I would like to move away from using spotify for music. Are there any torrenting sites where I can torrent music with high quality audio (~320kbps) tagged properly?
I would like to move away from using spotify for music. Are there any torrenting sites where I can torrent music with high quality audio (~320kbps) tagged properly?
RED and OPS. If you want to join, try OPS first and after making decent ratio, you could try getting into RED.
OpPS does not do interviews atm, so I’d recommend interviewing for RED.
RED is great, if you have the time and money needed to get ratio for downloading. You have to continuously buy new music on day 1 of release and have an ultra low latency server to serve it because of the way their algos direct bandwidth.
It is not for the faint of heart, but it is the catalogue of choice.
Do they ever do “freeleech” periods or staff picks with freeleech?
I was able to boost my ratio back on what.cd back in the day by downloading and seeding the 2009 Beatles Remasters Box Set in flac.
Thing was absolutely massive, and none of the download counted towards my ratio, only upload. I think I got my ratio up to 12.
They do, rarely.
A lot of people just rip Qobuz, Deezer, and Tidal FLAC for free using shared keys that you can find on the megathread (“Knowledge & Tokens”). Autosnatchers will give you at least one snatch per upload. No one is actually buying most of that WEB FLAC. There also might be a big batch of freeleech tokens during December for kickstarting a library. Also, I’d recommend just going full FLAC from the start; MP3 is easier/smaller to snatch, but it’s 2025 and no one wants MP3, so long-term you’ll get the best results by perma-seeding a large FLAC library.
What? Things sure have changed. Why would everyone want FLAC over mp3 vbr V0?
Mainly, HDDs are bigger and FLAC is future-proof for future audio formats, as well I think the death of What.CD has really impressed upon the next generation that preservation is of utmost importance. A lot of albums were fully lost during the transition to RED/OPS, and a good chunk of albums that used to have a lossless copy now only have lossy versions from those who kept MP3 libraries. IMO, piracy is ownership, and owning the master lossless copy so you can generate any other formats is that concept taken to its logical conclusion.
Thank you for your explanation. That makes sense. I stopped pirating music exactly due to oink and then what dying, getting disillusioned by private trackers.
I wonder what the in is to RED/OPS?
Worth noting that when What died, ~4 new sites popped up immediately and invited all the old members, and everyone raced to re-upload everything from What onto them, which was actually pretty effective. At this point, RED and OPS have greatly surpassed What in many ways, aside from some releases that never made it back (you can actually find out which releases used to exist because What’s database was made available after its death). Users and staff are a lot more prepared if it happens again, e.g. keeping track of all metadata via “gazelle-origin”.
If by “in” you mean how to get into them, generally you’re supposed to have a friend invite you. If you don’t have anyone you know on private trackers, you’ve gotta get in from scratch. Luckily, RED and OPS both do interviews to test your knowledge on the technicals of music formats, though I’ve heard RED’s interview queues are long and OPS’s interviews are often just not happening: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interview.orpheus.network/
Alternatively, you can interview for MAM, which is IMO the best ebook/audiobook tracker. They’re super chill and have a very simple interview e.g. “what is a tracker”: https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php. After that, you can just hang around there for a while until you can get into their recruitment forums to get invites to other entry-level trackers, and then on those entry-level trackers you can get recruited into slightly higher-level trackers, and so on, and eventually RED/OPS should be recruiting from somewhere.
This can feel a little silly and convoluted, but I guess I’d just appreciate that these sites put the effort into conducting interviews for new people at all, since the alternative is that you will just never get into anything without a friend. Reddit’s /r/trackers wiki is unfortunately one of the better places for information about private trackers if you want to do further reading.
I’m totally blanking on the name of a popular older torrent site that was invite-only as well. Demon something? Do you know what I’m talking about?
The Demonoid you remember is lonnnng gone although a shell of it’s former self exists.
RIP
I also really fucking miss what.cd
Oink
The og
My “bad luck Brian” was I got on that site after years of trying…. For it to be shut down a month later.
Major bummer. I completely lucked into an invite by having a friend in a fraternity at an ivy league school who had a frat brother who had an account and invites.
Seconding the notion to get into OPS somehow if at all possible. RED’s economy is one of the few economies that is actually non-trivial, whereas OPS’s economy is totally trivial. A large amount of RED stuff is automatically mirrored to OPS, so you can just grab it at OPS and cross-seed back to RED (there are a few tools to do this automatically, e.g. nemorosa). RED is still definitely the more active and qualitative place to be, but cross-seeding shenanigans with OPS will keep RED’s economy in-check.
Is cross posting torrents like that allowed? I haven’t been on a closed tracker for a very long time, but in my time, that was a huge no-no that would get you (and possibly even the people who you have invited/person who invited you) kicked off of the site.
Yes, it’s allowed and encouraged between RED<->OPS. There are a few tools on the RED and OPS forums to automate most of the process (e.g. Transplant, REDCurry, Takeout, Orpheus-Populator, etc.). Cross-posting torrents on many sites is allowed and fine, you just have to be aware of the rules of the source site, e.g. some places don’t want their internals to be shared, or some have a literal timer countdown before cross-posting is allowed. On the other hand, most sites are not going to enforce other sites’ exclusivity demands (PTP explicitly has a note about this). If an exclusive file is cross-posted onto PTP, PTP isn’t going to take it down on anyone’s behalf.
I’ll note that private tracker culture has warmed up quite a bit in the past decade and a half that I’ve been on them. Trackers (and their users) don’t usually see other trackers as rivals/competitors anymore, release groups are respectful of each other, there are a ton of tutorials and help forums around to help low-skill members learn how to do the advanced stuff, and so on. There are recognizable usernames everywhere, and the general vibe is to cross-upload as much as possible and help build everyone’s trackers together. Cross-seed (the program) has helped a lot with this, and seedbases have become very strong even on smaller trackers as a result.
Interesting… I haven’t done them since they shut down what.cd. I came from OiNK originally, and it’s a small miracle that I ever got an invite at all.
I still have all of the amazing shit (tons of vinyl rip FLACs of classic albums. Dunno if “pbthal” is still ripping them, but he was the best at the time) I got during that period.
Thanks for the info
If you have any drive to get back into it, TMK the interview for RED is roughly the same as the interview for WCD, and although OPS isn’t interviewing right now it’s fairly easy to get to power user on RED and get an invite to OPS that way. I think RED is a little bit more hard-ratio than WCD was because RED doesn’t do freeleech staff picks or site-wides, but they do give out handfuls of freeleech tokens from time to time, so even if you can’t keep up with ratio requirements you can still nab free stuff with those just by having an account. As before, having an OPS account will help tremendously for keeping up with RED ratio, and eventually it’ll become a non-issue.
I never had to interview… I got into OiNK from a friend who got invited and then got his own invites.
For some reason that I cannot explain, I took a screenshot of the top of the page once where it shows the user name and ratio info. So once it got shut down, and wcd rose from the ashes, I was able to get an invite from a friendly reddit stranger after showing him the screenshot to prove I was on OiNK, and know how to act.
Anyway, I don’t think I’m interested in getting back into it, but I appreciate the info. Haven’t thought about those sites in years. I had a wcd hoodie that I wore for like a decade after it shut down.