A niche band from Asia I loved as a teenager disbanded in the early 2000s. Due to legal reasons their work is in forever limbo, no Spotify, official YouTube etc. Best you can get is 2nd hand CDs on online marketplaces for a premium.
One guy was seeding a 4GB torrent over on PirateBay from 2008 with every song, music video, numerous interviews etc. Reasons like this is why pirating needs to stay alive. Legend made me want to seed it with him longterm. Now we’re 2 seeders strong.
Keep sailing pirates, and whenever possible please seed.
EDIT: For those asking the band is the Japanese band Malice Mizer. The torrent in question is https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=4158529 And I love seeing how a few of you guys know the band and getting hit by nostalgia. Enjoy
We all need to be our own archivists in this day and age. The internet isn’t forever, it’s a constantly burning Library of Alexandria. I’m glad you found your lost media again.
Even the Internet Archive is slowly eroding from the bottom :(
How do you mean? The lawsuits, or something else?
Society and everything as a whole.
It would need government level of intervention but even that might not be enough.
Just take a look at regular public libraries on how they fare. They look like they barely scrape by at times.You’re doing the “assume everyone online is American” thing. If I take a look at my public libraries here in Australia, they’re thriving. My local is in a new building about a decade old. It has a music studio that’s free to use for 12-25 year olds, it’s open 10am-8pm every day except Sunday. I’m also barely scratching the surface on what it offers, and what it’s sister libraries in nearby suburbs offer too.
I am from Germany where libraries arent crippled to death.
Thing most libraries outside of major city centers don’t get the funding.
My local library doesnt have a manga section for example. The library in the next city at least has that but also requires a subscription or a single lending fee.Okay fair, my apologies. I’m not sure how you classify major city centres, but the library back in my hometown of 120k is thriving too. I actually have cards to multiple library systems, as they all have different online resources. I use my mum’s address for our hometown library card! 😂
IA is not a sustainable project, and is built as a single point of failure. It has no transparency and no recovery plan if things go bad. Compare that to Anna’s Archive, a project that open sources all of their code and data so that things will continue running even if everyone involved disappears.
Ask yourself: if IA’s data was silently modified, would anyone be able to tell?
Archive the internet archive. /s
Maybe it could be mittigated by inolenenting a new feature to have every website capture receive a unique hash so that it can be checked?
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this was incredibly profound to me for some reason. you’re spot on, an eternal Alexandria.
seeders who continue seeding weeks and month after the download is complete are basically mercy from overwatch
Is that not the normal? I just started sailing again recently, and I legit feel bad having to clear out an old torrent to make room for something new.
I felt the same, but there’s just things that’s forever popular. I don’t mind not seeding, if there’s already 200+ doing it.
But for all the niche things, and for personal favorites, I’ll seed for a loooong time.
Can I introduce you to soulseek? I promise it’s going to serve way better than torrents for that kind of stuff.
soulseek
I have heard of it, but admittingly know very little about it and its strengths. After a quick search there’s a package for my Linux distro so I’ll install it when I got some time to deep dive it and get an understanding.
Thank you tho I will have a good look later tonight. If there’s anything you think I should read/watch regarding Soulseek shoot it through. Nonetheless I’ll continue to seed regardless if I stick with Soulseek.
Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It’s pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you’ll have multiple seeds for a single source, you’re connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you’re also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.
It’s survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it’s so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it’s basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay
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Yeah, I don’t think this one is a priority for the IDF boss.
Use nicotine as the client instead. It’s arguably more user friendly and also stuffed with features. Most nix distros have it in their repos. You just need to share stuff on Soulseek(primarily music though some people share films as well).
Soulseek is filled to the brim with music, especially flac versions of songs.
I’ve found it’s a great source for e-books, as well.
primarily music though some people share films as well
Also fonts. So many fonts
It’s pretty easy to use. The only challenge for newcomers is setting up port-forwarding, since some users won’t share their collection with people who have their ports blocked. You don’t have to open your ports or share your music collection, but it is leeching and considered a dick move by some.
Alright so I already had a quick look, sooner than I intended. Got too excited.
At a glance tho I love what I see. There’s an official nicotine+ package in the Pacman repository for Arch Linux so that’s a plus. I forwarded the port with no issue, I got a decent network setup so I got fixed internal IPs and could forwarded the port securely as possible.
It also looks like it plays nicely with how I got my NAS setup and how I mount files internally to my PC. This could be a bit of a rabbit hole and a great learning experience for me. Thanks to everyone for the suggestion/tips.
I’ll love to self-host this down the line on my server so I can better provide everyone with my files even when my usual PC isn’t on.
Thank you! I run Docker on my homeservers so when I next tinker it’s going on. :)
I can rly recommend it, especially with Nicotine+
You’ll find the rarest shit on SLSK.
After a quick search there’s a package for my Linux distro
I recommend using the Nicotine Plus client. It’s more user friendly and open source
I don’t really get, why people praise soulseek so much. It lacks the resilience of torrents. There is much cool stuff, but no quality control and structure. And the cool old stuff is artificially locked in order to keep it rare.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “artificially locked in order to keep it rare”?
You can lock the files you’re sharing, so that other people can see them, but are unable to download. Unless they are specifically allowed to do so. Many people that do this only unlock the files if you have something good to trade (that’s also locked) or you pay them
I don’t know about the latter half of your statement, but my main reason for its use is pretty simply just that there’s more music available, and it doesn’t take all the time it normally would to get invited to a good music tracker. If anything, specialized Torrent trackers that could offer the same volume of music are a much bigger pain go deal with.
You were bang on about Soulseek. I’ve spent quite a bit of time on it now and love it. I’m in the works of deploying an instance on a server for 24/7 uploading. Thank you for the recommendation.
Edit: 24/7 server up and running. Pointed to my Jellyfin partition which has all my music, films, TV shows (and ebooks/manga since I set it up poorly back in the day)
In that context, it’s not really piracy, it’s cultural preservation.
Sure… I know lawyers say otherwise,
Yes me too. As bad as humanity seems sometimes, always good to remind yourself of the kindness from the likes of seeders in OP.
The amount of niche old Canadian cartoons I’ve found thanks to dedicated pirates…
I had to download chilly beach via youtube. Id share it on torrent but i dont know how
I was looking for a show and i finally found it. There was 1 seeder and it took forEVER! I now have a ratio of 300. I will not stop sharing that until i have to.
Have a similar torrent, sitting at a ratio of 142 :)
Upload them to YouTube or Bilibili. Japanese music fandom tends to archive everything that not available anymore on YouTube and rarely get taken down.
That way, newer generation can discover them. Just like city pop.
OPs case might have even be easier to solve by using search terms in the respective language. Might not have been the same result and more manual work but maybe satisfactory results.
From what I understand the (Japanese) band official wrote the band name with the Latin alphabet. The band had a slight international presence in France if I’m not mistaken with their 2nd last album getting a limited CD release, so maybe a pirate site catering more to the Japanese or French crowd might have yielded better results in hindsight.
The amount of VOSTFR content I see om some sites agrees with your observations.
Name the band? Maybe some of us can pitch in.
Malice Mizer – https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=4158529
I dunno if I would consider the band that launched gackt as niche but I might be living in a bubble of my own making haha
Haha you definitely have a point. I love it how the man practically pretends the band never existed. Last i heard he’s wanted by Japanese law enforcement and has migrated to Malaysia. There will never be a reunion. :(
Holy shit, I’ve got some googling to do!
Daaaamn throwback. They were my friend Sarah (RIP)’s favourite band.
Hope it brings you good memories. Sorry for your loss. RIP.
Similar experience: One guy was seeding all of the old uncensored episodes of The Three Investigators and I’m so grateful for that. It’s pretty popular here in Germany, but despite that, no one seems to share it. There are episodes on Spotify, but they are censored and some of the music has been replaced with a modern rendition.
Oooh, what’s the band called?
Edit: Malice Mizer. OP answered below.
Malice Mizer
Wow that name is a blast from the past.
Yo I’m gonna need some details on that library so I can seed with you. Keeping obscure media alive is my favorite.
Meanwhile my torrent of Thee Michelle Gun Elephant is stuck at 31.9% because that’s all that’s available.
Story of my life with torrents, really. I just want the old and obscure, the stuff you can’t find anymore. But it always seems to be all about the latest popular shit, sadly.
Have you tried private trackers?
Edit: or soulseek?
I’m searching on the Seeker app but use Nicotine+ on desktop.
(this is like oldschool p2p, those are live clients and searching at other times may reveal more or less)
Private trackers are not worth it at all. Getting into main stuff is way too hard and open signups are pure luck. Even people who used top tier private trackers for over a decade now openly admit they wouldn’t bother with it if they were starting from scratch today.
Quite the contrary, I’d redo the tests for RED or OPS in a heartbeat. The fact that require potential invitees to put forth a bit of effort to join generally weeds out the people who aren’t going to put in the effort to maintain their account or ratio.
Spent maybe 1 hour reading the training material for both sites. Passed OPS first time, RED second. Maintaining a good standing on either will generally be enough to get you into anything else.
I was a denier for a few years too until I just sucked it up and made an attempt. Couldn’t pay me enough to switch back now.
I’ve been on Torrentday for 12 years. It’s been worth my time, in fact I get most of my content there. These days I have it set up with the *arrs, it’s the main source of torrents, alongside usenet as well. Guess it all depends. General trackers can be great.
I used to be on Demonoid and some other JAV trackers but they shut down and I’m too lazy to bother with waiting to join another. Never really was into music enough to track (hah!) a private tracker and honestly I think it’s not in the spirit of torrents. But I appreciate the recommendations nonetheless :)
Soulseek is freely open and barely even requires a login if you ever want to look.
I hear usenet is good for obscure stuff.
Almost all the films and games I’ve interacted with came from a little
, otherwise it just wouldn’t be accessible for me.