102 ms·

Oink's Pink Palace

92 points by dvektor 3y ago

dvektor 3y ago
Who else was here? God damn does this bring back memories.
- blisstonia 3y ago
  Oh yeah!
- fjallstrom 3y ago
  I was. It was a glorious time.
- geoah 3y ago
  Was so sad to see oink go. What cd did a good job but nowhere close to oink. I feel there was one more that I’m missing after oink.
  - clows 3y ago
    waffles.fm maybe?
    - geoah 3y ago
      Yes!! :D
      - clows 3y ago
        I was barely on OiNK. Got an invite and I think 2 months later it shut down :/ But I used waffles quite a bit. (I didn't like what.cd for some reason)
    - homefree 3y ago
      Waffles moved from fm to ch a while back. It also had a fake forum login in the early days. Not sure when it died though. I remember people trying to get into FTN and others too that were known to be very exclusive - not sure if any of those are still around.
  - blisstonia 3y ago
    WhatCD was pretty damn good, I'd say it rivalled Oink. Remember the bounty on that MSFT forensic tool? The copy of the unreleased JD Salinger novel? Both fulfilled...
    - dvektor 3y ago
      Lmao I remember the bounty for COFEE was up so high.. and it was super anti-climactic when it finally showed up. Nobody was impressed
      - blisstonia 3y ago
        Heh I know right? I think it freaked everyone out a little bit. Startled everyone as it had a whiff of LE…
    - homefree 3y ago
      I remember coffee getting fulfilled, but don’t recall the Salinger novel getting fulfilled. What was the story there? Iirc it was in the Princeton rare books library and it was hard to get access to? Guessing someone took photos?
      - crtasm 3y ago
        They're thinking of the short stories, I guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD#Leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD#Leaks https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-the-leaked-jd-salinger-stories-reveal-about-the-author https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-the-leaked-jd-salinger-st...
      - blisstonia 3y ago
        Here's the story about the novel: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/28/salinger-unpublished-stories-leaked-online https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/28/salinger-unpub... Directly calls out WhatCD
        homefree 3y ago
  - propter_hoc 3y ago
    What.cd was certainly better than oink in terms of the library (largely because it was started by seeders who already had the entire oink library) but was definitely missing the charm.
  - Larrikin 3y ago
    Honest question, what did Oink have that what did not? Oink was first to try, but what was the greatest collection of music in the history of the world with a lasting open source legacy to this day.
- phatskat 3y ago
  OiNK was amazing, big rip
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  Yep. Nugz and OiNK were how I got into vinyl ripping and live tape swaps afk. Only one tracker I joined in the early 2000s now yet remains. On an interesting note, I'm still being commissioned for analog capture and restoration projects through connections I made back then.
- bryceneal 3y ago
  OiNK changed my life. I discovered it in high-school and found so much good music that I never would have experienced otherwise. I still think about it at least a few times a year.
rpy 3y ago
RIP to a real one. Nothing since has been as good
- mathieuh 3y ago
  I think part of the reason is that audio streaming is relatively cheap and easy. I was never on oink but I was on what.cd, and I remember I started using it less and less as services like Spotify got better and better in terms of quality and content. If we compare music to movies and TV where the official ways of accessing content are such a complete shitshow, you have amazing sites like passthepopcorn and broadcasthenet, which to me are of a similar quality to what.cd was for music. I think it just demonstrates again the fact that piracy is in large part driven by difficulty and cost of access to official releases. I mean, I'm not badly-off, I have a very well paying job and I /could/ afford to spend the money on a load of subscriptions, it's just such a hassle. Much easier and less frustrating to just check PTP or BTN for something I want to watch.
- clows 3y ago
  Soulseek was pretty sweet - people would chat me up when downloading an album they shared and ask if I wanted anything else they hadn't ripped yet - or recommend something similar. It was more like napster though and not torrent based iirc.
  - miah_ 3y ago
    Soulseek still exists and works well.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Soulseek is very much still around. I recently logged in for the first time in a long while, and I was able to get all kinds of rare recordings. That said, it seems a less social place than 20 years in terms of using the chat feature. I would suspect that the majority of heavy Soulseek sharers are now in their 30s and 40s, with careers and families, and not so interested in making new music friends.
Spidler 3y ago
I'm still salty about the loss of OiNK and the cruft of junk that is streaming services. Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week. Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week. Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting". And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore. Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.
- layer8 3y ago
  You might want to try YouTube Music, which also includes whatever YouTube users upload (so you get rare mixes and other otherwise unavailable music), and will apply the usual “people who liked X also liked Y” recommendation algorithm. You won’t get any tour or merch info though.
- nickspacek 3y ago
  This annoys me to no end. I'm sure there are more curated playlists on Spotify out there, but having it always shoveling music at me based on whoever is paying them the most to push it is exhausting. And as others have pointed out, the app experience has seemingly deteriorated over time to the point where my Offline music is difficult and frustrating to get to play... when offline! I'm slowly returning to curating my own music files and integrating them into my homelab via Jellyfin and Fintunes (can be found on F-Droid). I currently keep Spotify around for its podcast archive but those days are likely numbered as well. I'll end up supporting them forever though, since weaning my family members off of its convenience is unlikely to happen. Edit to suggest "Cloudspeakers Weekly Chart" as my recommendation for a curated Spotify playlist with a wide variety of new music with updates on Saturdays. Occasionally includes pop hits, but I've otherwise found lots of new artists in there. Found it through a recommendation on here, definitely not through Spotify itself.
ssharp 3y ago
Oink filled a void at a perfect time in music. I grew up in the 90's and CDs typically ran in the $15-20 range. This was when minimum wage was something like $5.15 an hour. So it would take 3-4 hours of work to buy a CD. This led to having to really pine over purchase decisions. Pre-Napster, this meant using a few things as filters: the radio, label compilations albums that featured a lot of songs by artists and were usually cheaper to buy, or pirating via IRC, which was fun at the time, but looking back was quite tedious. Then Napster came and went. In it's wake, consumer expectations changed but nothing really worked as well as Napster. It's replacements were unreliable, were risky for installing adware/spyware, and there were lots of scare tactics by the music industry going after downloaders in court. This was also around the time of the iPod but pre-iPhone, so you could carry around digital music but it wasn't really streamed. At this time, I had an iPod but mostly consumed music in my car through burned CDs. Enter Oink. Oink brought you back to the time where you consume full albums instead of single songs but also solved a ton of problems with music sharing programs -- the shady software, unreliable availability of songs, inconsistent, if not totally absent tagging, shitty encoding, etc. Since there was still some work involved in downloading and burning the albums, you had to still make some choice over what to listen to, but not labor over it like a few years back when a CD meant half a days work. Oink had SO much stuff as well. I cannot recall a time when I didn't find something I wanted. Even though it was stealing, it felt like you were getting something of quality and not taking a gamble on something from a music sharing site. I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I got my first iPhone in 2008 and buying music from the iTunes store became much more appealing with it instantly showing up on your device, so I did more of that. I remember using Rhapsody on Desktop for a while and later on the iPhone as well, a year or so before Spotify took over music.
- nrp 3y ago
  > I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I believe most folks migrated to What.cd until large streaming platforms made music discoverability and accessibility possible again.
chrsw 3y ago
We got jobs and pay Spotify (or someone) for music now.
- tchbnl 3y ago
  Not everything is on Spotify, though. I have a lot of CDs I've had to look for second-hand because they're not on any streaming services or digital stores, and long out of print. I'd probably been able to find a lot of them on OiNK or What.CD and nowhere else online. It's difficult and expensive sometimes, and it also feels wrong not to be able to share them with others.
- 15155 3y ago
  Which is fine, until Spotify or the artist for whatever political, business reason decide to remove the content.
ct0 3y ago
I remember it well. Before their store went offline I ended up buying two T-shirts. I wore one and the other one might still be in the bag brand new. Has to be worth something by now.
- peblos 3y ago
  Still got my mug nearly 20 years later
beloch 3y ago
"Piracy is the new radio". --Neal Young The new radio is now silent, and it's just a streaming service's algorithm that decides what new music you'll be exposed to. I feel like we really lost something. Maybe I just entered a different phase in life, but back in the heydey of piracy I actually bought a lot of albums. I followed artists and was frequently excited for new releases. With so much of my music coming from piracy, it felt important to support bands I really wanted to hear more from. Now I spend a small fraction of what I used to spend on a streaming service and that's all.
gary_0 3y ago
The destruction of knowledge and culture wrought by copyright lawyers amounts to at least 1000 Libraries Alexandria.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
  [flagged]
- unixhero 3y ago
  First Oink then What.cd
nehal3m 3y ago
I miss curating local files and playing them with Winamp (just noticed the red squiggly under that name, god I'm old). The mobile-first streaming interfaces with miles of whitespace and big touch targets annoy the heck out of me. When I'm actively listening to music I want the interface to serve that purpose; just give me a list of albums, artists and song titles and let me filter them. Easily managing a playlist is also not a thing anymore although maybe that's just me. It's unintuitive.
- have_faith 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons I'm looking at getting rid of Spotify. Not because I'm against paying to stream audio (my account is very old), but because the UI around playlist and library management, plus it's very basic search / filter functionality, is built around highlighting the Spotify service and not what I want to do with the library.
  - soco 3y ago
    If that alleviates your pain a bit, know that there are some Spotify playlist managers around. I never tried any of them so I won't drop names, maybe someone else can recommend something?
- encom 3y ago
  >I miss curating local files You can just do that then. I have files in my library I encoded in the 90's. foobar2000 has been continuously developed for over 20 years and is very good at playing and managing a library. And runs well under Wine. Still, I pray for an actual Linux port. Dev is wasting his time on a Mac version.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    It's such a shame these great freeware programs for Windows tend to be proprietary. I never really understood why because they give it away for free anyway.
  - nehal3m 3y ago
neontomo 3y ago
I was never on OiNK but I ended up being a moderator on What.CD for half a year or so, made some lovely memories there and it was my first time being exposed to real nerds building unconventional things. The people I met there are the reason I installed Linux for the first time, learned how to build IRC bots and went on to dive deeper into technology as a passion and hobby. The quality of coders you'd meet there was exhilarating for a 16-17 year old. One guy was building a new BitTorrent tracker, another was exploiting CSS vulnerabilities to see what sites someone had visited and another was building a bot that would download the first 5 seconds of songs on the website and check whether the specified bitrate was correct. It was a formative time that nurtured my interests. RIP.
- unixhero 3y ago
  What.CD was so amazing. I could not believe it was gone. It still sucks.
- scld 3y ago
  oink and what.cd were the best music discovery methods ever devised and that remains true today
  - pivic 3y ago
    I loved them both buy don't forget SoulSeek!
    - vsnf 3y ago
      SoulSeek isn’t really discovery though is it? You more or less have to know what you want before you start
      - Larrikin 3y ago
        SoulSeek allowed you to browse the entire directory being shared, so you only had to search for one thing you wanted and then could look through everything an individual was sharing.
pineconewarrior 3y ago
I miss OiNK, Waffles, and What so dearly. Music has never been the same for me since.
- crtasm 3y ago
  https://interviewfor.red https://interviewfor.red
easyThrowaway 3y ago
Oink was used by A LOT of A-Level artists and musicians. IIRC The only one who openly spoke about this was Trent Reznor, but having the chance to speak with big name producers it was the place to go for extremely hard to find whitelabels, clean rips of completely forgotten releases from the 50-80s... Quoting LCD Soundsystem, "I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody". Oink closing had a tangible effect on the choice and audio quality of samples used in several commercially-released albums.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  One of the things that got me interested in Benn Jordan and his music was the fact that he was uploading his own albums onto What.CD
  - unixhero 3y ago
    The Flashbulb was "vanity house" (internal user, real artist) and published his music there. He went on to do great things.
  - timemct 3y ago
    If you are the same Solar Fields I’m thinking about, I’m pretty sure I discovered your/their music, specifically the album Until We Meet The Sky, via what.cd. Cheers!
    - mos_basik 3y ago
      Man! I would have missed that username if you hadn't commented about it. Thanks for saying something! I will always associate Until We Meet the Sky with a roughly two week period late in my undergrad during which several of my friends were moving away and I was pulling all-nighters helping people pack, blasting this album on the dorm's speakers to a deserted campus and generally thinking about impermanence. Strong album. Didn't find them via What, though - I think it was by branching out from the Mirror's Edge soundtrack. How did you find it? Staff Pick or similar?
gsa 3y ago
After what.cd died, I used Google Play Music for a long time before Google discontinued the product. I stumbled around a bunch of streaming music services and have been disappointed ever since. Streaming services have a terrible UX. Some artists are completely missing from the services. I often find one of my favourite artists has released a new album, but I end up finding this from third party sources. Scrolling through the library is incredibly slow because of infinite scroll and no concept of a local library. Lyrics don't always work and if they do it's always presented in a big font with no way to change it. I could go on and on. I'm now transitioning to my own curated music library and I'm currently running Navidrome on my home NAS. It has a Subsonic API that I use with Strawberry, a player which is reminiscent of Amarok - my favourite music player ever. New releases are tracked by Muspy. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and subreddits to discover new music. Works well for me but I imagine it's not for everyone.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
sad to think the closure of OiNK and What will definitely have set the wheels in motion for some cultural artifacts to become lost. Preservation should be legalized and its absurd to claim it harms sales when Universal Music has $2B revenue
- vanderZwan 3y ago
  What is easy to overlook is that it's not just cultural artifacts in the sense of the recording itself. These kind of sites also had fans meticulously fill in all the metadata about the history and context of a song, film or whatever. I remember a blog post by a historian lamenting the loss of all that community-build knowledge when these sites where shut down (and I bet it wasn't just one historian who felt that way).
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    >These kind of sites also had fans meticulously fill in all the metadata about the history and context of a song, film or whatever. Absolutely, the metadata on What was beyond wikipedia level all completely user managed meticulously. Slightly different versions of releases all catalogued and rips verified to a high standard. This is before we even get into the fact it was all connected so similar artists were navigate-able you could actually start from a band you enjoy and dig into other similar music right from the same site. The cataloging goes way beyond anything Apple offered at the time and anything Apple, Spotify, Tidal offer today.
  - crtasm 3y ago
    Much of What.CD's metadata was later released: https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release
dakial1 3y ago
I was both on OiNK and What.cd and both were awesome places to find new music and bootlegs. I was always after show recordings with different version of songs which would never reach anybody’s ears if it wasn’t for the people sharing them. I understand the whole copyright discussion but at least for music I understand that people there were really lovers of music, not just people wanting to pay nothing for the artists work. I still believe there is a space for a streaming service sharing raw show recordings (which I somewhat use YT music for).
notoriousdel 3y ago
I miss OiNK so much
qingcharles 3y ago
I ran a handful of trackers from 2006 to 2013. They were money machines like you've never seen. I ran a British TV tracker. Everyone in the industry used the site. Sometimes we would get pre-release stuff. I remember Charlie Brooker emailing me one time asking us to take down an item until it had been broadcast and then he was fine with it being up there. CB is a hero of mine, so there was no question of complying. https://torrentfreak.com/major-tv-torrent-site-thebox-bz-calls-it-quits-130829/ https://torrentfreak.com/major-tv-torrent-site-thebox-bz-cal...
- rospaya 3y ago
  That's the place I got my Charlie Brooker fix at the time. Thank you.
- acuozzo 3y ago
  Money from ads or…?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Donations to "keep the site running" .. our costs were actually relatively high, but our donations were several times our needs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
millerhooks 3y ago
Oink was an absolute dream.

Oink's Pink Palace

92 points by dvektor 3y ago

dvektor 3y ago

Who else was here? God damn does this bring back memories.

blisstonia 3y ago
Oh yeah!
fjallstrom 3y ago
I was. It was a glorious time.
geoah 3y ago
Was so sad to see oink go. What cd did a good job but nowhere close to oink. I feel there was one more that I’m missing after oink.
- clows 3y ago
  waffles.fm maybe?
  - geoah 3y ago
    Yes!! :D
    - clows 3y ago
      I was barely on OiNK. Got an invite and I think 2 months later it shut down :/ But I used waffles quite a bit. (I didn't like what.cd for some reason)
  - homefree 3y ago
    Waffles moved from fm to ch a while back. It also had a fake forum login in the early days. Not sure when it died though. I remember people trying to get into FTN and others too that were known to be very exclusive - not sure if any of those are still around.
- blisstonia 3y ago
  WhatCD was pretty damn good, I'd say it rivalled Oink. Remember the bounty on that MSFT forensic tool? The copy of the unreleased JD Salinger novel? Both fulfilled...
  - dvektor 3y ago
    Lmao I remember the bounty for COFEE was up so high.. and it was super anti-climactic when it finally showed up. Nobody was impressed
    - blisstonia 3y ago
      Heh I know right? I think it freaked everyone out a little bit. Startled everyone as it had a whiff of LE…
  - homefree 3y ago
    I remember coffee getting fulfilled, but don’t recall the Salinger novel getting fulfilled. What was the story there? Iirc it was in the Princeton rare books library and it was hard to get access to? Guessing someone took photos?
    - crtasm 3y ago
      They're thinking of the short stories, I guess? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD#Leaks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD#Leaks https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-the-leaked-jd-salinger-stories-reveal-about-the-author https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-the-leaked-jd-salinger-st...
    - blisstonia 3y ago
      Here's the story about the novel: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/28/salinger-unpublished-stories-leaked-online https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/28/salinger-unpub... Directly calls out WhatCD
      - homefree 3y ago
- propter_hoc 3y ago
  What.cd was certainly better than oink in terms of the library (largely because it was started by seeders who already had the entire oink library) but was definitely missing the charm.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  Honest question, what did Oink have that what did not? Oink was first to try, but what was the greatest collection of music in the history of the world with a lasting open source legacy to this day.
phatskat 3y ago
OiNK was amazing, big rip
washadjeffmad 3y ago
Yep. Nugz and OiNK were how I got into vinyl ripping and live tape swaps afk. Only one tracker I joined in the early 2000s now yet remains. On an interesting note, I'm still being commissioned for analog capture and restoration projects through connections I made back then.
bryceneal 3y ago
OiNK changed my life. I discovered it in high-school and found so much good music that I never would have experienced otherwise. I still think about it at least a few times a year.

rpy 3y ago

RIP to a real one. Nothing since has been as good

mathieuh 3y ago
I think part of the reason is that audio streaming is relatively cheap and easy. I was never on oink but I was on what.cd, and I remember I started using it less and less as services like Spotify got better and better in terms of quality and content. If we compare music to movies and TV where the official ways of accessing content are such a complete shitshow, you have amazing sites like passthepopcorn and broadcasthenet, which to me are of a similar quality to what.cd was for music. I think it just demonstrates again the fact that piracy is in large part driven by difficulty and cost of access to official releases. I mean, I'm not badly-off, I have a very well paying job and I /could/ afford to spend the money on a load of subscriptions, it's just such a hassle. Much easier and less frustrating to just check PTP or BTN for something I want to watch.
clows 3y ago
Soulseek was pretty sweet - people would chat me up when downloading an album they shared and ask if I wanted anything else they hadn't ripped yet - or recommend something similar. It was more like napster though and not torrent based iirc.
- miah_ 3y ago
  Soulseek still exists and works well.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Soulseek is very much still around. I recently logged in for the first time in a long while, and I was able to get all kinds of rare recordings. That said, it seems a less social place than 20 years in terms of using the chat feature. I would suspect that the majority of heavy Soulseek sharers are now in their 30s and 40s, with careers and families, and not so interested in making new music friends.

Spidler 3y ago

I'm still salty about the loss of OiNK and the cruft of junk that is streaming services. Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week. Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week. Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting". And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore. Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.

layer8 3y ago
You might want to try YouTube Music, which also includes whatever YouTube users upload (so you get rare mixes and other otherwise unavailable music), and will apply the usual “people who liked X also liked Y” recommendation algorithm. You won’t get any tour or merch info though.
nickspacek 3y ago
This annoys me to no end. I'm sure there are more curated playlists on Spotify out there, but having it always shoveling music at me based on whoever is paying them the most to push it is exhausting. And as others have pointed out, the app experience has seemingly deteriorated over time to the point where my Offline music is difficult and frustrating to get to play... when offline! I'm slowly returning to curating my own music files and integrating them into my homelab via Jellyfin and Fintunes (can be found on F-Droid). I currently keep Spotify around for its podcast archive but those days are likely numbered as well. I'll end up supporting them forever though, since weaning my family members off of its convenience is unlikely to happen. Edit to suggest "Cloudspeakers Weekly Chart" as my recommendation for a curated Spotify playlist with a wide variety of new music with updates on Saturdays. Occasionally includes pop hits, but I've otherwise found lots of new artists in there. Found it through a recommendation on here, definitely not through Spotify itself.

ssharp 3y ago

Oink filled a void at a perfect time in music. I grew up in the 90's and CDs typically ran in the $15-20 range. This was when minimum wage was something like $5.15 an hour. So it would take 3-4 hours of work to buy a CD. This led to having to really pine over purchase decisions. Pre-Napster, this meant using a few things as filters: the radio, label compilations albums that featured a lot of songs by artists and were usually cheaper to buy, or pirating via IRC, which was fun at the time, but looking back was quite tedious. Then Napster came and went. In it's wake, consumer expectations changed but nothing really worked as well as Napster. It's replacements were unreliable, were risky for installing adware/spyware, and there were lots of scare tactics by the music industry going after downloaders in court. This was also around the time of the iPod but pre-iPhone, so you could carry around digital music but it wasn't really streamed. At this time, I had an iPod but mostly consumed music in my car through burned CDs. Enter Oink. Oink brought you back to the time where you consume full albums instead of single songs but also solved a ton of problems with music sharing programs -- the shady software, unreliable availability of songs, inconsistent, if not totally absent tagging, shitty encoding, etc. Since there was still some work involved in downloading and burning the albums, you had to still make some choice over what to listen to, but not labor over it like a few years back when a CD meant half a days work. Oink had SO much stuff as well. I cannot recall a time when I didn't find something I wanted. Even though it was stealing, it felt like you were getting something of quality and not taking a gamble on something from a music sharing site. I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I got my first iPhone in 2008 and buying music from the iTunes store became much more appealing with it instantly showing up on your device, so I did more of that. I remember using Rhapsody on Desktop for a while and later on the iPhone as well, a year or so before Spotify took over music.

nrp 3y ago
> I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I believe most folks migrated to What.cd until large streaming platforms made music discoverability and accessibility possible again.

chrsw 3y ago

We got jobs and pay Spotify (or someone) for music now.

tchbnl 3y ago
Not everything is on Spotify, though. I have a lot of CDs I've had to look for second-hand because they're not on any streaming services or digital stores, and long out of print. I'd probably been able to find a lot of them on OiNK or What.CD and nowhere else online. It's difficult and expensive sometimes, and it also feels wrong not to be able to share them with others.
15155 3y ago
Which is fine, until Spotify or the artist for whatever political, business reason decide to remove the content.

ct0 3y ago

I remember it well. Before their store went offline I ended up buying two T-shirts. I wore one and the other one might still be in the bag brand new. Has to be worth something by now.

peblos 3y ago
Still got my mug nearly 20 years later

beloch 3y ago

"Piracy is the new radio". --Neal Young The new radio is now silent, and it's just a streaming service's algorithm that decides what new music you'll be exposed to. I feel like we really lost something. Maybe I just entered a different phase in life, but back in the heydey of piracy I actually bought a lot of albums. I followed artists and was frequently excited for new releases. With so much of my music coming from piracy, it felt important to support bands I really wanted to hear more from. Now I spend a small fraction of what I used to spend on a streaming service and that's all.

gary_0 3y ago

The destruction of knowledge and culture wrought by copyright lawyers amounts to at least 1000 Libraries Alexandria.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
[flagged]
unixhero 3y ago
First Oink then What.cd

nehal3m 3y ago

I miss curating local files and playing them with Winamp (just noticed the red squiggly under that name, god I'm old). The mobile-first streaming interfaces with miles of whitespace and big touch targets annoy the heck out of me. When I'm actively listening to music I want the interface to serve that purpose; just give me a list of albums, artists and song titles and let me filter them. Easily managing a playlist is also not a thing anymore although maybe that's just me. It's unintuitive.

have_faith 3y ago
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at getting rid of Spotify. Not because I'm against paying to stream audio (my account is very old), but because the UI around playlist and library management, plus it's very basic search / filter functionality, is built around highlighting the Spotify service and not what I want to do with the library.
- soco 3y ago
  If that alleviates your pain a bit, know that there are some Spotify playlist managers around. I never tried any of them so I won't drop names, maybe someone else can recommend something?
encom 3y ago
>I miss curating local files You can just do that then. I have files in my library I encoded in the 90's. foobar2000 has been continuously developed for over 20 years and is very good at playing and managing a library. And runs well under Wine. Still, I pray for an actual Linux port. Dev is wasting his time on a Mac version.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  It's such a shame these great freeware programs for Windows tend to be proprietary. I never really understood why because they give it away for free anyway.
- nehal3m 3y ago

neontomo 3y ago

I was never on OiNK but I ended up being a moderator on What.CD for half a year or so, made some lovely memories there and it was my first time being exposed to real nerds building unconventional things. The people I met there are the reason I installed Linux for the first time, learned how to build IRC bots and went on to dive deeper into technology as a passion and hobby. The quality of coders you'd meet there was exhilarating for a 16-17 year old. One guy was building a new BitTorrent tracker, another was exploiting CSS vulnerabilities to see what sites someone had visited and another was building a bot that would download the first 5 seconds of songs on the website and check whether the specified bitrate was correct. It was a formative time that nurtured my interests. RIP.

unixhero 3y ago
What.CD was so amazing. I could not believe it was gone. It still sucks.
scld 3y ago
oink and what.cd were the best music discovery methods ever devised and that remains true today
- pivic 3y ago
  I loved them both buy don't forget SoulSeek!
  - vsnf 3y ago
    SoulSeek isn’t really discovery though is it? You more or less have to know what you want before you start
    - Larrikin 3y ago
      SoulSeek allowed you to browse the entire directory being shared, so you only had to search for one thing you wanted and then could look through everything an individual was sharing.

pineconewarrior 3y ago

I miss OiNK, Waffles, and What so dearly. Music has never been the same for me since.

crtasm 3y ago
https://interviewfor.red https://interviewfor.red

easyThrowaway 3y ago

Oink was used by A LOT of A-Level artists and musicians. IIRC The only one who openly spoke about this was Trent Reznor, but having the chance to speak with big name producers it was the place to go for extremely hard to find whitelabels, clean rips of completely forgotten releases from the 50-80s... Quoting LCD Soundsystem, "I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody". Oink closing had a tangible effect on the choice and audio quality of samples used in several commercially-released albums.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
One of the things that got me interested in Benn Jordan and his music was the fact that he was uploading his own albums onto What.CD
- unixhero 3y ago
  The Flashbulb was "vanity house" (internal user, real artist) and published his music there. He went on to do great things.
- timemct 3y ago
  If you are the same Solar Fields I’m thinking about, I’m pretty sure I discovered your/their music, specifically the album Until We Meet The Sky, via what.cd. Cheers!
  - mos_basik 3y ago
    Man! I would have missed that username if you hadn't commented about it. Thanks for saying something! I will always associate Until We Meet the Sky with a roughly two week period late in my undergrad during which several of my friends were moving away and I was pulling all-nighters helping people pack, blasting this album on the dorm's speakers to a deserted campus and generally thinking about impermanence. Strong album. Didn't find them via What, though - I think it was by branching out from the Mirror's Edge soundtrack. How did you find it? Staff Pick or similar?

gsa 3y ago

After what.cd died, I used Google Play Music for a long time before Google discontinued the product. I stumbled around a bunch of streaming music services and have been disappointed ever since. Streaming services have a terrible UX. Some artists are completely missing from the services. I often find one of my favourite artists has released a new album, but I end up finding this from third party sources. Scrolling through the library is incredibly slow because of infinite scroll and no concept of a local library. Lyrics don't always work and if they do it's always presented in a big font with no way to change it. I could go on and on. I'm now transitioning to my own curated music library and I'm currently running Navidrome on my home NAS. It has a Subsonic API that I use with Strawberry, a player which is reminiscent of Amarok - my favourite music player ever. New releases are tracked by Muspy. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and subreddits to discover new music. Works well for me but I imagine it's not for everyone.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

sad to think the closure of OiNK and What will definitely have set the wheels in motion for some cultural artifacts to become lost. Preservation should be legalized and its absurd to claim it harms sales when Universal Music has $2B revenue

vanderZwan 3y ago
What is easy to overlook is that it's not just cultural artifacts in the sense of the recording itself. These kind of sites also had fans meticulously fill in all the metadata about the history and context of a song, film or whatever. I remember a blog post by a historian lamenting the loss of all that community-build knowledge when these sites where shut down (and I bet it wasn't just one historian who felt that way).
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  >These kind of sites also had fans meticulously fill in all the metadata about the history and context of a song, film or whatever. Absolutely, the metadata on What was beyond wikipedia level all completely user managed meticulously. Slightly different versions of releases all catalogued and rips verified to a high standard. This is before we even get into the fact it was all connected so similar artists were navigate-able you could actually start from a band you enjoy and dig into other similar music right from the same site. The cataloging goes way beyond anything Apple offered at the time and anything Apple, Spotify, Tidal offer today.
- crtasm 3y ago
  Much of What.CD's metadata was later released: https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release

dakial1 3y ago

I was both on OiNK and What.cd and both were awesome places to find new music and bootlegs. I was always after show recordings with different version of songs which would never reach anybody’s ears if it wasn’t for the people sharing them. I understand the whole copyright discussion but at least for music I understand that people there were really lovers of music, not just people wanting to pay nothing for the artists work. I still believe there is a space for a streaming service sharing raw show recordings (which I somewhat use YT music for).

notoriousdel 3y ago

I miss OiNK so much

qingcharles 3y ago

I ran a handful of trackers from 2006 to 2013. They were money machines like you've never seen. I ran a British TV tracker. Everyone in the industry used the site. Sometimes we would get pre-release stuff. I remember Charlie Brooker emailing me one time asking us to take down an item until it had been broadcast and then he was fine with it being up there. CB is a hero of mine, so there was no question of complying. https://torrentfreak.com/major-tv-torrent-site-thebox-bz-calls-it-quits-130829/ https://torrentfreak.com/major-tv-torrent-site-thebox-bz-cal...

rospaya 3y ago
That's the place I got my Charlie Brooker fix at the time. Thank you.
acuozzo 3y ago
Money from ads or…?
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Donations to "keep the site running" .. our costs were actually relatively high, but our donations were several times our needs.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

millerhooks 3y ago

Oink was an absolute dream.