what invite what.cd

free to download

"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."

2016

Metallica!!!

holy shit

anyone have oink invites?

apparently waffles is on a similar path

is it supposed to be legal pressure? or just no one wants to maintain them anymore

french authorities seized 12 servers

for a site to close up shop overnight like that something's gotta be up

:'-(

Yesterday W.CD warned users that the tracker would be down for an undefined amount of time so don't bother seeding for a while, can't recall the exact wording but it definitely seemed more suspicious than just regular maintenance.

Waffles has been down for who knows how many weeks now.

Waffles was a piece of shit tbh. What.cd was also a piece of shit, with it's hierarchy, rewards, fascist leaning rules. But boy was what.cd sweet all the same.

Back to slsk I guess...

first they came for what, and i said nothing, because my ratio on what was honestly pretty shit

good riddance

https://cdn.meme.am/cache/instances/folder182/400x400/37630182.jpg

Heh, I managed a dece 0.70 ratio iirc.

End of an era though, this. Been riding the torrent train since Oink and What. There is no replacement for the latter. This will hurt both the downloaders and the musicians.

how is it hurting musicians? are 'what' users going to stop previewing music on the web because it doesn't come with a log file?

man that sounds aggro but I honestly am interested in your response, lbi. it's prob been discussed to death on these boards I guess

It wasn't just a d/l site anymore. It was a community that had discovery of (new) music as it's core business. Ive bought loads of music after having learned of it through what. Highly unlikely I am alone in that.

Xp dont mind yr aggro tone, I *get* it: downloading is theft etc. And yet.

yeah they definitely had a good community going. though it's weird to say this about something so blatantly illegal I feel a bit bad, some people definitely put a ton of time into this without any compensation

honestly i've been spending more time on bandcamp lately than i ever did on what. not just because the site is better for the artists, i just have been finding it to be a better site for new music.

I'm behind on bandcamp/soundcloud, first to admin it, perhaps it's just as good

Ha That's interesting bcz I recall the community being totally not in line with my taste (to put it very diplomatically) but it's been years

Bandcamp is great. I think I've spent $500 on there this year alone. I've heard the artists get 90% of that which is cool with me. I love how unlike iTunes or Amazon you don't need to download anything to use it, I can click "buy" and start downloading it within about 15 seconds

what was a big community but they def had too much of a "scene" mentality for my tastes.

yeah it's really cool just how many notable artists use bandcamp nowadays, in addition to random talented nobodies from nowheresville

soundcloud obv the best for discovering new techno etc.. plus hardwax and other store websites

for older reccs, I mainly surf around discogs (check out cool users' wantlists/collections/lists, explore most wanted items)

by noteable i really mean "known"... like severed heads putting a bunch of stuff up there

however you feel about downloading digital copies or music for free, what had become an archive, it was a thing of beauty. the community produced so many collages that organized obscure collections of music, clusters of labels from a specific place and time, records that appeared on legendary radio shows, records associated with a specific club or scene... it was a massive library. also, it wasn't really one community, it was broad collection of communities organized by the process enforced by the site. you could not download a single thing from it and it'd still be a great resource.

the obsessive care and love that the users put into it was daunting and kind of weird, but the result was pretty amazing

how is it hurting musicians? are 'what' users going to stop previewing music on the web because it doesn't come with a log file?
― a but (brimstead), Thursday, November 17, 2016 5:33 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It wasn't just a d/l site anymore. It was a community that had discovery of (new) music as it's core business. Ive bought loads of music after having learned of it through what. Highly unlikely I am alone in that. Xp dont mind yr aggro tone, I *get* it: downloading is theft etc. And yet.

Their collection of music software torrents was unparalleled imo, esp. considering how meticulous the community was w/r/t uploading standards.

I'm still cranky I couldn't transfer my 3.something Oink ratio to What. I RIPPED SO MUCH DAMN SHIT

my ratio was over 5

: /

Most recent artist I discovered through What was Jenny Hval. Bought her latest. Fuck this. I'm also extremely picky with my audio sources and quality, and it's going to be much, much harder to find obscure, non-brickwalled releases of things I already own or rereleases that are now out of print. Fuck.

got banned from this shithole cuz i couldn't figure out how to get uploads

good riddance

jk it sounds cool

Damn, got my invite from a kind soul on here, just the ultimate library of music. Look forward to seeing the replacement though.

aw RIP, such a library and all the user-supplied bios and linking and collages etc, disappeared

also I'm sure I don't know what any of this stuff is (ahem) but if I did and if I had been saving all my birthday tokens (whatever they would be) for a major research'n'binge session this weekend, well... damn

apparently w*****s is on a similar path

huh I thought they already disappeared 6 months ago, guess they just moved and only told the cool kids. annoying as a permanent never-cool-kid but s'pose this thread's news underlines why it has to be that way

I just don't see the point of doing all that work and then only making the results available to the "cool kids". I kind of feel the same way about academic journals.

invites were given out by request in certain places, forums, chats, etc., but that's why it's dead now

I wonder if S***S**K will pick up a bit more now.

http://i.imgur.com/VpZOSkr.jpg

a tribute to human culture free from concern over profit or accalaim

[Silence, followed by unintelligible stammering.]

A eulogy for What.cd, the greatest music collection in the history of the world—until it vanished yesterday

I was then subjected to a 20-minute grilling, in which the moderator lodged obscure audio encoding questions at me: What is the difference between constant bitrate and variable bitrate mp3s? Look at these two spectrograms—which of them belongs to an mp3 that was encoded poorly? How can you tell? If you encode a lossless file at 320 kilobytes per second, and then again at 256 kilobytes per second, is this the same as encoding at 256 directly? And more.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha fuck these dicks

lol the mods were convinced my friend was some notorious banned user named JAGGERMONSTER and they berated him over chat saying stuff like "we know youre JAGGERMONSTER, JAGERMONSTER" and banned him

BAN L0U1S JAGGERMONSTER

I never had to go through some sodding 'exam' like NV pointed out. What.cd definitely was like the Stanford Prison Experiment, in that users who bought their way into the crew or got admin rights or whatever became these nasty fascist overlords. The banality of evil etc. That was the truly terrible side of it.

On the other hand: the staggering collection, man.

a friend of mine got banned because they said he was manipulating his ratio ...despite the fact that this guy was so computer illiterate that he needed my help to move files onto an external harddrive

dude had a huge collection of rare punk cds that he ripped and uploaded as well, so it wasn't like he was just a random freeloader

whole thing sounds like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre tbh

later my friend who was accused of being JAGGERMONSTER got another account but they somehow caught him and they were gonna ban him for having two accounts and also being JAGGERMONSTER but he told them he had a ton of rare rap tapes he was gonna rip and they let him stay

maybe a bit of Reservoir Dogs in there

I was then subjected to a 20-minute grilling, in which the moderator lodged obscure audio encoding questions at me: What is the difference between constant bitrate and variable bitrate mp3s? Look at these two spectrograms—which of them belongs to an mp3 that was encoded poorly? How can you tell? If you encode a lossless file at 320 kilobytes per second, and then again at 256 kilobytes per second, is this the same as encoding at 256 directly? And more.

lol this confirms so much of what I suspected about this trash

the level of fascism there was extremely high

thread of What is fascism

if you're okay with the immorality of stealing music it seems churlish to complain about the thieves' club rules

au contraire this would be much less funny if the thieves were chill and friendly

smh mookie clearly never heard of chill amongst thieves

i was banned prelaunch because i wrote about the oink crew acting like babies. men gotta men

lol qed

oink crew indeed

lmfao

Sure didn't expect What would be so divisive on ILM of all places.

The only thing that bothered me were the extreme ratio requirements. I mean, sure it incentivises retention but it's not much use when most people can't download anything until the sitewide freeleches or token giveaways.

octobeard and spacecadet otm

The ratio requirements were the least extreme thing about these sites

Always seemed pretty easy going to me considering the standards they were looking for.