria for music and scattering the community that maintained it.
nthitz 10y ago
A French site has reported that their servers on OVH were raided. RIP What :( http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-chez-ovh-free/ http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-ch...
dvcc 10y ago
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- 10y ago
  I felt the same. I'm now just waiting for the day that passthepopcorn.me disappears. I'm very surprised this happened.
  - JoshGlazebrook 10y ago
    Please don't say such things.
  - tachion 10y ago
    How do you even start using them, if there's no way to register? Aren't such self-enclosed niche sites secure anymore?
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      The sites are closed to preserve the communities rather than for security. Any determined party can easily get access.
- willejs 10y ago
  I really wonder if they have offsite backups and it's possible to resurrect it.
anc84 10y ago
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.
- icebraining 10y ago
  An open source torrent client with P2P search and a layer of privacy inspired by Tor - and paid for by the EU: https://www.tribler.org/ https://www.tribler.org/
- paktek123 10y ago
  https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
    First i've heard of this, but looks pretty cool. Anyone using it?
  - problems 10y ago
    Alternatives: zeronet or the more anonymity oriented Freenet. For something like this I think IPFS is about the right balance though. Zeronet does already have a torrent site called "play" though.
- dublinben 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    Wait, really? Do you have a link?
    - draaglom 10y ago
joslin01 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd4447a3fed26103a099/uTorrentHandler.cs#L84 https://github.com/joslinm/CSL/blob/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd44...
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      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.
perenestrial 10y ago
Unprecedented loss to the Internet community itself. This truly might be one of the saddest things happening online since the inception of Internet itself.
rublev 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - state 10y ago
    That kind of magic just happens in cycles. We learn what was broken about the last thing and build a better one.
    - gkop 10y ago
      Just like What was that much better Oink, I can't begin to imagine how awesome the next one will be.
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        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.
bwat48 10y ago
I can't believe this... what.cd's library and organization was completely unparalleled :(
smilekzs 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
ryanlol 10y ago
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.
lfam 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
sbarre 10y ago
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 10y ago
  They are claiming they destroyed all site and user data, I assume for privacy reason. So I'm guessing that would be a no.
mdevere 10y ago
damn what a shame
kentt 10y ago
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.
- MrBra 10y ago
  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.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  I use a combination of the 4chan /mu/ archive (https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/mu/ 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!
  - nathancahill 10y ago
    I liked What for the discovery part. You could fine some truely great obscure music by combining the right set of tags.
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      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
- frou_dh 10y ago
  Waffles has already been down for weeks. Likely dead too.
- viral_krieger 10y ago
  A new tracker will pop up soon.
B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
[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]
yolesaber 10y ago
Truly tragic. My recommendation for...sampling music is to use Soulseek. They have almost everything. Download speed can sometimes be an issue though.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  truly? it's just music, hippy. go bang your bongos. you're all idiots.
jessewmc 10y ago
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.
Nadya 10y ago
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.
TYE7JIKED5JK 10y ago
What altered the course of my life trajectory significantly. I've checked the site daily for the past eight years. RIP.
Bedon292 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
4ad 10y ago
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.
tristor 10y ago
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!
anguswithgusto 10y ago
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.
- duaneb 10y ago
  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.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    Soulseek is alive still somehow, and has a solid selection of rarities.
    - inostia 10y ago
      I just commented this below. Soulseek is amazing! Returned to it after years recently - I remembered the Mac version sucked. Now it's great. Haven't been let down yet and I listen to a lot of rare experimental stuff.
libeclipse 10y ago
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.
acobster 10y ago
Anyone know specifics about the "recent events"? EDIT: https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-raids-in-france-161117/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report...
viral_krieger 10y ago
I'm honestly speechless. Let's hope that a better tracker will form from the aftermath.
inostia 10y ago
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.
brokenmachine 10y ago
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... :-(
clydethefrog 10y ago
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-the-vulnerability-of-obscure-films http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and...
- gkop 10y ago
  Lest anybody get the wrong impression, Karagarga was down very briefly but was soon restored and continues to operate at https://karagarga.in/ https://karagarga.in/ .
- weerd 10y ago
  Fucking spot on! They achieved something so incredibly special. That place was a glimpse into the future. A marvel of both engineering and community. R.I.P.
- amorroxic 10y ago
  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. Trust MPAA to curate music. Lol :)
- joshdotsmith 10y ago
  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. https://www.amazon.com/Postcapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Mason/dp/0374235546 https://www.amazon.com/Postcapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Maso...
willejs 10y ago
I'm wearing my what t-shirt in memory of this sad event. This sucks.
simplyluke 10y ago
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.
jklinger410 10y ago
I was on oink and I was on what.cd and I fucked up both of my accounts. RIP
willejs 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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
gkop 10y ago
> 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-reported-raids-in-france-161117/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report...
dewey 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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.
kristofferR 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Why not decouple the community and metadata from the content to protect from losses like this?
  - palunon 10y ago
    That's basically what torrents trackers do... They don't store any content.
    - pault 10y ago
      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.
      - jzelinskie 10y ago
        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.
stirner 10y ago
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.
laxatives 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.)
macandcheese 10y ago
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..
jack612 10y ago
Shkreli...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
relyks 10y ago
Does anyone know what happened? I was an active member. Going to miss this greatly :(
callahad 10y ago
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.
olalonde 10y ago
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.
- nv-vn 10y ago
  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).
  - spronkey 10y ago
    I can vouch, personally, that at least one recording has been permanently lost outside of digital versions preserved "illegally".
- mangix 10y ago
  laziness
- toyg 10y ago
  > 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-division-and-new-order-rare-tapes-in-basement-319375/ http://metro.co.uk/2012/02/15/jamie-oliver-finds-joy-divisio...
resfirestar 10y ago
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.
djmobley 10y ago
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.
Fifer82 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Watch out you don't get Saddam along with your goods...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kinnth 10y ago
There must be a phoenix at somepoint, it feels like too much of the community exists not to try.
chrismealy 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
legodt 10y ago
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
drakenot 10y ago
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.
MrBra 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
NasEscobar 10y ago
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.
praveer13 10y ago
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.
cjwoodall 10y ago
RIP :( I remember when oink went down...
armitron 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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_ 10y ago
    (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.
draw_down 10y ago
Man, what a bummer. I've been using this thing for years to find stuff I couldn't get anywhere else.
copperheart 10y ago
Unbelievable! I wonder which motherless record company executive is responsible for this. This is a huge loss. WCD will be sorely missed.
deekayw0n 10y ago
from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-music-torrent-site-goes-dark-after-french-police-seize-servers/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-mu... ... 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.
intopieces 10y ago
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.
thomastjeffery 10y ago
Ironically, Metallica's new album is out tomorrow. (not pointing fingers or anything, just thought I'd point that out.)
thomastjeffery 10y ago
I keep wondering when major torrent trackers like this are going to start using things like zeronet.
meathouse 10y ago
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.
ePierre 10y ago
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!
mikehain 10y ago
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.
Fej 10y ago
Welp. There goes the greatest collection of music in the history of recorded sound. Is Waffles still kicking?
leonphelphs 10y ago
I'm crushed :( RIP What.cd
laacz 10y ago
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.
bdk 10y ago
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_ 10y ago
  Wow. Do you have any sort of record of what you uploaded? eg, hashes?
i336_ 10y ago
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.

607 points by Paul_S 10y ago

blahi 10y ago

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?

mattdotc 10y ago
>How did it get on the authorities' radar? Same way you know about it, I guess. An open secret really isn't a secret.
- somestag 10y ago
  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.
chris11 10y ago
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.
- iamdave 10y ago
  >COFEE a forensics tool made by Microsoft for law enforcement was leaked. Not to be confused with user "coffee". Dude was a legend.
- rfrank 10y ago
  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.
dewey 10y ago
There was always a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD), articles in a lot of mainstream newspapers and they never had any ads. 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.

JoshGlazebrook 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
underyx 10y ago
I've seen commenters on reddit calling it the 'burning down of the library of Alexandria of digital music'.
- mattdotc 10y ago
  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. It's really a shame...
  - derrickdirge 10y ago
    It's amazing what humans can accomplish if they're allowed to cooperate.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - copperx 10y ago
      Just look at the Linux kernel.

Paul_S 10y ago

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

nthitz 10y ago

A French site has reported that their servers on OVH were raided. RIP What :( http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-chez-ovh-free/ http://www.zataz.com/operation-what-cd-12-serveurs-saisis-ch...

dvcc 10y ago

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- 10y ago
I felt the same. I'm now just waiting for the day that passthepopcorn.me disappears. I'm very surprised this happened.
- JoshGlazebrook 10y ago
  Please don't say such things.
- tachion 10y ago
  How do you even start using them, if there's no way to register? Aren't such self-enclosed niche sites secure anymore?
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    The sites are closed to preserve the communities rather than for security. Any determined party can easily get access.
willejs 10y ago
I really wonder if they have offsite backups and it's possible to resurrect it.

anc84 10y ago

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.

icebraining 10y ago
An open source torrent client with P2P search and a layer of privacy inspired by Tor - and paid for by the EU: https://www.tribler.org/ https://www.tribler.org/
paktek123 10y ago
https://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
  First i've heard of this, but looks pretty cool. Anyone using it?
- problems 10y ago
  Alternatives: zeronet or the more anonymity oriented Freenet. For something like this I think IPFS is about the right balance though. Zeronet does already have a torrent site called "play" though.
dublinben 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Wait, really? Do you have a link?
  - draaglom 10y ago

joslin01 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd4447a3fed26103a099/uTorrentHandler.cs#L84 https://github.com/joslinm/CSL/blob/9371f97a4e43b7f756edfd44...
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    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.

perenestrial 10y ago

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

rublev 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- state 10y ago
  That kind of magic just happens in cycles. We learn what was broken about the last thing and build a better one.
  - gkop 10y ago
    Just like What was that much better Oink, I can't begin to imagine how awesome the next one will be.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      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.

bwat48 10y ago

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

smilekzs 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

ryanlol 10y ago

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.

lfam 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

sbarre 10y ago

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 10y ago
They are claiming they destroyed all site and user data, I assume for privacy reason. So I'm guessing that would be a no.

mdevere 10y ago

damn what a shame

kentt 10y ago

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.

MrBra 10y ago
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.
yolesaber 10y ago
I use a combination of the 4chan /mu/ archive (https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/mu/ 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!
- nathancahill 10y ago
  I liked What for the discovery part. You could fine some truely great obscure music by combining the right set of tags.
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    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
frou_dh 10y ago
Waffles has already been down for weeks. Likely dead too.
viral_krieger 10y ago
A new tracker will pop up soon.

B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago

[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]

yolesaber 10y ago

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

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
truly? it's just music, hippy. go bang your bongos. you're all idiots.

jessewmc 10y ago

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.

Nadya 10y ago

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.

TYE7JIKED5JK 10y ago

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

Bedon292 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.

4ad 10y ago

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.

tristor 10y ago

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!

anguswithgusto 10y ago

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.

duaneb 10y ago
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.
- rfrank 10y ago
  Soulseek is alive still somehow, and has a solid selection of rarities.
  - inostia 10y ago
    I just commented this below. Soulseek is amazing! Returned to it after years recently - I remembered the Mac version sucked. Now it's great. Haven't been let down yet and I listen to a lot of rare experimental stuff.

libeclipse 10y ago

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.

acobster 10y ago

Anyone know specifics about the "recent events"? EDIT: https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-raids-in-france-161117/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report...

viral_krieger 10y ago

I'm honestly speechless. Let's hope that a better tracker will form from the aftermath.

inostia 10y ago

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.

brokenmachine 10y ago

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... :-(

clydethefrog 10y ago

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

gkop 10y ago
Lest anybody get the wrong impression, Karagarga was down very briefly but was soon restored and continues to operate at https://karagarga.in/ https://karagarga.in/ .
weerd 10y ago
Fucking spot on! They achieved something so incredibly special. That place was a glimpse into the future. A marvel of both engineering and community. R.I.P.
amorroxic 10y ago
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. Trust MPAA to curate music. Lol :)
joshdotsmith 10y ago
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. https://www.amazon.com/Postcapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Mason/dp/0374235546 https://www.amazon.com/Postcapitalism-Guide-Future-Paul-Maso...

willejs 10y ago

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

simplyluke 10y ago

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.

jklinger410 10y ago

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

willejs 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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

gkop 10y ago

> 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-reported-raids-in-france-161117/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report...

dewey 10y ago

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 10y ago
> 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.

kristofferR 10y ago

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 10y ago
Why not decouple the community and metadata from the content to protect from losses like this?
- palunon 10y ago
  That's basically what torrents trackers do... They don't store any content.
  - pault 10y ago
    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.
    - jzelinskie 10y ago
      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.

stirner 10y ago

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.

laxatives 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.)

macandcheese 10y ago

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..

jack612 10y ago

Shkreli...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

relyks 10y ago

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

callahad 10y ago

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.

olalonde 10y ago

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.

nv-vn 10y ago
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).
- spronkey 10y ago
  I can vouch, personally, that at least one recording has been permanently lost outside of digital versions preserved "illegally".
mangix 10y ago
laziness
toyg 10y ago
> 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-division-and-new-order-rare-tapes-in-basement-319375/ http://metro.co.uk/2012/02/15/jamie-oliver-finds-joy-divisio...

resfirestar 10y ago

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.

djmobley 10y ago

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.

Fifer82 10y ago

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 10y ago
Watch out you don't get Saddam along with your goods...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kinnth 10y ago

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

chrismealy 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

legodt 10y ago

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

drakenot 10y ago

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.

MrBra 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

NasEscobar 10y ago

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.

praveer13 10y ago

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.

cjwoodall 10y ago

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

armitron 10y ago

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 10y ago
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_ 10y ago
  (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.

draw_down 10y ago

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

copperheart 10y ago

Unbelievable! I wonder which motherless record company executive is responsible for this. This is a huge loss. WCD will be sorely missed.

deekayw0n 10y ago

from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-music-torrent-site-goes-dark-after-french-police-seize-servers/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/worlds-largest-mu... ... 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.

intopieces 10y ago

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.

thomastjeffery 10y ago

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

thomastjeffery 10y ago

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

meathouse 10y ago

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.

ePierre 10y ago

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!

mikehain 10y ago

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.

Fej 10y ago

Welp. There goes the greatest collection of music in the history of recorded sound. Is Waffles still kicking?

leonphelphs 10y ago

I'm crushed :( RIP What.cd

laacz 10y ago

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.

bdk 10y ago

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_ 10y ago
Wow. Do you have any sort of record of what you uploaded? eg, hashes?

i336_ 10y ago

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.