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The loss of what.cd wasn't difficult because it made piracy hard, it was because the users had created one of the best fully verified lossless cd audio archives

The loss of what.cd wasn't difficult because it made piracy hard, it was because the users had created one of the best fully verified lossless cd audio archives on the internet. Much of this content has popped up (or even been extended) on replacement trackers, but it's only a matter of time before the heroic operators of these trackers get forced to shut down too.

Iv 7y ago
I remember the early days of piracy, Napster, Kaza, eDonkey. People were simply sharing all their files. There was pride in having a hard to obtain item, such as TV shows from the 60s, movies not released in DVDs, etc... P2P could have made archivists jobs so much easier. This is a tech that should have been the next iteration of internet that we killed for no good reason. Not even greed, just a refusal to evolve a profitable but obsolete system.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  For me it had more to do with the bootleg sharing programs and the inability to download anything without 1500 different versions of malware also making it onto your computer. For some reason the torrent community doesn’t have quite the same problem.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  While early-millennium filesharing was useful for finding obscure content, the stuff available wasn’t up to the standards of professional archivists. In the library world, there are strict standards for how information is to be ripped, encoded, and tagged, but the content on filesharing networks seldom lived up to solid archival standards. It wasn’t until Oink and What.cd that we got a rigorous archive of audio material.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  How is P2P killed? I would say P2P matured. There's open source stable torrent software. Just use it, it works.
  - oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
    I think two things happened which effectively destroyed p2p - for the music-sharing case, for me specifically, at least. Streaming and greater official release of bootlegs, demos, etc. For me, there is so much available through these channels, that I don’t even consider p2p as an option.
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    Torrent is still very centralized. The average user just downloads and seeds torrents made by a few torrent curators on each site. Becoming an uploader on a torrent site is a big privilege/responsibility that few people can take on. Other older platforms like Napster or DC++ (which actually still exists) let people share their own collection at the click of a button. This gave access to a really really long tail of rarities that perhaps only a handful of people were interested in, while torrent sites are mostly mainstream content.
    - dewey 7y ago
      > Becoming an uploader on a torrent site What do you mean by that? You can upload your torrents to any of the big public torrent sites and if it's a private site just being a member allows you to upload already. Public trackers are also all using DHT which makes this not centralized.
      - bonoboTP 7y ago
        On private sites I know (in Hungary), being an uploader is a privilege one must earn, by being around for some time, earning the trust of the admins, having good uplink, learning all the rules and formats so all torrents are consistent etc. I guess perhaps about 0.1% of members upload stuff to these trackers. The situation may be different elsewhere. Context: Torrent is hugely popular in Hungary, basically everyone is a member who uses the internet under ~40 years and is even remotely technical, which means more than a million people (with the single most popular site having over 700k members, with account sharing explicitly allowed). Perhaps not so much for the newest teenager generation (I don't know). Until very recently (and still now) streaming services have been limited contentwise and people just cannot afford to buy all the movies, songs, games etc. with the same ease as in Western Europe / North America.
- javajosh 7y ago
  I used to agree totally, but now I have a more nuanced view. While artificial scarcity offends my hacker sensibility, I also have to admit that this creates a society I like, with talented wealthy celebrities, and a large population of people who make their living in and around the industry. I'm not sure I would like a society where creative acts only happens in home studios and the work is given away for free, and all artists have to have day jobs.
  - Iv 7y ago
    I never said the new model was "give away everything for free" I just said that "Consider every copy needs to be paid even though making a copy is basically free of cost and that this forces us to put a terrible censorship mechanism into place" was not the right approach. Now that there are crowdfunding campaigns and tons of tools for microtransaction, that is even less excusable than when you had the effort to imagine the apparition of these obvious solutions.
    - hakfoo 7y ago
      I feel like we're screwed until we get over the "ownership" model. It means we spend more effort on metadata (What are we allowed to do with it? Who owns it?) than the actual data. It has stood directly in the way of new creative types (sampling in music, for example) and locked away content where the metadata is faulty/lost (orphan works problem) It falls apart badly at scale (if you wanted to get distribution rights for everything on an OSX/Windows installation image, imagine the number of third parties alone, plus the original developers, you'd need to sign off) and then it only really incentivizes work that's commercially appealing, not necessarily the technical best. I dream of a day where people who want to create will be able to get a stipend-- it might cover a modest lifestyle, but ensures they can live the dream of being an artist/musician/programmer without having to clutch tight over every scrap of their output to keep their income streams alive. If we did it through a tax-funded endowment rather than market forces, we could probably finance a lot more creativity that way (think how many touring singers we could finance at 50k per year for the price of one Taylor Swift, or how many programmers we could hire to work om their passion projects in database theory for what is currently being spent on Oracle licenses.)
xouse 7y ago
People have learned from what.cd. Lots of people have the same sense of inevitable doom you do so there's more people who have put thought and effort into being capable of rebuilding quickly if that happens again. Just varroa musica alone has created a giant decentralized metadata archive(and that's not even its main purpose just a neat side effect) that would make the restarting process much easier. The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. Spotify et al really put a huge damper on the music tracker community, and that makes it less resilient.
- Lammy 7y ago
  > The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. People were saying the same thing in 2007 when OiNK shut down and What was starting up. The community is not smaller; it's more fragmented, and that's a good thing. Centralization is no better in our societal constructs than it is in our technological ones. I'll trade some immediacy and convenience for longevity any day.
  - xouse 7y ago
    I disagree, the community is both more fragmented and smaller, what had 144k users on its last day vs the 35k of its spiritual successor today. The few music trackers that have sprung up post what.cd after said spiritual successor are all pretty small. The niche genre trackers all have about the same user numbers since then so they cancel out. Then factor in that waffles has been down for some time now and the difference is pretty big. I can only estimate because exact numbers are hard to find, but I'd say peak what era music tracker community total users was in the 350k region and we're probably somewhere around 100k now.
- WilTimSon 7y ago
  Does Spotify really cut that deep into the demographic of hardcore music tracker users? I'd presume those people are chasing rare and lost releases in high quality and Spotify and other streaming services aren't exactly touting rarities. Preserving underground music will always be a job for the fans, not streaming services.
shortandsweet 7y ago
What.cd most certainly wasn't the best. They were really stuck up and got what they deserved. I was amazed at the process just to get access to what they didn't even own. Waffles and oink were so much better.
- serf 7y ago
  > I was amazed at the process just to get access to what they didn't even own. it was that process that helped to curate one of the highest quality audio libraries to have ever been. it's not all that important for most folks to listen to and compare 20 different releases of Bowie's 'Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars', but to those of us that enjoy music cataloguing as a hobby , the loss of what.cd was pretty terrible.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dewey 7y ago
  By what metric where Waffles and oink better? What.cd was run incredibly professionally, as you can see by the fact that it was active for almost 9 years and nothing happened to any of the people involved.
  - MivLives 7y ago
    They're complaining about the invite system. Either you had to know someone or you had to get lucky that they'd be doing irc interviews that day.
    - dewey 7y ago
      Then their criticism doesn't make much sense as both Waffles and Oink had an invite system. At least What.cd was more approachable as there was an interview system which made it possible for everyone to join as long as they learned some basics about audio formats / transcoding / site rules and had an hour to spend on an interview.
dewey 7y ago
Luckily the internet archive was also working on archiving the content on what.cd even though the results are not public (yet?). https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl
- ripdog 7y ago
  Getting the metadata is great, but the content won't come back.
pontifier 7y ago
I'm working on something that should be the best place to find any media... unfortunately the VidAngel vs Disney lawsuit has made things a little tougher. Fair use took a big blow there.

Iv 7y ago

I remember the early days of piracy, Napster, Kaza, eDonkey. People were simply sharing all their files. There was pride in having a hard to obtain item, such as TV shows from the 60s, movies not released in DVDs, etc... P2P could have made archivists jobs so much easier. This is a tech that should have been the next iteration of internet that we killed for no good reason. Not even greed, just a refusal to evolve a profitable but obsolete system.

Aeolun 7y ago
For me it had more to do with the bootleg sharing programs and the inability to download anything without 1500 different versions of malware also making it onto your computer. For some reason the torrent community doesn’t have quite the same problem.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
While early-millennium filesharing was useful for finding obscure content, the stuff available wasn’t up to the standards of professional archivists. In the library world, there are strict standards for how information is to be ripped, encoded, and tagged, but the content on filesharing networks seldom lived up to solid archival standards. It wasn’t until Oink and What.cd that we got a rigorous archive of audio material.
vbezhenar 7y ago
How is P2P killed? I would say P2P matured. There's open source stable torrent software. Just use it, it works.
- oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
  I think two things happened which effectively destroyed p2p - for the music-sharing case, for me specifically, at least. Streaming and greater official release of bootlegs, demos, etc. For me, there is so much available through these channels, that I don’t even consider p2p as an option.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  Torrent is still very centralized. The average user just downloads and seeds torrents made by a few torrent curators on each site. Becoming an uploader on a torrent site is a big privilege/responsibility that few people can take on. Other older platforms like Napster or DC++ (which actually still exists) let people share their own collection at the click of a button. This gave access to a really really long tail of rarities that perhaps only a handful of people were interested in, while torrent sites are mostly mainstream content.
  - dewey 7y ago
    > Becoming an uploader on a torrent site What do you mean by that? You can upload your torrents to any of the big public torrent sites and if it's a private site just being a member allows you to upload already. Public trackers are also all using DHT which makes this not centralized.
    - bonoboTP 7y ago
      On private sites I know (in Hungary), being an uploader is a privilege one must earn, by being around for some time, earning the trust of the admins, having good uplink, learning all the rules and formats so all torrents are consistent etc. I guess perhaps about 0.1% of members upload stuff to these trackers. The situation may be different elsewhere. Context: Torrent is hugely popular in Hungary, basically everyone is a member who uses the internet under ~40 years and is even remotely technical, which means more than a million people (with the single most popular site having over 700k members, with account sharing explicitly allowed). Perhaps not so much for the newest teenager generation (I don't know). Until very recently (and still now) streaming services have been limited contentwise and people just cannot afford to buy all the movies, songs, games etc. with the same ease as in Western Europe / North America.
javajosh 7y ago
I used to agree totally, but now I have a more nuanced view. While artificial scarcity offends my hacker sensibility, I also have to admit that this creates a society I like, with talented wealthy celebrities, and a large population of people who make their living in and around the industry. I'm not sure I would like a society where creative acts only happens in home studios and the work is given away for free, and all artists have to have day jobs.
- Iv 7y ago
  I never said the new model was "give away everything for free" I just said that "Consider every copy needs to be paid even though making a copy is basically free of cost and that this forces us to put a terrible censorship mechanism into place" was not the right approach. Now that there are crowdfunding campaigns and tons of tools for microtransaction, that is even less excusable than when you had the effort to imagine the apparition of these obvious solutions.
  - hakfoo 7y ago
    I feel like we're screwed until we get over the "ownership" model. It means we spend more effort on metadata (What are we allowed to do with it? Who owns it?) than the actual data. It has stood directly in the way of new creative types (sampling in music, for example) and locked away content where the metadata is faulty/lost (orphan works problem) It falls apart badly at scale (if you wanted to get distribution rights for everything on an OSX/Windows installation image, imagine the number of third parties alone, plus the original developers, you'd need to sign off) and then it only really incentivizes work that's commercially appealing, not necessarily the technical best. I dream of a day where people who want to create will be able to get a stipend-- it might cover a modest lifestyle, but ensures they can live the dream of being an artist/musician/programmer without having to clutch tight over every scrap of their output to keep their income streams alive. If we did it through a tax-funded endowment rather than market forces, we could probably finance a lot more creativity that way (think how many touring singers we could finance at 50k per year for the price of one Taylor Swift, or how many programmers we could hire to work om their passion projects in database theory for what is currently being spent on Oracle licenses.)

xouse 7y ago

People have learned from what.cd. Lots of people have the same sense of inevitable doom you do so there's more people who have put thought and effort into being capable of rebuilding quickly if that happens again. Just varroa musica alone has created a giant decentralized metadata archive(and that's not even its main purpose just a neat side effect) that would make the restarting process much easier. The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. Spotify et al really put a huge damper on the music tracker community, and that makes it less resilient.

Lammy 7y ago
> The downside is that the post what community is so much smaller. People were saying the same thing in 2007 when OiNK shut down and What was starting up. The community is not smaller; it's more fragmented, and that's a good thing. Centralization is no better in our societal constructs than it is in our technological ones. I'll trade some immediacy and convenience for longevity any day.
- xouse 7y ago
  I disagree, the community is both more fragmented and smaller, what had 144k users on its last day vs the 35k of its spiritual successor today. The few music trackers that have sprung up post what.cd after said spiritual successor are all pretty small. The niche genre trackers all have about the same user numbers since then so they cancel out. Then factor in that waffles has been down for some time now and the difference is pretty big. I can only estimate because exact numbers are hard to find, but I'd say peak what era music tracker community total users was in the 350k region and we're probably somewhere around 100k now.
WilTimSon 7y ago
Does Spotify really cut that deep into the demographic of hardcore music tracker users? I'd presume those people are chasing rare and lost releases in high quality and Spotify and other streaming services aren't exactly touting rarities. Preserving underground music will always be a job for the fans, not streaming services.

shortandsweet 7y ago

What.cd most certainly wasn't the best. They were really stuck up and got what they deserved. I was amazed at the process just to get access to what they didn't even own. Waffles and oink were so much better.

serf 7y ago
> I was amazed at the process just to get access to what they didn't even own. it was that process that helped to curate one of the highest quality audio libraries to have ever been. it's not all that important for most folks to listen to and compare 20 different releases of Bowie's 'Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars', but to those of us that enjoy music cataloguing as a hobby , the loss of what.cd was pretty terrible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dewey 7y ago
By what metric where Waffles and oink better? What.cd was run incredibly professionally, as you can see by the fact that it was active for almost 9 years and nothing happened to any of the people involved.
- MivLives 7y ago
  They're complaining about the invite system. Either you had to know someone or you had to get lucky that they'd be doing irc interviews that day.
  - dewey 7y ago
    Then their criticism doesn't make much sense as both Waffles and Oink had an invite system. At least What.cd was more approachable as there was an interview system which made it possible for everyone to join as long as they learned some basics about audio formats / transcoding / site rules and had an hour to spend on an interview.

dewey 7y ago

Luckily the internet archive was also working on archiving the content on what.cd even though the results are not public (yet?). https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl

ripdog 7y ago
Getting the metadata is great, but the content won't come back.

pontifier 7y ago

I'm working on something that should be the best place to find any media... unfortunately the VidAngel vs Disney lawsuit has made things a little tougher. Fair use took a big blow there.