What.cd and Waffles.fm

Back on topic,

functionality > community.
what.cd > waffles.fm

I much prefer what.cd most of all because of it's notification system. It lets me conveniently follow bands which I wouldn't be following otherwise. It's torrent grouping is arguable on whether it's better or worse than the standardish tbdev browser waffles.fm uses. I find whatcd much superior because it groups all formats of albums together on an 'artist' page, making it easier to find stuff you're not looking for from specific artists because the torrents are not organized in a meaningless way like on waffles. They are grouped by album and by release, which makes it easy to discover less known releases such as 7inches, unreleased albums, and most of all unique compilation tracks. You will easily be able to discover non-album tracks on what.cd, because if a band has a single track on a compilation, you will get linked to the compilation via their artist page. Waffles will not show that compilation in the search results for that band. Since it organizes albums by grouping, it is efficient to snatch an entire discography at your preferred bitrate.

Waffles would be good for people who always have something specific in mind when searching, and their musical tastes are mainstream enough that you will find everything on both sites regardless of their differing torrent counts. But waffles does not excel for casual users because what.cd also gets this job done the same way.

What.cd is more in-line with Wikipedia, whereas Waffles is more of a parallel to Oink. What.cd kept innovating since it's inception, while waffles did mostly unproductive entrepreneurship, and was content being a oink.me clone with a few minor tweaks that I'm sure would have happened on oink anyways. Their biggest thing that I've noticed being "releasing" amateur 'indie' music as free leech torrents on their homepage, which is not even innovative or productive, as other trackers do the same, and the majority of the user-base gets no function from it. Based on laws of creative destruction, what.cd has gone from two years ago being equal and in close competition with waffles, to being an undisputed leader in the online music world. Waffles needs to do something fresh and creative to overcome their current stagnation. If not, the gap between these two behemoth trackers will only get larger, and the superiority of what.cd will become more and more apparent.


/end essay. comments?


(PS: The community debate on these 2 trackers is completely a matter of perspective. I am not saying that waffles.fm has a better community. I prefer the what.cd forum layout, but am not active at either)

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I much prefer what.cd most of all because of it's notification system. It lets me conveniently follow bands which I wouldn't be following otherwise.

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Now you mention it, a feature of What.cd I like is their "artist map", which lets you discover other bands/artists you may like. Waffles also links to "similar torrents", but for some reason I don't find that feature as powerful as What's.

About torrent grouping, it's nice because you can group all rips of the same album as one, but as it adds the count of seeders and leechers for all of them up, it may give you a false impression of how well-leeched that album is, which is frustrating when you're looking for popular stuff to increase your ratio.

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Their biggest thing that I've noticed being "releasing" amateur 'indie' music as free leech torrents on their homepage, which is not even innovative or productive, as other trackers do the same, and the majority of the user-base gets no function from it.

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Freeleech is a great way to increase your ratio, and if we add that Waffles is hard to seed on... you may also find new music you like this way, who knows. The only things lost are time and HDD space/sector life, at most.

Freeleech is not productive nor is it innovative, I'm talking more from an overall view (big picture). Also, browsing purely for increasing ratio is not really an intended function for any torrent site afaik. If you want to buffer the easy way, there are RSS feeds for that..

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If you want to buffer the easy way, there are RSS feeds for that..

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For someone that looks to increase his ratio, both basically involve the same - snatching stuff you don't want in hopes you'll manage to seed it to someone else.

Downloading just to get your ratio up may not be an intended function, but that does happen. A lot of people don't use their accounts afraid of being banned for low ratio, for example. With freeleech they can buffer up so that this isn't an issue anymore.

Its duration is also an important factor. If it lasts for too little time, it'll be the same as nothing. If it lasts too long, people may get the wrong meaning of the words "free" leech.

I lost my waffles account just for that reason . Waiting to seed back what I downloaded until I forgot to visit frequently enough and had my account deleted for non use.
At least What CD recognise that you ARE seeding and do not delete your account for non-visits ....
But the problem is actually finding stuff you can upload that has not already been uploaded.
Sure, on the big multi trackers like BitSoup, etc., you can get music from time to time that is what you are looking for, but getting it at the quality (flac, ape, or even mp3 320kbps) you would get on What CD or Waffles is another proposition.....

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Originally Posted by Fatal01

I lost my waffles account just for that reason . Waiting to seed back what I downloaded until I forgot to visit frequently enough and had my account deleted for non use.
At least What CD recognise that you ARE seeding and do not delete your account for non-visits ....
But the problem is actually finding stuff you can upload that has not already been uploaded.
Sure, on the big multi trackers like BitSoup, etc., you can get music from time to time that is what you are looking for, but getting it at the quality (flac, ape, or even mp3 320kbps) you would get on What CD or Waffles is another proposition.....

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Soulseek is a much better alternative for music than general private bittorrent trackers. There are countless albums on Soulseek that are not on What.cd. Demonoid and Isohunt are good in terms of torrenting. Reason I use music trackers is because I'm a stickler for bitrates, and trackers seem to be the easiest way to torrent for audiophiles.

I had no problem finding 50 torrents to upload on what.cd, and it took me under a day to do this. I didn't do it for upload though, and from those 50 torrents I got about 1 1/2 gigs of upload, and that is after a whole month of seeding. If you have a small music collection I would not bother uploading torrents, it's not a cost effective method of using your time. If you have something rare then upload it for the hell of it, but if music is remotely popular then someone else will have already bought, ripped, and uploaded the album at the popular bitrates anyways, so it's a waste of time to check if it's on the tracker or not.

Ratio rules are pretty lenient so I don't see why you would have to wait a month to have an acceptable ratio in order to download. You have something like 5 gigs where ratio doesn't even matter, and from seeding 5 gigs of music it shouldn't be too hard to meet 0.15.

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Originally Posted by Fatal01

But the problem is actually finding stuff you can upload that has not already been uploaded.

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better.php is your friend...

What > Waffles in every way as far as I'm concerned. Speed, content, IRC, features, gazelle...

As for uploading your own material, I've never had much of a problem finding CDs from my collection to upload (and it's not all obscure indie material).