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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 pa
by 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 agoI've seen commenters on reddit calling it the 'burning down of the library of Alexandria of digital music'.
- mattdotc 10y agoIt'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 agoIt's amazing what humans can accomplish if they're allowed to cooperate.
- grigory 10y agoI'm pretty sure I've read exact same comments back when oink shut down. Very sad indeed.
- krick 10y agoWell, to be fair, the music never was on what.cd itself. So it wasn't destroyed. So it's still somewhere out there… Somewhere. On somebody's computer. The problem is to find them and to connect with them again.
- robinhoodexe 10y agoWhat made what.cd unique was the way everything was organized with tags and correct information about every release. It's going to take quite a lot of time getting all that right again.
- krick 10y agoTrue, no arguing about that. I just wanted to point out that no music is really, really lost yet. Unlike with the Library of Alexandria, if the community wishes so, it is still possible to rebuild it. Even making it more, uh, fire-resistant.
- cmdrfred 10y agoI already have a personal archive that is probably larger than the library of Alexandria. If this kind of stuff matters to you get a hard drive and start your own today. Once it gets large enough, put it on a NAS with RAID5 and a hot spare.
- shitloadofbooks 10y agoAnd if you can afford it, you really should use RAID 6. The amount of RAID 5 arrays I've seen die during the rebuild process (because one of the other drives, with an equal level of wear of the failed drive, failed due to the increased IO) is non-zero.
- cmdrfred 10y agoIf you have the drives, of course. Also try to obtain your drives from different retailers if possible. They have bad lots from time to time. Getting the drives off different pallets is cheap insurance.
- gioele 10y agoI cannot comment about the content, but for music metadata there is nothing as good a http://musicbrainz.org http://musicbrainz.org . Incredible amount of data, versioned and CC0 licensed, great and diverse community of music lovers, strong ties with archive.org.
- sosuke 10y agoI've been a MB fan for a long time, recently found these scritps, https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts https://github.com/murdos/musicbrainz-userscripts, to help import some other albums they were missing from https://www.discogs.com https://www.discogs.com
- disposition2 10y agoYou might also want to look at beets (http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/)
- uabstraction 10y agoI've just got started with beets. It takes a lot of work to organize a music landfill that has accumulated over 15 years, but it may be the best tool for the job - even if the job will consume man-days. MusicBrainz Picard never cut it for me.
- krick 10y agoThat's simply not true. musicbrainz tagging is quite poor, to be honest. Properly moderated music torrents (not only what.cd) in general have much better and more relevant metadata for each release. Unfortunately, it's not that available and usually requires a human to be interpreted. Discogs is vaster, but still quite disorganized. For rather obscure music you still don't have anything better than the metadata that comes with the torrent (and is required on all quality music torrent trackers).
- MrBra 10y agoYou have missed last.fm probably.
- gioele 10y agoI cannot comment about the content, but for music metadata there is nothing as good a http://musicbrainz.org http://musicbrainz.org . Incredible amount of data, versioned and CC0 licensed, great and diverse community of music lovers, strong ties with archive.org.