Torrent site invites

[Junglist]

I'm not asking for any invites, but where do smart people get their music these days? Private trackers? Are PirateBay and the big public trackers untrustworthy wastelands at this point?

Setting aside newer releases, I amassed an unwieldy music library 5+ years ago when it was still in the golden days of torrenting and there was still a robust scene of people posting megaupload albums on blogs, and have been mostly out of touch since. And now I lost a large portion of my library in a hard drive crash...

What.cd is the primary, invite only place.

[phantom_power]

I'm not asking for any invites, but where do smart people get their music these days? Private trackers? Are PirateBay and the big public trackers untrustworthy wastelands at this point?

Setting aside newer releases, I amassed an unwieldy music library 5+ years ago when it was still in the golden days of torrenting and there was still a robust scene of people posting megaupload albums on blogs, and have been mostly out of touch since. And now I lost a large portion of my library in a hard drive crash...

I would recommend soulseek. There is very little that I have searched for that I haven't found and it has helped fill in gaps in my collection that I have been unable to get from torrents. This includes bootlegs and rarities as well

[Flouncer]

Soulseek is awesome; I haven't used anything else to acquire music since I discovered it ages ago. You can get some incredibly rare stuff on there.

[Famous Mortimer]

I'm not asking for any invites, but where do smart people get their music these days? Private trackers? Are PirateBay and the big public trackers untrustworthy wastelands at this point?

Get yersen on Soulseek and you can join the Cookd and Bombd room there and see what people are sharing.

[NoSleep]

I popped into the cookdandbombd chatroom on Soulseek last weekend and said hi to Famous Mortimer & phantom_power but I think you must have both been AFK.

[phantom_power]

Yes, I leave my Soulseek on all the time and autojoin the room. Feel free to browse my music if I am away though

[Famous Mortimer]

I also leave mine on all the time. According to my upload history, a lot of people want library music at the mo.

[Robot DeNiro]

I usually try to download WEB-DL versions of TV shows, as they don't have the annoying TV station logos and pop-up graphics.  However, for the last week and a half most of the shows I follow haven't been available in that format. Does anyone know if a major release group has called it quits, or if iTunes has changed its DRM or something? 

[NoSleep]

I don't know if it's related but one of my downloads from last week had a message from one of the groups (2HD):

We are not sure what we did to upset -TURBO and ZoneNet. We simply released The X Files and
then they decided to reign down fire on us. We have never taken place in nukenets. Our release
had a 1 pixel fade at the top which is allowed under the rules. They then added the normalized audio
reason. It still didn't hold up so they added the ivtc issue which has been the same on every X-Files
episode in the relaunch.  We did nothing wrong and we accepted the nuke and moved on. Someone unrelated
to us defended us against the lame proper and now today someone decided to nuke an insanely high number
of our releases.

We haven't changed anything in how we encode for years. We don't have real time encoding, we have
the most basic tools and all that and simply put we don't really have time for this stuff these days.
We are doing nothing diferent today with our audio then we've done for a long time. We don't know what
this is about. We haven't even done anything to TURBO that we know about.

Either this shit gets sorted out or we're just as happy walking away entirely. No sweat off our backs.
Truth to be told it's like we already have. The stupidity has gotten too high.

This is all we have to say on this matter

[Robot DeNiro]

Yes, it wouldn't surprise me if it was something like that, there does seem to be a lot of petty squabbling between the release groups.  I'm not sure if 2HD did many WEB-DLs though.  I'm wondering now if the torrents I'd been getting had been leaking from private trackers, and those leaks have now been plugged. 

[olliebean]

I just wish there weren't so many TV releases with fucked up sound. Sounds like many of the groups are ticking an "audio compression" box somewhere along the process. Very annoying in outdoor scenes when the background noise is drowning out the dialogue. I go for the WEB-DL versions, if I can get them, for that reason - because usually nobody's re-encoded it and fucked with the sound.

[TTT]

I grab the 720p WEB-DLs from the newsgroups and I've been able to get pretty much all of the shows I watch in that format this week, so they are still being released, maybe just not being posted to public torrents? If you name a couple of example episodes that are missing I can check this if you like.

[Beep Cleep Chimney]

I've still got 10 Myspleen invites that I'd quite like to get rid of if anybody wants one.

Don't really use that site much any more.

They've got some decent stuff on there, but I hate the fact that the majority of the film/video stuff that gets uploaded on there is in ludicrously big .ISO file format that you have to burn onto a fucking DVD to watch.  Why they insist on doing this rather than putting stuff up in a more convenient format like .avi or .mp4 is beyond me.

Anyway, it might not bother you as much as it bothers me so, if you want an invite, let me know.

[Robot DeNiro]

I grab the 720p WEB-DLs from the newsgroups and I've been able to get pretty much all of the shows I watch in that format this week, so they are still being released, maybe just not being posted to public torrents? If you name a couple of example episodes that are missing I can check this if you like.

Hi TTT, good to see you're still around.  Thanks very much for offering to check.  Two of the shows I've been waiting for showed up overnight, so I guess there's just been a delay for some reason.  However there's still no sign of these three:

Superstore s01e09 aired 8 Feb
Baskets s01e04 aired 11th Feb
Childrens Hospital s07e04 aired 12th Feb

Maybe I should check out newsgroups, I've never tried to use them before. Is it complicated / do you need invites etc?

[NoSleep]

I just wish there weren't so many TV releases with fucked up sound. Sounds like many of the groups are ticking an "audio compression" box somewhere along the process. Very annoying in outdoor scenes when the background noise is drowning out the dialogue. I go for the WEB-DL versions, if I can get them, for that reason - because usually nobody's re-encoded it and fucked with the sound.

Generally you should try and avoid the ones that stipulate "480" as these seem to be designed for hand-held devices and the audio is really thin and compressed.

[TTT]

Checked the newsgroup indexers I use and Superstore was available on the 9th. No sign of Baskets yet, although it looks like it took a few days after air for the other episodes to appear in WEB-DL. Childrens Hospital only seems to have a WEBRip from the Adult Swim website so far (Rather than the iTunes WEB-DLs), not sure if they are logo free or not, but they do only have 2 channel audio.

Once you setup the newsgroup downloads via Sonnar for example, it is then automatic, you just add a show you want and pick the quality you want to grab and it will just do its job for you in the background (I have mine grabbing the 720p HDTV ones first, then it auto upgrades to WEB-DL or BluRay when they become available). It does take a bit of setting up and likely a fair bit of effort to import your existing shows (if they are not already sorted/named properly).

Don't need invites for all indexers, as some are freely open for everyone to join.

[Famous Mortimer]

I've still got 10 Myspleen invites that I'd quite like to get rid of if anybody wants one.

Don't really use that site much any more.

They've got some decent stuff on there, but I hate the fact that the majority of the film/video stuff that gets uploaded on there is in ludicrously big .ISO file format that you have to burn onto a fucking DVD to watch.  Why they insist on doing this rather than putting stuff up in a more convenient format like .avi or .mp4 is beyond me.

I guess it's to do with ratio - people want to get their ratio up, so rather than upload small files, they upload big ones. With stuff like episodes of "Saturday Night Live", I tried arguing with them once, that a recording from TV wasn't going to magically get better quality if encoded as a massive ISO, but I got nowhere.

[NoSleep]

No sign of Baskets yet, although it looks like it took a few days after air for the other episodes to appear in WEB-DL.

It's been regularly turning up on Fridays.

[NoSleep]

I guess it's to do with ratio - people want to get their ratio up, so rather than upload small files, they upload big ones. With stuff like episodes of "Saturday Night Live", I tried arguing with them once, that a recording from TV wasn't going to magically get better quality if encoded as a massive ISO, but I got nowhere.

Are they generally against lossiness? Do they, like Karagarga, see themselves as a kind of archive or repository? The above suggests so. If you have an ancient VHS and encode it using compression it can only get worse, so they sound like they are trying to encourage people to preserve these old tapes in the best possible way. The best way to think of this is; what resolution would you use to photograph clouds? Probably the highest you could, to capture the subtle changes in shadow and form. Old VHS are essentially "cloudy", so the first digital copy you make should attempt to capture it in the highest possible resolution. I can't see a problem, once it has been upped in this resolution, to offer compressed versions alongside, though.

[Robot DeNiro]

Checked the newsgroup indexers I use and Superstore was available on the 9th. No sign of Baskets yet, although it looks like it took a few days after air for the other episodes to appear in WEB-DL. Childrens Hospital only seems to have a WEBRip from the Adult Swim website so far (Rather than the iTunes WEB-DLs), not sure if they are logo free or not, but they do only have 2 channel audio.

Thanks very much TTT, hopefully they will turn up soon.  I'm just relieved that WEB-DLs are still being released, for a few days it seemed as if they'd stopped completely, but I guess it was just a coincidence that most of my shows had been delayed.  I'll have a look at newsgroups when I have more time - am I right in thinking you need to pay for a server which will have monthly download limits?  Torrents still seem like the best option if so.

[Junglist]

PMed, DeNiro.

[TTT]

Thanks very much TTT, hopefully they will turn up soon.  I'm just relieved that WEB-DLs are still being released, for a few days it seemed as if they'd stopped completely, but I guess it was just a coincidence that most of my shows had been delayed.  I'll have a look at newsgroups when I have more time - am I right in thinking you need to pay for a server which will have monthly download limits?  Torrents still seem like the best option if so.

Yeah you generally have to pay for a Usenet provider. You either buy a block of say 100GB that you can use for as long as it takes to be used up. Or you pay per month for unlimited access.

If you happen to have virgin media as your ISP you get free access to their news server though. It also has a 30 day retention but if you automate the download/only want new episodes as they come out it would be fine.

If you can get an invite to one of the good TV trackers that would be the way to go though. I've been struggling to get on any of them for a while now though.

[Robot DeNiro]

I am on Virgin, so I'm going to give that a go, thanks.  When you say it has a 30 day retention, does that mean I won't be able to get anything that was posted more than 30 days ago?

I use a VPN when I'm torrenting, is it foolish to use Virgin's news server for downloading TV shows?  Will I get a threatening letter asking me to stop?  Thanks again for your help, as you can tell I don't know anything about news servers etc.

The other day I stumbled across this list of private torrent sites currently open for sign ups, in case that's any use to you - https://www.reddit.com/r/opensignups. It looks like TransmitTheNet was open for a while last month, not that that's any use now of course.

[TTT]

Cheers for the link, I'll keep an eye on that.

I've PM'd you more details about the virgin news server.

[Uncle TechTip]

Amazing that the virgin  news server is still going, I remember using it a lot up to a decade ago and although the retention was short and sometimes patchy, the PAR files could make up the difference and there was a huge range of binary groups. Glad to hear it's still going. Yes it's pretty much the safest way of downloading as the media cos can't see who is using it and so never give it very much attention. The indexing websites were blocked some years ago but I'm sure it didn't make much difference. If you are willing to pay I would ditch VPNs and instead buy a news service.

[Famous Mortimer]

Thanks very much TTT, hopefully they will turn up soon.  I'm just relieved that WEB-DLs are still being released, for a few days it seemed as if they'd stopped completely, but I guess it was just a coincidence that most of my shows had been delayed.  I'll have a look at newsgroups when I have more time - am I right in thinking you need to pay for a server which will have monthly download limits?  Torrents still seem like the best option if so.

They've never made a point of it, if they have (and offer most new shows as normal sized rips). I assumed VHS tapes would be about as good, resolution wise, as old TVs are...720x576? Surely a file of that resolution would be identical as a 700 meg avi as it would a 4 gig iso. I'm probably going to be proved wrong in a minute, so I'll just apologise in advance.

Myspleen is odd at the minute though. One of the main things is a bloke digitising his entire VHS collection, no matter what's on them. An old film noir followed by some Fortean-style magazine show from the late 90s.

[Junglist]

They've never made a point of it, if they have (and offer most new shows as normal sized rips). I assumed VHS tapes would be about as good, resolution wise, as old TVs are...720x576? Surely a file of that resolution would be identical as a 700 meg avi as it would a 4 gig iso. I'm probably going to be proved wrong in a minute, so I'll just apologise in advance.

It depends how much of a quality snob you are really. I know peeps who will only download blu-ray remuxes at about 19gig, whilst I'm happy with a 4gig 720p or a 7gig 1080p. I can barely tell the difference.

[olliebean]

Generally you should try and avoid the ones that stipulate "480" as these seem to be designed for hand-held devices and the audio is really thin and compressed.

I only ever get the 720p ones. Sound is still rubbish on a fair number of the TV rips, but the WEB-DLs seem to be OK.

[NoSleep]

They've never made a point of it, if they have (and offer most new shows as normal sized rips). I assumed VHS tapes would be about as good, resolution wise, as old TVs are...720x576? Surely a file of that resolution would be identical as a 700 meg avi as it would a 4 gig iso. I'm probably going to be proved wrong in a minute, so I'll just apologise in advance.

Myspleen is odd at the minute though. One of the main things is a bloke digitising his entire VHS collection, no matter what's on them. An old film noir followed by some Fortean-style magazine show from the late 90s.

Did you mean to quote my post rather than TTT's?

When I did an avi (can't remember offhand what it was, probably DIVX or XVID) from a VHS>DVD I had, you could see artefacts in the avi in places, whilst other parts were OK. It's always worthwhile to know where to get a hi-res copy of an old transfer as compression techniques have improved over the years, whilst the VHS machines you can play your old tapes on will get rarer as well as the tapes aging (so doing another transfer on a new format may not be possible). Those hi-res copies will be the only playable masters.

[Famous Mortimer]

Did you mean to quote my post rather than TTT's?

Whoops, yes.

When I did an avi (can't remember offhand what it was, probably DIVX or XVID) from a VHS>DVD I had, you could see artefacts in the avi in places, whilst other parts were OK. It's always worthwhile to know where to get a hi-res copy of an old transfer as compression techniques have improved over the years, whilst the VHS machines you can play your old tapes on will get rarer as well as the tapes aging (so doing another transfer on a new format may not be possible). Those hi-res copies will be the only playable masters.

If the maximum resolution you can pull from a VHS tape is (for the sake of argument) 720x576, though, then past a certain point there's not going to be any difference, surely? You're talking about the quality of the transfer, which is a different kettle of fish. I think. Honestly, I'll shut up, I have no real idea about any of this stuff.