this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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?
When WCD closed, it had over 1M releases. Now these respectively have 1.8 and 1.3. Requests are filled-up quickly thanks to Spotify downloaders. Most torrents are xseeded on both, so there is redundancy. I'd say it's doing pretty well.
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.