Submitted via IRC for Cmn32480_phone
The torrenting community has been tumultuous these past few weeks. First, Kickass Torrents was seized by the government after the owner's arrest. Now, one of the largest search engines has vanished.
According to TorrentFreak, Torrentz.eu unexpectedly shut down on Friday, disabling its search functionality. The domain is still active, but currently, the site just features the search bar with a message in the past tense: "Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines."
Source: Gizmodo
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Monday August 08 2016, @06:57PM
Streaming is good as long as you only want mainstream..
Sadly enough "mainstream" is often a euphemism for "lowest common denominator".
Or a bit of personal experience - spotify only has about 70% of the things I search for (prior to streaming gaining ground torrentsites had a combined successrate of 90% but are now down to about 50%), and it removes about 3% of my main playlist every month. (Seems to follow the pattern of most immersive first).
To make it worse - they often only have the "new and ruined" releases/remixes/remasters of many albums, and almost never allow you to access the regional versions (for instance - the austrian/german release of Falco Greatest Hits has better song selection than the international version).
And if you are into music mainly marketed outside of your region or into indie or enjoy music that has entered public domain (pretty much anything before 1930) you are out of luck with streaming.
Also - streaming normally suck for discovering new music or movies. On a big torrent site you can just do a category listing and look at things where seed+peers is less than 20 and grab stuff at random (actually are lots of good stuff there).
And we also have the issue of that streaming often(always?) lacks the ability to select an album at random and then play it from start to finish and then pick another album. (However; Solar Fields did a nice workaround by also uploading the album Random Friday as a single track).
Oh, and not to mention that the UI for streaming also tend to suck (I want to build playlists of playlists)
And no - youtube is not an option, too interactive and to messy to build playlists (and too often "not available in your region").
Funnily enough my main sources of music are streaming (in particular internet radio) but backed up with a eeringly large collection of mp3s. And best rate if succes in finding the stuff I want - discogs (yup, streaming got me to start buying CDs and vinyl)
Don't even get me started on how crappy I find netfulu prime.. (let's just say single-digit succesrate in finding the stuff I want - internet archive scores higher)