The lost joy of music piracy • Hacker News Board

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#71

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:22 AM UTC

CoolestBeans wrote: post #56

One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just…

I'd even go as far as argue that all streaming has its origins in piracy - Spotify seeded its catalog with pirated music (allegedly), Crunchyroll started off as an anime piracy site, etc.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#72

Post by emsixteen » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #65

I loved OiNK (and had the t-shirt), but neither What.cd nor waffles ever were a proper replacement for me. What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening. I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I…

I really loved OiNK and all of that era. Was genuinely gutted when it all fell apart, as it was also about the community of it all. Always wanted a tee - I'm envious.

When waffles and What.cd appeared it seemed to me like waffles would be the long-term successor, but definitely didn't work out that way. Neither ever felt the same, and I wasn't engaged with them like I had been on OiNK.

Nowadays I'm just another streaming service zombie when it comes to music, aside from my old library sitting in Plexamp, like my own little musical time capsule.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#73

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#74

Post by ndesaulniers » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

maxaw wrote: post #30

What a cool article. I have good memories of being 13 and my cousin telling me about limewire. Between random pornography titles there was an artist called burial, which I downloaded cause I thought it sounded edgy. How lucky was I!

Final Fantasy FMVs set to edgy nu metal.

Man, I _had_ a limewire shirt (somewhere); they interviewed at my college. Where is that important piece of history?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#75

Post by DaanDL » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

eisa01 wrote: post #51

It's important to remember that to this day, streaming sites do not have a full archive of the music out there. There is still a need for music piracy Even albums mentioned in the Norwegian business magazine D2 can be impossible to find in legit channels. Your only option is to buy used CDs on Discogs for 50-100 USD, or know your way around the successors of these sites These CDs weren’t even on Oink or What (or did…

What I also miss on Spotify: live mixes.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#76

Post by ndesaulniers » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

Just setup lidarr and plex. Not happy about having to re-arrange all my loose files, but claude and beets are helping.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#77

Post by dewey » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

Great read! I spent many many hours during my student times as part of the team interviewing new members for What.cd about audio encoding settings, the rules of the site and its one of the times I look back on often. Made great friends, improved my English and spent most of my day on IRC. There’s so many good stories from this time and I wish the forums would’ve been preserved.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#78

Post by gfody » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

ColdStream wrote: post #39

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people want more than "mystery meat" levels of audio quality.

I once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference. I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.

crappy speakers?

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#79

Post by charcircuit » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

ktallett wrote: post #33

charcircuit wrote: post #20

Any amount of joy you lost is a fraction of joy lost from people blatantly stealing the fruits of other people's's labor. Communities do not have to be parasites to exist. Similar amounts of joy could be created over a different interest that didn't require stealing and hurting others.

Is it stealing if when I buy digital I don't own it?

You own a license when you buy it digitally. Stealing is never okay regardless of if something is technically buying or not.

Re: The lost joy of music piracy

#80

Post by dewey » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 7:27 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #9

I can't believe the operators of what.cd would choose to delete everything without at least a warning, or letting people back it up. So much music and metadata just lost! Not to mention the crime of law enforcement prioritising private profit over a cultural milestone. It really is like they burned the library of Alexandria because it hadn't paid the copyright fee.

There was an official release that contained just that and a lot of other things like image assets uploaded on Archive.org. You can’t just put a database dump online without doing a lot of cleaning first.

There’s some websites where people made that browsable too so you can go through collages and album and artist pages with the original style sheets too. Just no forums or torrent files or images.