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Music Torrent Site What.CD Has Been Shut Down (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: What.cd, an invite-only music torrent website first launched in 2007, has been shut down after a raid by French authorities. The private tracker offered free (and often illegal) access to a massive, deeply thorough collection of music and was popular among audiophiles for its strict rules around quality and file formats. The site was created after the shutdown of another well-known torrent website, Oink, which operated between 2004 and 2007. Though its primary focus was music sharing, What.cd also permitted torrents of computer software, ebooks, and other content. Zataz Magazine is reporting 12 servers that powered What.cd's infrastructure were seized by French cybercrime authorities. What.cd hasn't been taken offline completely, but torrents are unavailable and the homepage now displays a message confirming its demise: "Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down. We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish."
All site and user data has been destroyed.
I hope this statement is true (particularly the userdata part).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
So my 15 free leech tokens were for nought. :(
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
However, I lost my physical music collection. Please, please give me a complete option. One where I can download FLAC or WAV copies of the albums I love. Quality is important to me, and I can hear compression artifacts, especially below 256k MP3.
Give me the ability to choose earlier releases. Where I can get copies of albums before crappy remasters (I am looking at you Megadeth/Dave Mustaine), where I can get copies from before the loudness wars
Where I can get more obscure items, like old DJ mix sets that were excellent, but available nowhere. Now all you can find is the individual tracks without the Djs influence. Not the same.
In other words, open your vault for a fair price and I will pay. Stop attempting to create artificial scarcity, and I will stop going to find my music elsewhere.
What.cd, you will be missed. Hopefully someone will fill the gap. Even someone legitimate that will take my money.
Silence is a state of mime.
Who invited the cop?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sites like Pandora can't survive on ads alone because royalties are too high. They have to get subscriptions. And, they can't get every artist to let them stream.
Whatever though. Downloading music for free is still so very easy. YouTube alone has pretty much every song on it.
This wouldn't be an issue if they tried to improve the actual filesharing protocols for better sharing/privacy/distributeness instead of wasting resources on their little castle plus thuosands of seedbox idling while trying to get some ratio.
Curiously, the tracker went down only a couple hours after the new Metallica album showed up on the site.
Coincidence?
LAAAAAAAARS!
This is why we should legalize noncommercial copyright infringement.
I've kept telling "What.CD" that they needed to correct their colossal grammar error and move to "Which.CD" but they just laughed at me. WHO'S LAUGHING NOW, YOU JERKS?! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The media industry is a parasite. Bankrupt them by downloading their horrible music, movies and video games.
Soon you, too, will realize that modern life and its mass-culture products are empty of meaning.
Alternative Right.
https://torrentfreak.com/martin-shkreli-begs-for-private-torrent-site-invitation-161031/
Dickhole.
"whatever though"
you clearly have never been on What.CD
ôó
No. Now go buy the White Album again.
Sincerely, The Music Industry.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Aren't there enough free radio sites operating perfectly legally to demonstrate that music sites can survive if only they pay the fucking royalties?
audiophiles
Oh shit. The only way this thread can end is in a bitter argument with audio snobs about how much popular music sucks. Well here's your preemptive FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU!
What.CD was much more than that. I'm not a music snob nor an audiophile by any stretch, but I was a member for the past 2 years, and although I joined the site mainly so that I could get invites to other private trackers, I stuck around because they had some really neat stuff that you just couldn't find anywhere else. That, and there were a few indie and smaller labels that actually distributed their songs through What.CD.
I remember one thing I was impressed with was when I found a high quality rip of Where Eagles Dare by Misfits that sounded better than any other copy I heard, and you didn't need to even have good hearing or even good speakers to notice the difference. Having good quality rips of EVERYTHING was an ironclad rule that you won't ever find on other music sites, even legal ones. Amazon for example actually sells you MP3s that are upsampled, which was a HUGE no-no on What.CD, and it speaks volumes when paid music sites don't even have basic quality control, and a pirate site does.
Just wait until stuff can be broadcast from privately owned, low-Earth orbit satellites. Good luck raiding my orbital, weapons-laden space platform!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
They should have used a rule where their torrents would be released into the public scene a month or so after the upload on their site.
That way their crap would be backed up so to speak, and all that effort would never be wasted. The wider public would also experience a surge in audio quality and maybe it would help increase the standards everywhere rather than just one "secret" place being known for them.
That's where rutracker beats them. A day or two after the whole Russia debacle, and rutracker procured a gigantic mirror of all its torrents. Some already made it before the debacle came out of hunches and instinct.
It's not when anti-piracy goes crazy that everyone loses, it's when a supriority complex and a "secret club complex" get to one's brain that everyone loses.
What.CD did a lot of mistakes, and they were all born from a close-minded self-glorifying jerkfest mentality, rather than thinking on a wider scale.
It's not a question of when a site will go down, that's an inevitability no matter how well you prepare. What matters is HOW a site will go down, and how it will
per-emptively prepare and strike back afterwards.
Anyone remotely serious about their music - and, equally, their willingness to pay for a decent service and support the artists they like - could do a lot worse than checking out Bandcamp.
Pay only for what you want, download FLACs (plus many other formats) and stream everything you've ever bought via their app if you'd rather not download any files. They're also far more artist-friendly than the likes of Spotify; I've got a fair amount of music on Spotify and have never seen a cent from them whereas Bandcamp give you a significant percentage of any sales.
Admittedly, Bandcamp doesn't have the breadth of music on there that some other options do - many artists need to do a better job of uploading their libraries, myself included - but right now it's by far the best option for both listeners and artists out there (though I'd absolutely be interested to hear of others). It's unquestionably a better alternative to any option that either gives zero support to the artist, provides a poor service to listeners, or both.
One of the reasons I loved what.cd was the active, well moderated forums. I haven't torrented music in a long time, maybe years, but I did enjoy great discussions about music, technology and politics. I went to what.cd for music, before good streaming options existed. I stayed because of the relationships I built with people there. It was a great community that will be missed.
Facts have a liberal bias.
Wat? Sleeping at work? Where are your diatribes about pirates, stealing, and how those folks should go to jail and get waterboarded?
You scum! Where are you when we need you most!
I was first a software pirate, and then a tape-trader. In the process, I became an advocate for (some) great software programs and musical artists, and by being involved with radio, zines and fans, spread them farther than they would have been if I had not done so. The same was true with software; I served as an evangelist for a number of really well-designed products, even if my own copy was more often than not cracked or pirated.
Underground metal music spread through tape-trading. We would dub songs or albums for friends and mail off the tape. In return, we would usually get a tape back. This was how you heard music that was too extreme to be sold in stores or played on most radio stations. As a result, piracy led to sales, at least among the hardcore fan base.
Technically, what we were doing was illegal (even before you get to the "send back my stamps" part, a bit of a postal hack that involves rubber glue). And yet, it enabled artists to flourish.
What I like about piracy is that it is natural selection. You buy only the apps that are useful or the music that really stays with you. That cuts out the mediocre and hopefully, they die out, just as happens in nature, although in this case "die out" means leave the market, although if they're real idiots maybe they should be dead or sterile at least.
So, as far as supporting "independent" musicians... I support good music. I buy it, and not digitally, but in physical form. I pass copies along to others. Most of them buy it too. This is fan-supported music, and any genre which is not this fanatical is probably just Muzak anyway.
Alternative Right.
"Free Radio Sites" are not free. Streaming has given ISPs a case for further jacking the price of internet access with metered connections and throttling when you use too much of an "unlimited" plan.
NRRPT/RCT
Amazing how they complain and say "You're stealing from the artists". Bull. Not true. That just tells me they don't understand how the business works. The artists are long paid in advance, and paid a LOT. Aw, those poor millionaires. Would those artists be concerned about YOUR financial situation? These are people who wouldn't even shake your hand if you met them on the street...
In 2016, very few people buy music. Everybody has to realize that and move on. Many clever artists have already realized that, that's why they are giving away their music for free. Even established artists are giving away their own music for free either via YouTube or via their own websites. One great example from my country is Sakis Gouzonis.