Still can brother 🏴☠️
For those wondering check out Soulseek clients like Nicotine+. Even better, these days most of the files are well tagged.
Set to search only file sizes of >320 and revel in limitless FLACs.
I feel like I have more availability to get what I want now, than when I was using Limewire/Kazaa/Napster/eMule/etc.
If it was super popular, you could get it. If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn’t actually what you wanted.
I used to have a demonoid account and kept my seed ratio high just because that private tracker had the biggest collection of random ass music and movies you couldn’t find anywhere else. Unreleased shit and whatnot.
Private trackers have gotten way better. I think they’ve figured out how to retain obscure and rare things. At least RED, GGn, OPH, BTN and PTP have. I’m sure there are others.
Come back to torrenting if you feel trapped by subscriptions and enshittification. There is a bar to entry, but it ain’t too bad.
I do miss the weird fake tracks. There was a whole 3rd “Portishead” album that fake.
I kinda wanna look up who actually made that “Link, he come to town!” song. Because it sure as hell was not System of a Down. lol
My PC got AIDS once from Limewire Lite, true story.
EDIT : it was Kazaa had a lite version, not Limewire. Good days lol.
Step 1. Download Kazaa Lite Step 2. Use Kazaa Lite to download Kazaa Step 3. Profit
no one has mentioned SoulSeek yet
in my defense Theres a lot of comments
Specifically nicotine+.
slskd, soularr, lidarr :p
This! Also, I have never found a single incorrect naming there.
That Turbo-Charged connection was pulling more than 200 KB/s
lots of free viruses too.
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Before torrenting kicked off, this was one of the only ways you could ever get anything. And it was great!
Dc++ as well
You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
the high seas have grown more treacherous, but you still can.
In what way?
many governments will snitch on you if they find you doing it. some countries need a vpn to hide yourself now. and some other smaller bullshit.
The government will snitch on you to who? A foreign government?
usually to the copyright holders so they can sue you. or they cut your internet access.
i said “governments” but really i should be saying “ISPs in some countries”. that might have added some confusion.
Yeah, ISPs are usually under pressure to obey the copyright holders. But VPNs should always be used.
Today it’s harder, not more dangerous.
But also everything is darker.
More treacherous than LimeWire was? I think the fuck not, that boi was filled with Justin_Bieber_Baby.mp3.exe’s
That stuff is so easy to deal with, 1 its fucking obvious its a .exe and second you can just run it in a VM. What, is your PC going to struggle running a VM that only has to run audio or video?
It’s considerably easier to deal with these days so the seas are less treacherous. Even Windows’ default antivirus will catch most of those too.
Including NIMDA!
In 2001 my Uni’s entire campus network was shut down for 3 days to clean up a massive NIMDA infection. Wild times.
Ahhhh, back when every punk cover song was done by Pennywise.
Among many other misattributed MP3s I downloaded off LimeWire, I remember downloading an mp3 of a “new leaked Nine Inch Nails song” called “Digital” that even had an intro read by a some DJ on a radio station (supposedly).
It ended up not being Nine Inch Nails, but I loved the song anyway, and had no idea what it was until a decade later when I found it again online. Still fuckin rocks too:
Boom Boom Satellites - Push Eject
I also remember a Tetris Theme remix by Aphex Twin that was very much not Aphex Twin.
I also remember downloading the Aphex Twin remix of Beck’s "Devil’s Haircut"and the remix was so bad I thought it had to be fake (it’s not).
I actually still have songs in my playlist that I discovered the same way. A lot of the saints were incorrectly labeled so it was hard to make sure you got the right one without listening to it. Found a lot of unknown artists this way.
Somewhere in my files I still have the file of a hoarse, cracked male voice singing along to Ricky Martin’s “Bailamos”, purportedly recorded from Martin’s mic by a sound tech when he was lip synching live on stage.
Probably fake, but I want to believe.
These sorts of programs still exist. I use Nictotine, which is based on Medusa, but basically works like a better version of the old MP3 download programs. Good for finding obscure artists.
Soulseek is basically the same thing too, and still works.
Hey does anyone remember searching for the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? What a fun time…
