Just cracks me up when normies think that any of these things actually has access to “basically anything”. Not everything is even on the internet period

Curious what you don’t get? There’s always people will to make a quick buck even if it’s risky and there’s always lazy people who will pay money for convenience (hence why paid streaming is even a thing)

You don’t own the music so it can be edited/taken away as desired by the DSP

Also me personally very little of what I listen to is on DSPs and a lot isn’t even on YouTube but I recognize this as an extreme outlier

Private trackers really aren’t masters of op sec. They thrive through security through obscurity which the worst kind of “security”. And generally even fail at that (PTP, BTN, RED, OPS are so widely known)

That said I use them and I also don’t use a VPN so I just take that risk. It’s up to you

IP2 definitely sounds intriguing as truly (or close to) anonymous peer to peer

You can use without port forwarding. Others without open ports won’t be able to upload to or download from you and give versa. There’s a sticky on the Reddit explaining this

If you can’t forward ports Soulseek will still work okay. Don’t let that stop you from joining

Music piracy isn’t dead but it’s a shell of what it was. You can see even here most people would rather just stream

Soulseek needs more users though as the proportion of locked file users keeps increasing

Traders are hardly just on Soulseek. Most probably aren’t since it’s so accessible. Most of the traders I’ve seen on Soulseek anyways are scammers who are just sharing RED repositories. Or they’re on dc++ hubs where you can’t have locked files anyways

As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone

I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on

But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.

Any specific server you recommend? And is there anything on windows like mldonkey where you can search call the servers at once?

Seems like another blow and a step closer to the death of public trackers for many. For us hardcore pirates we don’t give a shit but the big corps are gonna be very happy. Many people should probably just move on to Usenet

They’re going hard still

DC++ does it but it’s even more selective than PTs. Maybe someone on here can start a hub for all the members here

DC++ and Soulseek gang here plus some personal contacts and sites mainly DDL

Yeah I like the smell of my own farts. I got PT access too but I try to minimize use these days. Usenet is great but I have too much ego to pay for anything currently outside of internet connection and storage.

Why’d you tag them? You were able to see who downvoted you?

If you wanna make money off of it you become more of a bootlegger than a pirate with a separate set of ethos. It’s going to put a much bigger target on your back both legally and from non legal entities and in the case some shit does go down you’ll have much less support/empathy. This is with the mindset you’re out to make a profit not donations to run servers etc if you get big, even if it’s to just do it full time. And you’re not going to get much support if that’s the case here

That was a ridiculous drama between them. They painted thearchivist and his team like some kind of terrorists and shit lol

I generally don’t really regard private trackers highly so just off of that I’m skeptical. And I’ve only had good experiences with the eye/archivist/his people

My only thing is there any simple way to transfer all my stuff from qt to nicotine? I have literally several hundred items on my wish list and user list

Good but we need more people before the traders/locked file users take over. ___

Lucky you - there’s definitely still tons of obscure music not on Soulseek. But for 99.9999% of people they’ll find everything they’re looking for. Certain band and artist names are blocked to avoid copyright issues so you’ll have to search by song ot album title.

it’s more like limewire as it does not use the BitTorrent protocol but rather direct P2P connections to other users. In that case it tends to be slower

It’s popular cause it’s probably the most popular P2P non torrent app and there’s a lot of hardcore users sharing over 100k music files including real rarities and mostly public to all. There are some locked file users in search of trades and that’s been hurting the overall community arguably as well as people who ban if you don’t share anything but generally most are willing to share whatever to whoever as long as you don’t download all their shares at once

Reddit is full of contrarians. A lot of the smaller subreddits in particular likes to be contrarian to anything they saw as mainstream Reddit

Also, the people who are really pissed at Reddit probably have left so the remaining population has a larger proportion of people who don’t care or even support what Reddit does.

Finally, let’s be honest /r/piracy was dominated by casual pirates at best as shown by the posts and comments “what’s a seeder” “what’s Usenet” “OMG Rarbg down what do I do”. So they’re not hardcore pirates with a dedication to piracy/warez ethos just casuals looking for links and shit

RED has a thread for scene requests doesn’t it? Otherwise it can be tough if it’s not on Soulseek as you’ll need topsites or dc++ private hub access which is extremely difficult. There are some forums that used to be around and not as hard to find as well as more public sites that you had to pay for (0daymp3 was the name or some crap) but they don’t have as much as the archives in the top places

This is some 2000s scene group domination era shit isn’t it? I know topsites still exist for example but aren’t a lot of groups just P2P and will release directly to private trackers? As opposed to the old days when the scene groups dislike P2P

I wish I was a normie lol just not in me. Things would be easier

DC++ is my preference for music but the good ones are near impossible to get in like the top private trackers. You can’t even say what they are

Slav Art, RU Tracker, and Soulseek is what I’d recommend to normies. You can also try OPS and RED if you’re a FLAC FREAK but those have barriers. Surmountable but more time required than the third I mentioned in the start (I assume SlavArt DIVOLT is still around and public?). You’ll get most stuff with those three anyways especially if you’re not into some real obscure shit. Maybe add on yt-Dlp but not gonna be the best quality.

Curation, breadth of access (less important if you don’t have obscure tastes which it sounds like you don’t OP, and that’s fine), quality control, security to a small degree, and community. Also if you get upload credit you can use the requests option and have some of the most rabid nerds on this world looking for what you want.

Top reason which people will be in denial about though is epeen

In short most people don’t need it and probably will never get in the most selective ones. If you’re not satisfied with public trackers or too worried you’re likely better off with Usenet or real-debrid.