7 ms·

To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's d

by Etheryte 10mo ago

To put this into perspective, What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. What had in the ballpark of a few million torrents when it got raided and shut down. Anna's rip of Spotify includes roughly 186 million unique records. Granted, the tail end is a mixed bag of bot music and whatnot, but the scale is staggering. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD

VanTheBrand 10mo ago
True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.
- Etheryte 10mo ago
  This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.
  - qingcharles 10mo ago
    That's why I use YouTube Music as my streamer as they allow damned near anyone to upload any old rare record and then figure out the royalties somehow.
  - alxndr 10mo ago
    FWIW archive.org has a lot of live music as well
- leetbulb 10mo ago
  Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.
  - some-guy 10mo ago
    Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
    - selectodude 10mo ago
      At the end of the day it feels like the private trackers are such a nightmare to get invited to and maintain ratio at it’s just not worth the effort. I want this torrent though. It would be fun to stand up a NAS for this.
      - some-guy 10mo ago
        The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular. I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.
        max51 10mo ago
        Generally speaking, trackers that require a ratio above 1.0 and don't have freeleech/point system are designed so that you pay the website to fix your ratio and/or rent a seedbox from one of their partner. It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0. And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
      - leetbulb 10mo ago
        If you share your email somehow, I can invite you.
- tclancy 10mo ago
  Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).
- BoingBoomTschak 10mo ago
  Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really. (And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
  - TonyTrapp 10mo ago
    This, a thousand times this. I have gone back to collecting CDs because it's often the only remaining way (short of pircay) to get original masters of many artists. Even lossless download stores like Qobuz don't have them.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
flxy 10mo ago
I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions. Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.
- some-guy 10mo ago
  I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform. One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.
  - david_p 10mo ago
    Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old internet and would love to take a look.
    - chrneu 10mo ago
      Another comment mentioned Redacted.sh as a successor. I haven't used it. I'm sure there's a subreddit around that can help. Looks like orpheus is another option if I'm reading correctly. You have to get an invite or pass an "interview" though, so be prepared to wait a while.
    - Narushia 10mo ago
      It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.
rckclmbr 10mo ago
You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore
- SSLy 10mo ago
  I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk
  - platevoltage 10mo ago
    Soulseek has to be the best kept secret on the internet. Even people my age who grew up with things like Napster, Limewire, and even soulseek, don’t know that it still exists.
    - ZeWaka 10mo ago
      The amount of extremely obscure music on there is crazy, stuff that exists nowhere else in the internet except maybe google drive links.
    - lukaslalinsky 10mo ago
      Yeah, I was looking for some rare album I had in the past, and was shocked to realize that Soulseek is still active.
    - parodysbird 10mo ago
      It's crazy how convenient and deep the library on soulseek is. I even use it all the time on mobile.
  - tclancy 10mo ago
    I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.
SSLy 10mo ago
Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.
layer8 10mo ago
That being sad, I have a lot of non-mainstream tracks in my playlists on YouTube Music that have YouTube comments along the line of “I wish this was available on Spotify :’(“. I bet the same goes for What.CD. So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.
b8 10mo ago
Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.
WadeGrimridge 10mo ago
anna's rip has ~86m tracks, not ~186. ~186m is metadata, specifically ISRCs.
rldjbpin 10mo ago
about the scale, the same album in the tracker had several submissions, for dedicated format and regional editions. while one can compare in terms of number of tracks, the quality used to be in another level altogether. from the article: > The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. meanwhile the tracker had 16/24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track's metadata was verified for any artifacts. for the given quality, one could rip youtube music (maybe not as easily anymore) and achieve a larger scale in a similar quality level. now if hypothetically tidal had all the music of the world and was accessible this way, then it would be a comparable resource. insane regardless.
- uncivilized 10mo ago
  It's 160kbit/s for popularity>0 and 75kbit/s for popularity=0. I'm surprised Anna's Archive went for this given that these are not archival quality bitrates. It appears they did this because they found a way, rather than seeking to create a library of music.
  - rldjbpin 10mo ago
    my comparison was with source catalog in spotify compared to the private tracker. spotify is working on the high fidelity mode, but so far it is not rolled out worldwide. i completely understand the archive's decision on applying their own compression.
laughingcurve 10mo ago
Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories! OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical community
josteink 10mo ago
> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from. There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in. And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by. This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite: - focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included - quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity. This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.

VanTheBrand 10mo ago

True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.

Etheryte 10mo ago
This is true and a category of music that got hit notably hard was live recordings. What had a wide array of live recordings made by sound engineers straight from the mixer. This is something that you simply cannot find now unless you maybe know a guy.
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  That's why I use YouTube Music as my streamer as they allow damned near anyone to upload any old rare record and then figure out the royalties somehow.
- alxndr 10mo ago
  FWIW archive.org has a lot of live music as well
leetbulb 10mo ago
Yes. RIP a ton of very rare material. What.cd has a special place in my heart.
- some-guy 10mo ago
  Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
  - selectodude 10mo ago
    At the end of the day it feels like the private trackers are such a nightmare to get invited to and maintain ratio at it’s just not worth the effort. I want this torrent though. It would be fun to stand up a NAS for this.
    - some-guy 10mo ago
      The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular. I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.
      - max51 10mo ago
        Generally speaking, trackers that require a ratio above 1.0 and don't have freeleech/point system are designed so that you pay the website to fix your ratio and/or rent a seedbox from one of their partner. It's a 0 sum game; for every account with a >1.0 ratio, that implies other people will be <1.0. And when you compete with 10gb/s seedboxes that have scripts to automatically grab all the new torrent the second they get posted, it's extremely difficult to improve your ratio. Even for super popular torrents, you have a few minutes to seed as much as you can before upload speed goes to 0 forever. You can't slowly accumulate upload over time the same way you would with a torrent from a public tracker.
    - leetbulb 10mo ago
      If you share your email somehow, I can invite you.
tclancy 10mo ago
Yeah, it was a great place. I have a paid Spotify account but finally got an ancient hard drive onto my network for all sorts of stuff Spotify doesn’t or can’t have (e.g., Coldcut: 70 Minutes of Madness).
BoingBoomTschak 10mo ago
Which also means almost always limited to the latest, almost always crappy (or blind to the original ambiance) remaster! One of the main reasons why I don't bother with streaming, really. (And because they lack much obscure stuff and I don't like being dependent on the Internet and a renter's whims for something as essential as music, I guess)
- TonyTrapp 10mo ago
  This, a thousand times this. I have gone back to collecting CDs because it's often the only remaining way (short of pircay) to get original masters of many artists. Even lossless download stores like Qobuz don't have them.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

flxy 10mo ago

I think what earned what.cd that title wasn't necessarily just the amount but the quality, as you mentioned, as well as the obscurity of a lot of the offered material. I remember finding an early EP of an unknown local band on there, and I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe. There were also quite a few really old and niche records on there which possibly couldn't be put on streaming services due to the ownership of rights being unknown. It was the equivalent of vinyl crate digging without physical restrictions. Additionally there was a lot of discourse about music and a lot of curated discovery mechanisms I sorely miss to this day. An algorithm is no replacement for the amount of time and care people put into the web of similar artists, playlists of recommendations and reviews. Despite it being piracy, music consumption through it felt more purposeful. It's introduced me to some of my all time favourite artists, which I've seen live and own records and merchandise of.

some-guy 10mo ago
I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform. One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.
- david_p 10mo ago
  Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old internet and would love to take a look.
  - chrneu 10mo ago
    Another comment mentioned Redacted.sh as a successor. I haven't used it. I'm sure there's a subreddit around that can help. Looks like orpheus is another option if I'm reading correctly. You have to get an invite or pass an "interview" though, so be prepared to wait a while.
  - Narushia 10mo ago
    It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.

rckclmbr 10mo ago

You can’t talk about what.cd without talking about its precursor OiNks Pink Palace. Even Trent Reznor was public about what an amazing place it was. Music aside, the community existing just for the shared love of music and not for any other kind of monetary or influencer gain is what set it apart. We just don’t have those kinds of communities for music online anymore

SSLy 10mo ago
I mean, WCD has two healthy replacements, plus slsk
- platevoltage 10mo ago
  Soulseek has to be the best kept secret on the internet. Even people my age who grew up with things like Napster, Limewire, and even soulseek, don’t know that it still exists.
  - ZeWaka 10mo ago
    The amount of extremely obscure music on there is crazy, stuff that exists nowhere else in the internet except maybe google drive links.
  - lukaslalinsky 10mo ago
    Yeah, I was looking for some rare album I had in the past, and was shocked to realize that Soulseek is still active.
  - parodysbird 10mo ago
    It's crazy how convenient and deep the library on soulseek is. I even use it all the time on mobile.
- tclancy 10mo ago
  I love that SoulSeek still exists in some format. My path was Napster (made me get cable Internet and a cd burner) > AudioGalaxy (learned how to path things on routers so I could download music to home from work) > SoulSeek. Plus it had some useful chat and people who cared about sound quality and metadata.

SSLy 10mo ago

Well, what.cd counted any album as one torrent. While current spotify has also podcasts and AI slop.

layer8 10mo ago

That being sad, I have a lot of non-mainstream tracks in my playlists on YouTube Music that have YouTube comments along the line of “I wish this was available on Spotify :’(“. I bet the same goes for What.CD. So there’s some way to go for a comprehensive music archive.

b8 10mo ago

Redacted, their replacement has more records then they had now.

WadeGrimridge 10mo ago

anna's rip has ~86m tracks, not ~186. ~186m is metadata, specifically ISRCs.

rldjbpin 10mo ago

about the scale, the same album in the tracker had several submissions, for dedicated format and regional editions. while one can compare in terms of number of tracks, the quality used to be in another level altogether. from the article: > The quality is the original OGG Vorbis at 160kbit/s. meanwhile the tracker had 16/24-bit flac rips of vinyl, with decent quality control where the track's metadata was verified for any artifacts. for the given quality, one could rip youtube music (maybe not as easily anymore) and achieve a larger scale in a similar quality level. now if hypothetically tidal had all the music of the world and was accessible this way, then it would be a comparable resource. insane regardless.

uncivilized 10mo ago
It's 160kbit/s for popularity>0 and 75kbit/s for popularity=0. I'm surprised Anna's Archive went for this given that these are not archival quality bitrates. It appears they did this because they found a way, rather than seeking to create a library of music.
- rldjbpin 10mo ago
  my comparison was with source catalog in spotify compared to the private tracker. spotify is working on the high fidelity mode, but so far it is not rolled out worldwide. i completely understand the archive's decision on applying their own compression.

laughingcurve 10mo ago

Wow, I have not thought about OiNK in ages... great memories! OiNK and WhatCD did something very special for the musical community

josteink 10mo ago

> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth. It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from. There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in. And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by. This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite: - focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included - quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity. This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.