 Do you remember Torrenting? If you're not a boomer like me then listen up kids because back in the day we didn't have to subscribe to 10 different mid-streaming services just to get the latest Hollywood slop. Back then if there was a movie or an album or a game that you wanted but you were dead broke you sailed the high seas. That's right you pirated it. Now as a disclaimer of course I would never condone something as despicable as internet piracy. It's illegal and it's against YouTube's terms of service and worst of all it directly harms the poor artists who are just trying to survive. But come on just about everybody who's ever touched a computer before has sailed the high seas so to speak and the best way to do that was always with Torrenting. Now in case you don't know Torrenting is a magical technology that allows you to connect other people's computers and download a file and once you finish downloading it you can then share it back so others can also download it. Now this is the perfect technology for downloading some big files like maybe a linux iso but come on everybody knows what most people use this for but these days you don't really hear too many people talking about piracy like you did before because as we all know services like Spotify and Netflix and Steam came along and they improved our lives so much that Torrenting and piracy was never heard of again, right? Well with big companies getting greedier and greedier and the fact that if you even want a chance of finding a decent movie to watch tonight you have to subscribe to five different services each of them with that $15 a month price tag. Like I know some of you out there are spending more time scrolling on Netflix trying to find a good movie to watch than you actually spend watching a movie we've all been there before and so as a result a lot of people are getting interested in Torrenting again. Now maybe you think you're an elite hacker because you know about baby's first Torrent site or the Pirate Bay or maybe some other similar sites. Maybe you're even smart enough to get a VPN so Comcast will stop sending your mom letters in the mail and you'll finally stop yelling at you to get a job and move out but what you might not know is this is just the surface of Torrenting on the internet. What if I told you you could go much deeper and find a world that you never even knew existed because let's face it there's not exactly a lot of quality control on these big torrent websites. I know at least one of you bricked your parents computer when you were trying to find a correct version of Blooms Tower Defense and if your taste in movies or music is a little bit obscure you're not finding it on the Pirate Bay but there are torrent websites out there where you can find any piece of media ever created all for free and you don't have to settle for the stupid Yiffy or Netflix quality. Doesn't Netflix have this scam where you have to pay five extra dollars a month just to get 4k content? On these websites you've never heard of before you can literally find just about anything. If you want to watch the bonus features on the limited edition Blu-ray of your favorite anime only ever released in Japan you can find it on there. If you want to listen to the vinyl copy of your favorite album with the reordered track list you can also find that on there. Today I'm going to tell you about the secret world of private torrent trackers. Now I can't even tell you too much in this video or I'm probably going to get sent to Davy Jones Locker but there are websites out there with an absolute treasure trove of content impeccably maintained by the internet's greatest autists and if you think that the Pirate Bay has a lot of content trust me you ain't seen nothing it is literally just a tiny fraction of what is out there. Now there are hundreds and even thousands of these private torrent trackers out there there are ones for films games books software and each of them have their own rules and requirements but in this video I'm going to tell you the story of what CD and this is just one private torrent tracker out of many but this was arguably the most infamous private torrent tracker out there and just about everybody agrees this was the greatest private tracker for music of all time. Now not everybody can come here and download to your heart's content like something like the Pirate Bay this is an exclusive club and the people here may be sharing copyrighted music but these aren't just your average cyber criminals people on these sites are pros and professionals have standards if you try to compare the Pirate Bay to a site like this it's like comparing a wannabe gangbanger to Don Corleone there's just no comparison because they don't just let in any riffraff off the street if you want in you need a connection you need an invite now if you tried to enter this site before all you would see is a cryptic message analog in form there's nowhere to register an account there's no button to sign up the only way you can get in is to get an invite from a current member and the number one rule is you never ask for an invite you have to earn it you might be wondering how to earn an invite well one way to do it is to pass the interview now you might be thinking an interview an invite why would anybody care about this pretentious music club why wouldn't you just listen to the latest Taylor Swift album on Spotify or YouTube and of course that's a very dumb question a normie like you would never understand this is a sanctuary for those with obscure music taste if you want to listen to the deep guttural screams of alt idle seiko omotes early work when she was at her absolute raw sound you can't find that on Spotify and if you have actually decent headphones instead of using these trash apple airpods that the kids are using these days you wouldn't be able to hear the subtle differences between the compressed horrible youtube version and the warm lossless quality of the vinyl rip of carly ray jebson's emotion sorry i got a little bit worked up there but if you care about quality or finding obscure items that you can't find anywhere else you can only find them in private trackers like what cd now in recent years spotify's collection of rare music has gotten much better but 10 years ago you couldn't find 90 percent of what i listened to on spotify or even youtube a lot of times and certainly not in good quality and this isn't just a mishmash of random torrents everything was impeccably organized you can open up one album and find five different versions of it so you could download the cd rip or the web version or the vinyl or the limited edition japanese release with the bonus tracks or the remastered version or the original demo tape that only ever had 50 copies made and when you upload a torrent it has to meet the quality standards or it's going to be deleted this wasn't amateur hour this was a perfectly curated museum of music so if you want into the club you have to pass the interview now this is an interview conducted over irc for you zoomers this is like prehistoric discord and you need to pass the interview because you can't just be letting anyone in there you have to show how much you know about music what's the difference between a variable bitrate and a constant bitrate how do you transcode a flak file and you need to know these things because once you're in you can't just download you have to share if you've ever torrented before let's be real nobody seeds at the torrent but not in a private tracker at what cd everybody contributes you always leave the torrent seeding and if you own any music you rip that cd or vinyl and share it with everyone maybe you found an obscure album at a good will that isn't already on the website everybody contributes and only if you upload can you download if you upload one gigabyte of data then you can also download one gigabyte of data you also get a ratio showing how much you share and if you don't share enough then you're walking the plank if you take much more than you give you're getting banned and so these rules seem pretty strict but this means that you can always find a seed on a lot of these websites because on a lot of public trackers like the pirate bay you'll often find torrents that are just completely dead people just stopped caring about them and now there's nobody left to share them but on these exclusive private trackers you'll almost always find somebody who is still sharing these files because of course you have a lot of incentive to share with other people and some power users on these websites would even rent servers called seed boxes which were exclusively used to seed torrents 24 7 with massive upload speeds the most elite users might have terabytes of data uploaded and it was utopia if you were a real music fan if you're serious about having any kind of music collection then this was basically heaven on earth and if you share back to the community enough eventually you work your way up the ranks so you start off as just a deck hand just as an ordinary user but over time you can level up your rank to be a power user an elite or even higher and of course the higher your rank the more privileges you get you get invites to other trackers of course it's not just about music like i said there are movie trackers anime trackers game trackers book trackers software trackers and of course trackers completely dedicated to well just about everything of course there's also the community i discovered so many of my favorite bands of all time from this website you could just be introduced to so much good music that you would never even hear of outside of private trackers people there were passionate about music and it showed the forums were always active talking about the latest music you could create your own collages of different albums you enjoyed you could find the most popular new releases in the top 10 section there were so many new artists to discover and if you couldn't find something there you could even request rare hard to find music from other members by staking some of your upload maybe you want a rare copy of a fishman's record only ever released in japan and you don't want to pay exorbitant import tax you can just request it and somebody living there might pick it up look the community back in the day was so great that i've even heard of people getting married to people that they met on what cd but if you're against piracy and you think people should just pay the artists what they deserve then you might just think of what cd as a place for stingy internet users that don't want to support the artist and they just want to get something for free but what cd was more than that it was a giant archive a lot of music on this website had never even been digitized before i'm talking about old cassette tapes and vinyls from artists that were never popular enough to get their music on spotify there was a lot of rare music on here that you just couldn't find anywhere else and what cd was the only place that really incentivized this sort of sharing maybe if you're a super fan of some artists that you really like you really want to hear their early work that has been lost to time but if record labels don't think it's going to make enough money then it's just going to be lost to time these weren't just entitled teenagers trying to get something for nothing people on what loved music like nobody else and they paid for music just to share it with others you've probably heard that a lot of pirates buy more music than average person and since you could learn about obscure artists that you would never hear of otherwise i remember supporting these artists some super obscure artists that nobody ever heard of i would buy their albums on bandcamp because i wanted to support them and a lot of torrents uploaded on here there was just no legal way to obtain them there were so many out of print limited edition records on there so sure we were treading into a legal gray area for sure but was it really as bad as it seems and at its peak what had over two million torrents available something completely unheard of on any other torrent site at the time but all good things cannot last forever because as i'm sure you know online piracy is super illegal now what cd wasn't actually hosting any illegal files all they were hosting was basically links but do you really think that's going to hold up in court and running a private torrent site is dangerous business of course they're not as well known as something like the pirate bay which is open to everyone but of course the feds also had their eyes on what cd but it's not like the people who ran what cd were getting rich off of it most private torrent trackers run on donations in this community making money from torrenting is very much looked down on the most professional sites don't give you any rewards for donating you donate to keep the site alive maybe you'll get a cool little donor icon next to your name on the forums but that's about it but of course if you run one of these private torrent trackers you're always going to be a little bit paranoid this sounds like a secret website that not many people know about but the feds always know and if you own what cd it can be pretty scary running a torrent website what if xiyoshi fan x a trusted super moderator is actually a fed in disguise and he's looking to finally gather enough evidence to get the owners locked up and what happened to what cd is it disappeared in a moment one day you could log in and the next day there was a notice saying it was gone on november 17th 2016 french authority sees 12 servers from the internet service provider that what cd was using and what cd later said that the feds didn't seize any of the databases and that's a good thing because if the feds got access to all of the messages on the server they could presumably track down some of the admins with bad opsec but of course the owners were spooked the next day all that remained was a message from the owners so long and thanks for all the fish because nobody wants to get rounded up by the alphabet boys they were spooked and they fled and not much has been heard from them since they posted one final goodbye on their twitter and disappeared in a way it's sad because what cd was essentially the library of alexandria for music you could find things on there that you could never find anywhere else in a million years unreleased demo tapes from legendary bands obscure music that takes a real music fan to even enjoy but it's just part of the life cycle of these sorts of websites even what cd was a spiritual successor to oinks pink palace one of the og music private trackers that was shut down by the feds and what cd's closing wasn't the end since then several replacements have popped up and are still alive and well and from what i've heard they have even more than what cd ever had but that's a whole another story these private trackers have always had a niche but loyal fan base of music lovers even Trent resner the founder of the band nine inch nails was a member of what cd's predecessor oinks pink palace and resner said about these private trackers they're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it they're stealing it because they love the band this was whenever itunes was big but itunes music was always locked down with drm and you could only listen to low quality low bit rate versions of the music on itunes now it's been a few years since i last used private trackers just because i really don't care about having a perfectly curated multimedia collection anymore and it's bad form to mention the names of any current private trackers out there and the few whispers that you'll hear people only mention obscure acronyms that make no sense unless you're in the know and for good reason they want to keep the normies out and the feds now it might not seem like a site like what cd would still be relevant today but even today whenever you buy a movie or a book from something like amazon you don't really own it with things like drm and locks placed on your content you never truly own your collection if amazon wants to they can remove your entire kindle collection and there's nothing you can do about it even if you think something like spotify is amazing one day your favorite track off of your playlist might be removed for whatever reason because on these big services you never truly own your collection and as long as there are still corporations out there that still want to screw over the consumer there will always be a space in the world for private trackers out there