Hacker News Reader

But the successors still have stuff iTunes don't have, and there's even new uploads of old releases that What didn't have ;)

>> some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC

> nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.

The loss of WhatCD's torrent database didn't wipe out anyone's library.

The value of a library is that it's all in one place.

Burning the Library of Alexandria also didn't burn the other copies, and yet many books were lost.

That's a reasonable observation.

By virtue of being a private torrent tracker, WhatCD never had that full catalog, itself. The members did and what you consider to be an inability to recover is only because the torrents were never remade. The same thing would happen if the tracker was up and there were no seeds.