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This was why what.cd was sublime (and its loss a travesty I haven't yet recovered from) -- it was a peerlessly extensive archive with uncompromisingly strict cu

by zkms 9y ago

This was why what.cd was sublime (and its loss a travesty I haven't yet recovered from) -- it was a peerlessly extensive archive with uncompromisingly strict curation of metadata and content alike. Wanton downloading was not tolerated; it wasn't a site meant to avoid paying for music; it was a project meant to build an archive -- that there was no payment involved was incidental. You had to contribute to download: either you got buffer via leaving your torrent client on with a fast internet connection, or you got buffer by filling requests (people could pledge some of their buffer to an unfulfilled request to make filling difficult-to-find requests it more attractive). If you wanted to download something and you didn't have enough buffer, you'd either have to wait for your existing stash to generate buffer (via other people requesting it from you) or you'd go in the "requests" tab and buy/lend/obtain and rip the CD in question to fill the request. Between the passionate userbase and this incentive system, over its 9 years, there were a lot of out-of-print albums digitised and distributed for the first time. I spent money on it (for CDs that nobody had uploaded yet) but for the value that it offered me, I'd be willing to pay a lot for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to any copyright/licensing issues. To see albums fall out of print and become obscure and inaccessible is heart-rending, given that we have the means to archive all of this. It is even more tragic because we won't have forever -- physical media degrades and people die (and their collections get lost or thrown away). To quote Pastor Manul Laphroaig from PoC||GTFO, > Bitrot will burn libraries with merciless indignity that even Pets Dot Com didn’t deserve. Please mirror—don’t merely link!—pocorgtfo13.pdf and our other issues far and wide, so our articles can help fight the coming flame deluge. I feel similarly about libraries of music.

executesorder66 9y ago
Does anyone know if there is a project that is trying to fill the massive void that what.cd left when it was closed?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  Yes. If you know how and where to look you will find them.
Freak_NL 9y ago
The same holds true for film and television as well; any twentieth century media really. It is a saddening state of affairs that we have the means to built and maintain a global distributed digital library of Alexandria, but not the political will or legal means. The absurdly long copyright terms are too blame for most part. 2017 is strange in that there are not nearly as many ways of sharing our vast collective libraries of digital or digitized culture as five years ago (e.g., the fall of What.cd), despite a steady increase in storage and bandwidth. I wonder what will happen next? I'm not very hopeful about copyright reform though.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >The absurdly long copyright terms are too blame for most part. While I agree that copyright terms are too long, I'm not sure they're the primary villain here. A lot of what we're talking about are works from living artists dating to, say, the 1960s or more recently. That's not what people usually mean when they talk about absurdly long copyright terms. I agree about film and television. Increasingly, if it's not available on streaming, it doesn't exist. Netflix is letting their DVD back catalog decay to nothing. Which basically leaves Amazon DVD purchases. When something goes out of print, you're stuck with the used market. And if it's never made it to DVD, pretty much forget about it at this point.
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    The 1960s were 50 years ago though — more than half a lifetime. That falls well outside of what I find a reasonable duration for copyright. Even a limit of 30 years (or perhaps the historical 14 + 14 years) would mean anything published before the 1980s would already be in the public domain by now. The article hints at the artist simply preferring people to forget some of his older work, and that is his prerogative. But once media takes root in our culture society has its own interests to defend. We would find it really weird to leave out certain works of Shakespeare from a comprehensive omnibus because he wasn't particularly fond of them himself. Copyright should balance the rights of the author and the needs of society; in its current form that balance is lost.
peatmoss 9y ago
> I'd be willing to pay a lot for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to any copyright/licensing issues. Oh my yes. I currently pay Tidal $25/month—$20 because I refuse to believe that in 2017 it is economic to stream 4k video but not lossless audio. And tack on $5 for a family member. But I am continually annoyed when I'm listening to an album and I expect a transition into one song, but instead the album skips forward a track or two. I can only assume this is because they've lost distribution rights on a particular song for some infuriating reason. After the advent of streaming music purchases, and about the time subscription services started, Steve Jobs opined that nobody would want to rent music when you could own it. At that time, I thought that this was old man Jobs stuck in the past. And it sort of was, based on the popularity of Spotify and evidenced by Apple's capitulation. But... I find myself increasingly frustrated by being a serf and being totally at the whims of profit-driven licensing schemes. And this is why I want something similar to what.cd (I didn't even know about it until it was dead). I'm happy to pay for what I use, but FFS, the idea that we're letting chunks of our culture die because we lack the legal mechanisms to preserve it all makes me just crazy.
jszymborski 9y ago
A trusted source and well-known person in the hacker community has said there is a copy of what.cd out there... although it's understandably not accessible to the public. And no, I have no idea how to access it myself.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  I very much doubt that claim. There are however other sites that have taken what.cd's place and many of what's users have been hard at work recreating the library.
veridies 9y ago
I liked the interface and catalog that what.cd had, but I think that private trackers are absolutely the wrong way to go. Having an archive is nice, but there's no present danger of losing most of these albums; the real problem is people not having access to them. We should want rare and out-of-print CDs to be reachable by poor, rural Americans, by Moroccan dentists, and by Chinese schoolchildren. Building a walled fortress that only affluent, tech-aware Westerners can access makes me deeply sad.
- 1337biz 9y ago
  There is no incentive for a group to create unique value when the benefit for non-group members is the same as in-group members. Just take a look at how many people contribute to public trackers.
- bsder 9y ago
  > Having an archive is nice, but there's no present danger of losing most of these albums I was never a what.cd member, but try to find anything from this guys channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/80zforever/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/80zforever/videos That's only 35 years ago. I can't even imagine the level of stuff from earlier that is already gone. (For example, how about all of the bands that were contemporaries of the Beatles before they hit it big?)
notatoad 9y ago
That was my first thought too - i bet the music piracy community isn't having a similar problem. And it appears that Bob Seger's back catalogue is pretty well represented: http://i.imgur.com/rICjGbQ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rICjGbQ.jpg
overcast 9y ago
What.cd was a monumental loss. There was so much rare stuff on there, old albums from local bands where I grew up, that were out of print twenty years ago. Loved it.
- johansch 9y ago
  Why didn't they just publish the torrents and the metadata? E.g. daily via automated torrents.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

by zkms 9y ago

executesorder66 9y ago

Does anyone know if there is a project that is trying to fill the massive void that what.cd left when it was closed?

SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
Yes. If you know how and where to look you will find them.

Freak_NL 9y ago

The same holds true for film and television as well; any twentieth century media really. It is a saddening state of affairs that we have the means to built and maintain a global distributed digital library of Alexandria, but not the political will or legal means. The absurdly long copyright terms are too blame for most part. 2017 is strange in that there are not nearly as many ways of sharing our vast collective libraries of digital or digitized culture as five years ago (e.g., the fall of What.cd), despite a steady increase in storage and bandwidth. I wonder what will happen next? I'm not very hopeful about copyright reform though.

ghaff 9y ago
>The absurdly long copyright terms are too blame for most part. While I agree that copyright terms are too long, I'm not sure they're the primary villain here. A lot of what we're talking about are works from living artists dating to, say, the 1960s or more recently. That's not what people usually mean when they talk about absurdly long copyright terms. I agree about film and television. Increasingly, if it's not available on streaming, it doesn't exist. Netflix is letting their DVD back catalog decay to nothing. Which basically leaves Amazon DVD purchases. When something goes out of print, you're stuck with the used market. And if it's never made it to DVD, pretty much forget about it at this point.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  The 1960s were 50 years ago though — more than half a lifetime. That falls well outside of what I find a reasonable duration for copyright. Even a limit of 30 years (or perhaps the historical 14 + 14 years) would mean anything published before the 1980s would already be in the public domain by now. The article hints at the artist simply preferring people to forget some of his older work, and that is his prerogative. But once media takes root in our culture society has its own interests to defend. We would find it really weird to leave out certain works of Shakespeare from a comprehensive omnibus because he wasn't particularly fond of them himself. Copyright should balance the rights of the author and the needs of society; in its current form that balance is lost.

peatmoss 9y ago

> I'd be willing to pay a lot for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to any copyright/licensing issues. Oh my yes. I currently pay Tidal $25/month—$20 because I refuse to believe that in 2017 it is economic to stream 4k video but not lossless audio. And tack on $5 for a family member. But I am continually annoyed when I'm listening to an album and I expect a transition into one song, but instead the album skips forward a track or two. I can only assume this is because they've lost distribution rights on a particular song for some infuriating reason. After the advent of streaming music purchases, and about the time subscription services started, Steve Jobs opined that nobody would want to rent music when you could own it. At that time, I thought that this was old man Jobs stuck in the past. And it sort of was, based on the popularity of Spotify and evidenced by Apple's capitulation. But... I find myself increasingly frustrated by being a serf and being totally at the whims of profit-driven licensing schemes. And this is why I want something similar to what.cd (I didn't even know about it until it was dead). I'm happy to pay for what I use, but FFS, the idea that we're letting chunks of our culture die because we lack the legal mechanisms to preserve it all makes me just crazy.

jszymborski 9y ago

A trusted source and well-known person in the hacker community has said there is a copy of what.cd out there... although it's understandably not accessible to the public. And no, I have no idea how to access it myself.

mixedCase 9y ago
I very much doubt that claim. There are however other sites that have taken what.cd's place and many of what's users have been hard at work recreating the library.

veridies 9y ago

I liked the interface and catalog that what.cd had, but I think that private trackers are absolutely the wrong way to go. Having an archive is nice, but there's no present danger of losing most of these albums; the real problem is people not having access to them. We should want rare and out-of-print CDs to be reachable by poor, rural Americans, by Moroccan dentists, and by Chinese schoolchildren. Building a walled fortress that only affluent, tech-aware Westerners can access makes me deeply sad.

1337biz 9y ago
There is no incentive for a group to create unique value when the benefit for non-group members is the same as in-group members. Just take a look at how many people contribute to public trackers.
bsder 9y ago
> Having an archive is nice, but there's no present danger of losing most of these albums I was never a what.cd member, but try to find anything from this guys channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/80zforever/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/80zforever/videos That's only 35 years ago. I can't even imagine the level of stuff from earlier that is already gone. (For example, how about all of the bands that were contemporaries of the Beatles before they hit it big?)

notatoad 9y ago

That was my first thought too - i bet the music piracy community isn't having a similar problem. And it appears that Bob Seger's back catalogue is pretty well represented: http://i.imgur.com/rICjGbQ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rICjGbQ.jpg

overcast 9y ago

What.cd was a monumental loss. There was so much rare stuff on there, old albums from local bands where I grew up, that were out of print twenty years ago. Loved it.

johansch 9y ago
Why didn't they just publish the torrents and the metadata? E.g. daily via automated torrents.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]