Jump to content
IGNORED

What.cd shut down


Rubin Farr

Recommended Posts

  • Replies 98
  • Created
  • Last Reply

For some reason i never got into the forums until about a year ago (only had membership there for 2 yrs)  and it was great. What hooked me was an active thread titled "Turn Every Autechre album into an EP" or something like that. Therer were a lot of suggestions and ideas and comments and it got me to look at a few of the albums a lot differently (and it got me to make my own edit of Exai). but yea i was on their forums quite a bit this year

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

Hey sexy faces. Let's not be pointing people to torrent sites you scamps ....

... then why does a mod make such a thread?

 

He made a thread about an illegal file sharing service being shut down - I think you're smart enough to suss that one out, eh? Not like he recommended or solicited alternatives...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

great news, hopefully people will migrate to soulseek/ruracker or other open platforms, the wcd ratio rules coupled with its seedbox proliferation among users became unbearable for people with slower connections.

The reason it was unbearable for you is probably the fact that you're so against paying for music. For people who regularly buy releases it would have been straightforward to maintain a decent ratio regardless of seedboxes and slow connections.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

buying and uploading music would actually be a pretty inefficient (time and money wise) way to maintain a good ratio, it would be much easier to buy a seedbox and just live off seeding freelech without contributing anything useful ever. that's exactly why wcd got so backwards, it rewarded seedboxers much more than actual uploaders of original content.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

buying and uploading music would actually be a pretty inefficient (time and money wise) way to maintain a good ratio, it would be much easier to buy a seedbox and just live off seeding freelech without contributing anything useful ever. that's exactly why wcd got so backwards, it rewarded seedboxers much more than actual uploaders of original content.

That is true but you have to admit one thing that they got incredibly right was the bounty system. That rewarded expansion of the library but even more important, it rewarded people for supporting obscure artists and labels.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A landmark loss imo, the comparison to Alexandria is less hyperbolic than it usually is. The completeness and detail of the collection was unprecedented. Curation is what separated what.cd from every other torrent community. Eager to see what will come next.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

<a torrent site> is gr8 for movies, series and relatively popular artists (they have some gr8 full discog torrents), but the moment you look for the rare stuff it's very hit or miss (mostly misses). If you're anal enough about quality to regularly use what.cd instead of <a torrent site> + soulseek then you probably know where to turn to. I certainly don't, just parroting what I read on private tracker circlejerking threads on 4chan etc

Link to comment
Share on other sites

there's no better alternative than <a torrent site>+slsk, trust me on that. rut is extremely underrated and underappreciated, mainly because mentally it sits outside of english speaking piracy sphere. content wise it's probably comparable to what, maybe less flacs though, it's just that its emphasis is on different genres as its core user-base is culturally different. the availability of classical music and metal on rut surpasses wcd for example.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I got a decent buffer by filling requests. Happened to find a CD in my library that had a few hundred gigs bounty. All it took is a bit of effort if you wanted to increase your ratio, no seedbox required. Although granted, once your new upload got snatched by the seedboxes you were not getting any more upload from that torrent.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd rather pay my rent and buy food than music. Still being poor shouldn't stop me from enjoying music. I also buy music when I can afford it. In fact, if it wouldn't be for pirating music, I wouldn't have bought as much music as I have over the years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A landmark loss imo, the comparison to Alexandria is less hyperbolic than it usually is. The completeness and detail of the collection was unprecedented. Curation is what separated what.cd from every other torrent community. Eager to see what will come next.

It was special in that regard but its completeness was (and is) often overstated. It was complete in the sense that there were probably vinyl rips of ten different pressings of every Fleetwood Mac record or something, but grab a random dime a dozen techno/electro/d'n'b 12-inch from 10-20 years ago and it was probably not on there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'd rather pay my rent and buy food than music. Still being poor shouldn't stop me from enjoying music. I also buy music when I can afford it. In fact, if it wouldn't be for pirating music, I wouldn't have bought as much music as I have over the years.

This was definitely true for me during the internet of old where you'd either get the choice of listening to some crappy 30 second .ra stream and then take the gamble of buying it, or getting a decent quality dodgy download.

 

However since the era of digital services being *everywhere* (Bleep, Boomkat, Amazon Digital, Youtube, Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud etc. etc.) that excuse has pretty much gone - If you want to sample a whole album nowadays again and again before purchase there's no doubt a way you can legitimately!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For the folks who think What's bounty system was helpful to small labels and independent artists, think again. All it encouraged was "bounty pirates", who would buy music only to claim the bounty, effectively bypassing any kind of actual grassroots support for the music in favor of a private community of people who never wanted to actually support it anyway.

 

$12 made from a bounty pirate's purchase would be enough for a tire patch, but when the fallout of their action is that no one else buys the music, the tire goes flat and that $12 just buys a coffee and sandwich while you sit there looking at your flat tire.

 

Also also, those of you who reason out that your money is better spent on food and utilities before music or any intellectually fun thing are like the college kids I used to know. They'd go out to eat at a restaurant, knowing how much money they had wasn't enough for a gratuity, and then didn't tip, saying the servers "would understand."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.