What.cd continues to show the decrepit recording industry how to promote music in the BitTorrent era. The site just released The What CD Volume 2, a compilation album of some of the artists that are featured there. (Bands, song writers, and so forth are encouraged to submit their material to the site—they’re added to a special subsection called the Vanity House, which is promoted differently than otherwise commercially released music.) It’s a 20-song album, and comes in at just around 1.4 hours long. A quick first listen while doing a million other things suggests that it’s a better album than the first volume, which was released during the summer.

To those of you on the site, make sure you grab it. The rest of you, well, make friends with someone on the site ;-)

One year ago today OiNK’s Pink Palace was shut down by police. It’s only appropriate to pour one out for it today.

OiNK had been in operation for a little over three years; I had joined exactly one year before it was shut down, invited to the party by CrunchGear alum Vince Veneziani, who’s now kicking about over at GearFuse. Be sure to say hi.

The thing about OiNK (and its primary successors, What.cd and Waffles.fm) is that it wasn’t really ever about getting music for free. To anyone with a job, paying $1 per song is more or less equivalent to paying $0 a song. Music is a commodity. What the labels don’t recognize, or consciously refuse to recognize, is that there was a very real community on OiNK. It was that community that made OiNK special, not being able to download some pop album a few days before it shipped to Wal-Mart.

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A new study says what we’ve been saying for God knows how long: [music] piracy is here to stay. It’s now up to the industry to figure out how to move forward.

The study, by the MCPS-PRS Alliance (the record companies) and Big Champagne (they measure stuff online!), looked at piracy through the lens of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, the album that was released last fall as a digital download, priced at whatever you wanted to pay. The numbers show that illegal downloads via torrent sites “far exceeded” legal downloads. Some 400,000 torrent downloads occurred the first day it was available.

The study also concludes that there’s a strong brand loyalty toward torrents sites, like OiNK back in the day, and What.cd and Waffles.fm now. It makes sense, seeing as though I can grab a FLAC copy of more or less every album I’d be looking for, complete with PDF/JPG liner notes, in a few minutes. Seconds if it’s a particularly popular album, like Viva la Vida.

In conclusion, the record companies are urged to add value to their music-buying experience if they want to remain relevant.

It’s not even about getting music for free anymore. It’s that the entire BitTorrent experience—I’m a What.cd fan—, from A to Z, is so unrivaled in its quality, why would I even bother with an iTunes or Rhapsody or whatever?

via Drudge

Hey. music pirates! You know that band “Coldplay”? Well proper rips of Viva La Vida (the Japanese retail) are now appearing on the private torrent sites likes What.cd and Waffles.fm; they should migrate over to the likes of the Pirate Bay soon enough. I just grabbed a V0 and and everything sounds fine.

Hop on the torrent early and watch your ratio balloon!

Also, good eye, Peter Ha! Don’t ever lose your smile!

There’s a bit of a scare going around the BitTorrent community today, with word that the Canadian Recording Industry Association has “ordered” the closure of several popular trackers, including What.cd. The CRIA has told Moxie Colo, which hosts the trackers in question, to take the offending sites down, issuing cease and desists like they’re going out of style. For its part, the hosting comapny says it has no plans to comply with the CRIA’s demands:

We will not be following the request and will be fighting for the rights of our clients as to date laws in Canada protect them.

A similar note was posted in the What.cd’s forum:

I doubt the sites in question are going to move off of moxie as we are standing here in public eye backing them up. If they want to leave then in end of day makes our life easier but by no means are we saying them or any other client needs to vacate. We will take this all the way to the courts before we would ever damage our relations with our clients.

Please everyone understand that we are not shutting down anyone anytime soon.

Hopefully What.cd doesn’t go the way of OiNK.

Rumors from la France point to a Samsung S5 firmware update that will enable FLAC playback. I know that a grand total of seven of you have so much as seen an S5, but I bring it up merely to point out that, you know, there are other portable players out there beyond the iPod family. And for some people, the lack of FLAC support—no, Apple lossless doesn’t cut it—makes the iPod an alotogether less attractive option.

As I twittered earlier, FLAC is so, so fine. What.cd is currently on FLAC freeleech; I should have more invites available later in the week, so one or two (I guess) lucky readers will get to join the party.

via DAPreview.net

Hi-res

BitTorrent tracker What.cd launched Gazelle last night (beta), effecting a complete re-launch of sorta. There’s a new site design (though still with the familiar wood theme) and some new features. One of them, Paranoia, lets users set how much info is available to other users of the site. Things like recently snatched torrents, current seeding/leeching and other stats can now be regulated. There’s tags, wikis, related artists, etc.

The site itself seems to be having some issues right now. Search is hit or miss, for example.

Overall, and keeping in mind that team is still working out the bugs—it’s still beta, after all—not a bad update. Right now, What.cd’s looking better than Waffles.

Again, I don’t have any invites. It’s very hard to seed on Time Warner, what with my 60KB/s max upload speed on BitTorrent. To think I’m paying for that.

Gazelle, the new back-end that What.cd has been hyping these past few months, now has a release date: April 17. Gazelle isn’t simply faster than TBsource, but it’ll bring with it several features found in the OinkPlus script for Firefox.

And no, I don’t have any invites to give out. I need to upload about 4GB more in order to become a power user. Then I’ll have invites.

OiNK pretender What.cd is getting closer to releasing Gazelle, its new “under-the-hood” code that’s set to replace the old TBSource. It was just released into alpha a few hours ago for VIP users; other user classes will have to wait a little while longer.

What.cd appears to be quite confident of Gazelle’s importance and success. The code adds several new features that, until now, have (in part) depended on external scripts. (Yes, I’m alluding to Greasemonkey and OiNKPlus.) If you’re even a casual BitTorrent user you’ll no doubt appreciate the improvements, which include built-into-what.cd artist profiles (above) and torrent grouping. Torrent grouping shows the many different file formats a particular album is available in—very handy if you’re in a hurry and just want to grab a V0 before heading off to do whatever it is you do all day.

Not gonna lie—I’m sorta looking forward to Gazelle. I’ve always felt more “loyal” to What.cd than Waffles.fm for whatever fanboy reason and the site’s been hyping it up like it’s the main event of WrestleMania. I don’t know, What.cd seems to know what it’s doing.

What.cd

Does the current invitation system used by so-called private BitTorrent sites need to be changed? TorrentFreak, a source of inspiration to nearly everyone on staff here, thinks out loud about this very subject in a recent column. At first, these private sites were largely under the radar of the average after school pirate. A small, trustworthy user base was more valued than 10,000+ ratio farming users. Invites, so the article contends, is partly to blame.

Invites were initially hard to come by, a sort of “I know someone who knows someone” scenario. Now you simply throw “torrent invites” into Google (or worse, eBay) and walk right into any number of sites. The community suffers, the “feeling” of community suffers and then law enforcement agencies shut you down. Not good.

If there’s a solution to this problem, other than entertainment companies getting their acts together and stopping piracy before it starts, then I certainly don’t know what it is. Accounts, and their invitees, are already banned if it’s discovered it’s selling invites.

Just something to mull over during the post-MacWorld haze.

Trading BitTorrent Tracker Invites – Commodity or Curse? [TorrentFreak]

Music pirates have a new tool to put artists in the poor house. The Web site BitLet.org lets users upload torrent files that contain MP3 or OGG files, which begin streaming right after. So if you’re browsing the many popular trackers out there like Pirate Bay or Mininova, you can preview all the songs included in the torrent. The Web site is essentially an embedded BitTorrent client, but one that doesn’t work with private torrents. I tried a couple torrents from What.cd and Waffles.fm and none of them worked, severely limiting the site’s usefulness, in my worthless opinion.

But hey, if you’ve got a couple minutes to kill at the office, it’s worth playing around for a little while. Until it works with What.cd and Waffles,fm, however, I can’t see myself using it too much. Neat idea, just not quite there yet.

BitLet Music Player [BitLet via TorrentFreak]

What.cd?, one of the two main OiNK successors, is developing an entirely new set of site code, promising to be faster and more secure than the old TBsource. (TBsource is used by several private BitTorrent trackers and is among the least efficient and horrifying code to look at. So I’m told. I don’t speak programmer language.) It’s going by the name of Project Gazelle, which not only implies speed, but also the inability to outrun big cats. Technical jargon aside, all it means for you, the average BitTorrent user, is the What.cd? will run smoother than ever and smoother than any private tacker out there. Your download speeds, however, won’t increase.

In related news, it seems What.cd? just opened its door to more users. First three folks to email me at nicholas at crunchgear dot com get an invite.

What.cd To Launch New BitTorrent Tracker Script [Torrentfreak]

First OiNK died, then came the replacements. Now one of those is gone, never having gotten of the ground. BOiNK, the Pirate Bay’s planned all-music BitTorrent tracker, has been cancelled. It seems TPB’s powers that be figured that there were enough OiNK replacements out there, so there was no real reason for yet another one.

This leaves Waffles.fm and What.cd?, the former, I feel, will be much harder to get into than the latter because invites aren’t given out too frequently. Better troll those invite exchange forums if you want in. (Or wait till the sites open up and I’ll give a few out here. Trust me, I won’t put you through any hoops to win.)

The Pirate Bay Cancels OiNK Replacement [Torrent Freak]

You know, in this post-OiNK world, music fans can’t be too careful when it comes to picking a new BitTorrent tracker. That’s why when I woke up this morning I was fully convinced that that RIAA had shut down What.cd?, one of the two biggest trackers comprised of former OiNK users (the other being Waffles). It seems someone is out to “get” What.cd? for whatever reason, subjecting the site and its users to SQL attacks, DDoS attacks, general mischief, etc.

Alas, the e-mail I got from the RIAA was just from some punk kid in the UK. Dork.

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So I loved your comments in my original post so much, I decided to pick two of you for invites to the hot new torrent site. Unfortunately, What.CD? is really getting slammed (although not nearly as bad as Waffles is) and registration is currently closed to new users. When it opens again, I will do a post and send out an e-mail to those who I picked.

No worries. Your invites are coming soon enough.

UPDATE – Note, this post is from November, so there are no more invites to be had.