Oink's Pink Palace

I was never on OiNK but I ended up being a moderator on What.CD for half a year or so, made some lovely memories there and it was my first time being exposed to real nerds building unconventional things. The people I met there are the reason I installed Linux for the first time, learned how to build IRC bots and went on to dive deeper into technology as a passion and hobby. The quality of coders you'd meet there was exhilarating for a 16-17 year old. One guy was building a new BitTorrent tracker, another was exploiting CSS vulnerabilities to see what sites someone had visited and another was building a bot that would download the first 5 seconds of songs on the website and check whether the specified bitrate was correct. It was a formative time that nurtured my interests. RIP.

Oink was used by A LOT of A-Level artists and musicians.

IIRC The only one who openly spoke about this was Trent Reznor, but having the chance to speak with big name producers it was the place to go for extremely hard to find whitelabels, clean rips of completely forgotten releases from the 50-80s... Quoting LCD Soundsystem, "I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody".

Oink closing had a tangible effect on the choice and audio quality of samples used in several commercially-released albums.

After what.cd died, I used Google Play Music for a long time before Google discontinued the product. I stumbled around a bunch of streaming music services and have been disappointed ever since. Streaming services have a terrible UX. Some artists are completely missing from the services. I often find one of my favourite artists has released a new album, but I end up finding this from third party sources. Scrolling through the library is incredibly slow because of infinite scroll and no concept of a local library. Lyrics don't always work and if they do it's always presented in a big font with no way to change it. I could go on and on.

I'm now transitioning to my own curated music library and I'm currently running Navidrome on my home NAS. It has a Subsonic API that I use with Strawberry, a player which is reminiscent of Amarok - my favourite music player ever. New releases are tracked by Muspy. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and subreddits to discover new music. Works well for me but I imagine it's not for everyone.

Oink filled a void at a perfect time in music.

I grew up in the 90's and CDs typically ran in the $15-20 range. This was when minimum wage was something like $5.15 an hour. So it would take 3-4 hours of work to buy a CD. This led to having to really pine over purchase decisions. Pre-Napster, this meant using a few things as filters: the radio, label compilations albums that featured a lot of songs by artists and were usually cheaper to buy, or pirating via IRC, which was fun at the time, but looking back was quite tedious.

Then Napster came and went. In it's wake, consumer expectations changed but nothing really worked as well as Napster. It's replacements were unreliable, were risky for installing adware/spyware, and there were lots of scare tactics by the music industry going after downloaders in court.

This was also around the time of the iPod but pre-iPhone, so you could carry around digital music but it wasn't really streamed. At this time, I had an iPod but mostly consumed music in my car through burned CDs.

Enter Oink. Oink brought you back to the time where you consume full albums instead of single songs but also solved a ton of problems with music sharing programs -- the shady software, unreliable availability of songs, inconsistent, if not totally absent tagging, shitty encoding, etc. Since there was still some work involved in downloading and burning the albums, you had to still make some choice over what to listen to, but not labor over it like a few years back when a CD meant half a days work. Oink had SO much stuff as well. I cannot recall a time when I didn't find something I wanted. Even though it was stealing, it felt like you were getting something of quality and not taking a gamble on something from a music sharing site.

I don't really recall what I did with music from Oink's shutdown in 2007 until Spotify came to the U.S. a few years later. I got my first iPhone in 2008 and buying music from the iTunes store became much more appealing with it instantly showing up on your device, so I did more of that. I remember using Rhapsody on Desktop for a while and later on the iPhone as well, a year or so before Spotify took over music.

I'm still salty about the loss of OiNK and the cruft of junk that is streaming services.

Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week.

Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week.

Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting".

And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore.

Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.

I miss curating local files and playing them with Winamp (just noticed the red squiggly under that name, god I'm old). The mobile-first streaming interfaces with miles of whitespace and big touch targets annoy the heck out of me.

When I'm actively listening to music I want the interface to serve that purpose; just give me a list of albums, artists and song titles and let me filter them. Easily managing a playlist is also not a thing anymore although maybe that's just me. It's unintuitive.

The destruction of knowledge and culture wrought by copyright lawyers amounts to at least 1000 Libraries Alexandria.

Who else was here? God damn does this bring back memories.

I ran a handful of trackers from 2006 to 2013. They were money machines like you've never seen. I ran a British TV tracker. Everyone in the industry used the site. Sometimes we would get pre-release stuff. I remember Charlie Brooker emailing me one time asking us to take down an item until it had been broadcast and then he was fine with it being up there. CB is a hero of mine, so there was no question of complying.

https://torrentfreak.com/major-tv-torrent-site-thebox-bz-cal...

I miss OiNK, Waffles, and What so dearly. Music has never been the same for me since.

"Piracy is the new radio". --Neal Young

The new radio is now silent, and it's just a streaming service's algorithm that decides what new music you'll be exposed to. I feel like we really lost something.

Maybe I just entered a different phase in life, but back in the heydey of piracy I actually bought a lot of albums. I followed artists and was frequently excited for new releases. With so much of my music coming from piracy, it felt important to support bands I really wanted to hear more from. Now I spend a small fraction of what I used to spend on a streaming service and that's all.

I was both on OiNK and What.cd and both were awesome places to find new music and bootlegs.

I was always after show recordings with different version of songs which would never reach anybody’s ears if it wasn’t for the people sharing them.

I understand the whole copyright discussion but at least for music I understand that people there were really lovers of music, not just people wanting to pay nothing for the artists work.

I still believe there is a space for a streaming service sharing raw show recordings (which I somewhat use YT music for).

sad to think the closure of OiNK and What will definitely have set the wheels in motion for some cultural artifacts to become lost.

Preservation should be legalized and its absurd to claim it harms sales when Universal Music has $2B revenue

RIP to a real one. Nothing since has been as good

I remember it well. Before their store went offline I ended up buying two T-shirts. I wore one and the other one might still be in the bag brand new. Has to be worth something by now.

We got jobs and pay Spotify (or someone) for music now.

Oink was an absolute dream.

I miss OiNK so much