What.cd IS NOT for the casual user!!

[soulreaper]

Let's face it. What.cd isn't for the casual downloader who simply downloads and seeds 24/7. Unless one has a seedbox or a really fast connection, it's not possible to survive. They don't give you gigs for donation either so there's no easy gigs to be had. Also, please don't tell me to upload. There's so much already out there that unless you go out of your way to find stuff, you can't upload. And let's just assume you actually find something to upload, what's the point? The seedbox whores autosnatches buffer the shit out of the upload leaving you dry with a max of 1:1 on that torrent.

So why the hell don't the what.cd staff just cut the bullshit and hand users with shitty connections 50-100 tokens on a regular basis? I can't give 50% of my life to what.cd and I'm sure more users feel this way.

[stan]

Leave your Whatcd torrents seeding.Then sign up to Rutracker then . Download 20 GB of flac each day till you are fed up . Then go back to admiring Whatcd's much better search facility's.If you are lucky you might even have uploaded 30mb on Whatcd.

[soulreaper]

Leave your Whatcd torrents seeding.Then sign up to Rutracker then . Download 20 GB of flac each day till you are fed up . Then go back to admiring Whatcd's much better search facility's.If you are lucky you might even have uploaded 30mb on Whatcd.

Can't trust the rips at rutracker.

[DeadPoet]

I'm trying to catch those staff picks but I often miss them. So what to do? I don't know. They gave every user 5 free-leech tokens. My best guess would be checking better.php and find flacs with no transcodes uploaded and start from there. You can upload 15 torrents that way. No biggie, but it's something.
You can find perfect flacs on RuTracker but I don't know how to check whether it is/is not perfect. It's an option though.

[Quarterquack]

Joined: 3 years, 1 month ago
Up: 175.04 GB
Down: 1.99 GB
Ratio: 87.84
Required: 0.00

My What.CD stats for you.

The basic rules of survival are the following:

Use Freeleech to its maximum, I download entire discographies during freeleeches, and then seed them for as long as I can (this makes sure that pretty much anyone interested in the same artists that I am will have to snatch from me eventually, and on a site with so many members that's usually daily).

Upload requests. The vast majority of my ratio was fulfilled uploading 4-5 Music requests and 1 ebook request. If I had a little more dedication I'd go and build myself a scanner from here, and spend a month building a 1-2TB buffer on there using ebook uploads. From then on, I'd never worry about ratio again.

Better.php is also a great option. Find FLACs, upload V0. Every member with an auto V0 download will give you a little bit extra ratio. Usually it's about 80MB per V0 transcode, so you might need to upload 3-4 of them before you can grab a FLAC at break-even, but if you prefer V0 to FLAC, then you'll always be going at a 1:1.

RuTracker and DigitalHive are even better. Both of those trackers have torrents from What uploaded directly to them. RuTracker has a lot of the FLACs (even ones from Pedro's), DigitalHive has a lot of the alts (like Rosetta Stone for freeleech). Download from there, and cross-seed at What.CD. You'd be surprised how much traffic the Rosetta Stone torrent gets.

[iStatiK]

If you upload it really isn't hard to get a good ratio. I have a 2.42 ratio, nothing close to Darth's but its not hard.

[soulreaper]

Waiting a whole year for a "surprise" freeleech to download free music is not an option. Might as well turn it into a full on paysite,that way the users know exactly what to expect and the what.cd admin need to quit with their non-profit humanitarian bullshit. They're not doing anybody any favours.

LOL@uploading. Uhhh not interested.

[IdolEyes787]

Waiting a whole year for a "surprise" freeleech to download free music is not an option. Might as well turn it into a full on paysite,that way the users know exactly what to expect and the what.cd admin need to quit with their non-profit humanitarian bullshit. They're not doing anybody any favours.

LOL@uploading. Uhhh not interested.

I couldn't agree more about not just What but most "popular" sites in general.I already have a job I don't need something I supposedly do for fun to become a second one.
If the fact that I don't traipse all over the internet looking for opportunities to cross seed shite that I am never going to watch/listen to/play /use makes me de facto a bad tracker member then seriously they can all go fuck themselves.

[soulreaper]

Joined: 3 years, 1 month ago
Up: 175.04 GB
Down: 1.99 GB
Ratio: 87.84
Required: 0.00

My What.CD stats for you.

The basic rules of survival are the following:

Use Freeleech to its maximum, I download entire discographies during freeleeches, and then seed them for as long as I can (this makes sure that pretty much anyone interested in the same artists that I am will have to snatch from me eventually, and on a site with so many members that's usually daily).

Upload requests. The vast majority of my ratio was fulfilled uploading 4-5 Music requests and 1 ebook request. If I had a little more dedication I'd go and build myself a scanner from here, and spend a month building a 1-2TB buffer on there using ebook uploads. From then on, I'd never worry about ratio again.

Better.php is also a great option. Find FLACs, upload V0. Every member with an auto V0 download will give you a little bit extra ratio. Usually it's about 80MB per V0 transcode, so you might need to upload 3-4 of them before you can grab a FLAC at break-even, but if you prefer V0 to FLAC, then you'll always be going at a 1:1.

RuTracker and DigitalHive are even better. Both of those trackers have torrents from What uploaded directly to them. RuTracker has a lot of the FLACs (even ones from Pedro's), DigitalHive has a lot of the alts (like Rosetta Stone for freeleech). Download from there, and cross-seed at What.CD. You'd be surprised how much traffic the Rosetta Stone torrent gets.

Your stats say it all. You have like 175 gigs uploaded but about 2 gigs downloaded as you probably downloaded like 3 times in 3 years during FL. That just shows how shit-scared users are to download anything substantial when it's NOT freeleech(which is like 364/365 days a year) which just underlines the fact that what.cd's ratio system needs to be discarded because as much as they think it works it just doesn't.

And all the methods you describe to survive ,as effective as they maybe, are flat out BS because it just doesn't apply to the casual user who'll just DL and seed back music which he loves listening to.

The thing is torrent sites were never meant to be about survival, it's turned out that way thanks to profiteering admins.


And What.cd is an abomination for a library, please don't call it that(don't mean you specifically Darth cicero).

Waiting a whole year for a "surprise" freeleech to download free music is not an option. Might as well turn it into a full on paysite,that way the users know exactly what to expect and the what.cd admin need to quit with their non-profit humanitarian bullshit. They're not doing anybody any favours.

LOL@uploading. Uhhh not interested.

I couldn't agree more about not just What but most "popular" sites in general.I already have a job I don't need something I supposedly do for fun to become a second one.
If the fact that I don't traipse all over the internet looking for opportunities to cross seed shite that I am never going to watch/listen to/play /use makes me de facto a bad tracker member then seriously they can all go fuck themselves.

Absolutely nailed it. This is EXACTLY what I was trying to convey.

[ajsi]

Let's face it. What.cd isn't for the casual downloader who simply downloads and seeds 24/7.

I call BS. Staff picks can get you a significant upload amount, even on a slow connection. In case you want to whine about not wanting to check the site all the time in case there are new picks, or checking other sites like FST, or not having anyone that would tell you when there were new picks, it doesn't matter. It is still easy, if you seed everything you DL... The minimum ratio rule also works big in your advantage. Upload speed doesn't matter that much on what.cd, because you are only gonna upload a small amount of data basically on anything, maybe except FLAC (you DL more data on that though, so it is logical that you upload more too, but the V0:FLAC upload ratio should be similar, maybe the upload speed might matters a bit more), dunno about that. Only time when your upload speed really matters is during FL / Staff picks, when it basically determines how much you are gonna upload.

Yea, of course you won't be able to DL 100GB right after you've joined and then expect to seed it all back in a week. I seed about 500 torrents (V0 rips) about 10 hours a day, and in the last week or two (can't tell for sure since I don't track it that much) I uploaded just over 5 gigabytes (10Mb upload, but as I said, this doesn't matter). That is not much, but I certainly don't DL 5GB of music every two weeks...

Plus I think that if you do seed, the staffers won't give you trouble. I mean, ffs, there are 150.000 users, if you do seed your shit, you will eventually upload some data...

But then if you DL FLAC, you don't have any music in your library, have a 4th world connection, then yea, it might suck for you.

But you know what, I think that you don't care anyway, you are just pissed off that you can't seed 1:1 in a week, and don't even wanna try, and just came here to make yourself feel better, by finding others that will share you feelings...