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Comment by ValentineC | Hacker News Reader

I remember learning about this album because it was the request with the highest bounty on What.CD: https://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/5abmpz/martin_shk...

R.I.P. What.CD. :'(

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FWIW... It still is the album with the highest bounty on redacted

I gave up on private trackers after what.cd died. Has redacted surpassed what.cd?

Sadly not, although it’s doing as well as could be expected given the reduced interest in torrents that streaming has brought. There will always be certain things like rare scene rips that are unlikely to ever be resurrected.

Same, for music at least. Spotify/Apple Music provides anything I could want. But my tastes were never niche to begin with.

I miss What and Oink. I didn't even bother finding out what the next incarnation was and trying to get an invite, I just gave up and got Spotify. There's still tons of good music that I only ever found on those trackers. The quality of recommendations was also peerless.

Have any of the successors rebuilt that?

There’s RED: https://interviewfor.red/

Also Orpheus, which IMO has a better usage/retention policy, awarding bonus points (which can be used to purchase freeleech tokens) for one's seeding torrents: https://interview.orpheus.network/

My gosh. I've just been reading the interview requirements. I need to study spectral analysis, amongst other things. Then sit through a "1-2 hour" interview. To take the interview I MUST be on my home network, I must have my VPN etc. disabled. I must use a laptop/PC, not a mobile device. Can't use CLI for IRC. Other requirements as well.

I've never seen anything like this. I understand that raising the bar to entry is good for a community. What ever happened to having a seedbox and provable good ratios elsewhere.

Is the community/content exceptional?

I had a similar reaction. Even though I have some familiarity with the required topics I really didn't like the look of the interview. It seems like getting invited skips all that, but I don't know anyone in that world any more. To be fair there must be a barrier to entry, and having it very high should be good for community quality.

Might be easier to try to find an acquaintance with invites though.

>Might be easier to try to find an acquaintance with invites though

I wish that was the case; we all moved on to streaming services. Now though I want to return and backup everything I've paid for over the decades, as well as hunt down some rarities.

> I've just been reading the interview requirements. I need to study spectral analysis, amongst other things. Then sit through a "1-2 hour" interview. To take the interview I MUST be on my home network, I must have my VPN etc. disabled. I must use a laptop/PC, not a mobile device. Can't use CLI for IRC. Other requirements as well.

The content was probably taken wholesale from the original What.CD interview. I think What.CD wanted to ensure that people uploading new content (a core part of a private tracker) were able to distinguish obvious FLAC>MP3>FLAC conversions, since most lossy codecs have a lowpass filter which would be quite obvious with spectral analysis.

Turning off VPN etc is probably to allow the tracker to fingerprint you, and make sure that rule-breakers aren't blatantly attempting to register for a new account.

> Is the community/content exceptional?

I think many people treated What.CD's interview and progression as a stepping stone into other private trackers, since their invite forums (available once you upload enough content) were exceptional.

What's successors (RED and Orpheus) are carrying on in the same fashion.

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