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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
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!”
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.