soulseek

so glad this is still around

Spotify has reduced my usage significantly but it's still handy indeed.

I basically use slsk these days for individual tracks and when I see a cool album on a blog somewhere with a dead d/l link.

It's still very handy for seeking out rarities, I think.

still pretty good for dance 12"s

is the mac version still rubbish?

every cool person i know gets all the idm, microhouse and grime mp3s they need in primo 160kb/s from slsk these days, dont know why l4m0rz still actually buy music IMHOhttp://l.yimg.com/lo/api/res/1.2/_qIwROO2K4kFM.sCuxDb2Q--/YXBwaWQ9bWtihttp://www.5foq.com/vb/images/Smils%20For%205foq/rolleyes.gif

the mac version is now fantastic

TIP

soulseekqt

hooray!

ya i'm all over this add me i have 2 accounts for my laptop (roiheenok) and pc (flopson)

I have been using it on and off since early high school!

can you still use slsk (and get away with it) if you're in the USA? I've downloaded practically nothing since 5 strikes took effect.

soulseekqt

requires snow leopard (10.6 or up) : /

do you know of anyone who has ever gotten a strike?

felt "safe" because my isp isnt on the "list"

I usually have an ILX room up if I'm online (elvis_telecom)

still going strong

Here here
Just used it yesterday

First rule of slsk, don't talk about slsk.

do you know of anyone who has ever gotten a strike?
― flopson, Monday, 22 July 2013 22:20 (2 years ago) Permalink

That's the thing--it's been going long enough that it can't possibly be a secret at this point. The agencies that monitor this stuff, haven't they decided that, for whatever reason (primarily music rather than films?), soulseek just isn't worth bothering about? I only use it for occasional songs now, but it does come in handy at times.

second rule.

The agencies that monitor this stuff, haven't they decided that, for whatever reason (primarily music rather than films?), soulseek just isn't worth bothering about?

I think this must be the case. I remember a few years ago the search results for major label releases used to be swamped with obviously fake users, but that doesn't seem to happen any more.

man, i used to love SOULSEEX on os x before the lion update a few years ago. once you got used to it, it made the most sense of any version of slsk. it was better than the windows client. people used to complain that it used too many windows, but i always felt like its heavy window usage was a virtue - it felt like it kept keeping multiple chatrooms/user messages/user shares/downloads etc. well organized, and, because i had exposé set up with hot corners, i always kind of had fun switching windows.

such fond memories of SOULSEEX - browsing through user shares and randomly chatting with people played a major part in my formative music exploration in my late teens/early twenties.

those days are gone, though. ah, memories. i just have the regular mac client now + it looks exactly like the windows version = lame.
i never did bother with nicotine on os x, by the way. i was all about SOULSEEX, all about ssX.

anyway, how long ago was it? seven, maybe eight years ago, that the main port number changed, and many, many people didn't update their client/port number and just assumed slsk went to shit and abandoned it? yeah, what a shame. i updated my shit, at the time, and although slsk's been a little different since then, it never really stopped being COMPLETELY AWESOME for me. it's still GREBT for all sorts of oddities and obscurities, and, albums, too...

ah, the SOULSEEX days on os x. what a time to be alive. good times, good times.

there's too many slsk threads for me to find the most recently bumped one, but so i got a record there the other day and when i went to play it whoever encoded the mp3s put a naked picture of (presumably) himself as the album art. two things surprising about this. first is that i haven't run across it before, because there are some skeevy people on the internet, and second is that i really can't imagine anybody else on earth giving a shit about this record. if you're an exhibitionist and want people to look at pictures of your cock, why the hell would you embed them in a long-out-of-print compilation of outtakes by bands like "touch" and "stray dog"?

you could always msg them and ask!

i thought about it but i'm already married and honestly he wasn't much to look at naked.

also, he's not even online! it took me three weeks to download the damn album because he's never online!

Maybe all his files are encoded that way, not just the album you downloaded.

Still extremely useful to me around year-end time.

Well, it's not called "Buried Treasures" for nothing!

goddamn your locked files sir

Yeah, what's up with that?

it brings the true free-leeching spirit of SLSK into disrepute, stingy arsey bastards!

So annoying, as are those tl/dr scripts full of daft rules that pop up on occasion

anyone who uses that auto message for anything other than 'if you can't download try browsing my files first' is a grade-a prick

absolute bell ends.

'TRADE ONLY' – go fuck yourself, buddy.

just want to say bison2, harlemjazz and murdercitydevil - these are what I call proper SLSK'ers. lol I feel like I know them, but have never had any interactions with them.

Amen to that.

my hero = soulvent

Bless all the Japanese music enthusiasts on there, so much amazing stuff I've found.

Can only otm that. My obsession with Japanese music has been fueled profoundly by slsk. I wouldn't know where else to find stuff like that.

Not being able to wishlist an item + "flac" because it will just bring up the singular padlock cunt who has it (and is always online) is excruciating

can't you ignore that user? or does that do something else?

murdercitydevil

top bloke, never spoke a word to him tho

rn I'm trying to find the Asper Bothrops EP and there are two padlock fuckers with it in wav format, it's torture

Can't believe I am still ssk-ing and ILX-ing fifteen years after I first started, someone help

man i would totally crowdfund a new soulseek app for mac. the options are dire. isoul was decent but stopped working for me like a year ago.

Can't believe I am still ssk-ing and ILX-ing fifteen years after I first started, someone help

Some addictions are worth indulging. Ride the dragon till the bitter end.

More than that even, I can't believe that they're still basically the same given how much the world (particularly the internet world) has changed in that time.

"TRADE ONLY - CHECK MY WISHLIST IN MY USER INFO BEFORE PM ME"

Fuck you, Scramouthca, fuck you

it's amazing these things are still the same. Mac version is fine, isn't it? I was using it a few months ago. Now using the Linux version. Seems same to me on all platforms.

I don't get the hoarders either. Maybe there's some people with too much money sunk into storage and high power/internet bills or something. Start going on a powertrip instead of just limiting the app's bandwidth.

The majority of people having a looser approach and looser collections are probably how it continues to get by. Well-curated torrent sites are just begging to be taken down

Had a fun exchange a few years back with some guy yelling at me that I had to be someone else that he had banned with a similar username

Well-curated torrent sites are just begging to be taken down

― maffew12, Wednesday, May 22, 2019 3:29 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is this true though? Is hunting down private torrent sites still a thing? Seems the focus has shifted to the big free ones sharing the huge Hollywood trash. Those and stream rippers, apparently, according to TorrentFreak (which I visited just now for the first time in absolute ages, prompted by this revive).

Well they know better than me.

Regarding music specifically, streaming services make a lot more sense for most users than downloading MP3s. The heat has to be down to some degree. I pay for a service myself, and still buy physical releases, and Soulseek helps with things not easy to find any other way. I imagine this is a typical use case now? I'm glad it's surviving

I would think that is typical nowadays, yes (if only as it's my mode of music consumption, too). Slsk and some well-curated film trackers seem to still fly under the radar, fortunately.

Since waffles.ch (mainly stuck with it because of the community) died, this has been my thing. I came up in the Limewire / Kazaa / etc. period, so I was extremely skeptical when a friend was pushing it on me. Seemed archaic as hell.

His sell was "These are people who are serious about piracy and curation," and damn if that isn't the truth.

When Josh Fauver (formerly of Deerhunter) passed, a lot of the Army of Bad Luck (his record label) catalog went with him, and this is just about the only place you can find these things, legal or otherwise.

Seeing a bunch of replies on a Soulseek thread almost had me worried.

Denki Groove getting all of their music pulled from streaming services because one member failed a drug test is why I'll ride for MP3 collecting until I die

The biggest problem with Spotify, iTunes etc is the same as with Netflix, ie yes you can spend all your remaining days consuming what’s on it, but the vast majority of music worth hearing is not on it.

xp not familiar with Denki Groove but having just checked out the story can I say jesus fucking christ that's just about the most stupid thing I've read this year, and it's been quite a year, are they going to pull every other artist who's ever done drugs too?

That is wild o_O

Seeing a bunch of replies on a Soulseek thread almost had me worried.

― MarkoP

me too, i still try to be discreet about this shit because man slsk could go at anytime, fucking miracle that it's outlasted more or less everything worthwhile on the internet...

anyway, spotify isn't the celestial jukebox, and neither is youtube (and neither is slsk!). it's always going to be distributed to some extent.

I just checked and I seem to have two spare invites to JPopSuki if anyone wants them LBI, Frogbs?

Ohh that would be amazing!

My mail address for ILM is ancient, so send a mail to: n a k a g i n c a p s u l e t o w e r @gmail.com and I'll hook you up.

<3 bison2

I am also still a soulseek user. like most, i buy a lot of music digitally and physically, though i've yet to fall into what i consider the trap of streaming services and will never, ever do so, so i have to supplement some of my *pretty exorbitant music spending* with DLs on ssk.

I often marvel that it's still around, too. Means I've been using it for longer than almost anything on the internet.

Seeing a bunch of replies on a Soulseek thread almost had me worried.

― MarkoP, Wednesday, May 22, 2019 4:12 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol otm.

not familiar with Denki Groove but having just checked out the story can I say jesus fucking christ that's just about the most stupid thing I've read this year, and it's been quite a year, are they going to pull every other artist who's ever done drugs too?

also fair to say that anyone 'scandalized' by this likely doesn't understand rave culture, I mean come on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ouftVtGWjY

Hey guys slsk is great but pipe down knaw mean?

also fair to say that anyone 'scandalized' by this likely doesn't understand rave culture, I mean come on

― frogbs

god if their music is pulled for any reason i'd think it would be for inducing epilepsy

apparently a lot of dr*g city artists have a small don't ask don't tell thing going where searches for them on slsk are blocked to help keep the enterprise going without fear of multiple lawsuits

and ya since i got banned from oink this is my only source of mp3s. sorry for having a bad ratio my bros, my college throttled bandwidth :(

these posts brought to you by 2007

hah add me to the murdercitydevil fans group

XXXXP - I noticed that 'beatles' in the search meets with a blank returns page.

there have been blocked search terms since at least 2005, and the same ways to get around them since then

hah that dates back to the Napster days, I remember searching endlessly for stuff like "They May B Gaints"

search for album titles + part of artist name or song title and right click, that sort of thing

I hated oink, such miserable pedantic twats on there with their crazy list of rules, and I could never get a decent ratio from china

yes, they were fucking awful.

they were BUT their selection was better than any other service I can think of including Apple Music/Spotify so whatever. if I'm gonna tolerate fascism in any form it might as well be on a torrent site

i hated teenage-elitist "scene" bullshit when i was 15 and calling bbses and i'm not any more taken with it in its current form

having a complete archive of all music ever recorded is of little use if nobody can fucking listen to it without jumping through more hoops than it takes to get a top-level security clearance

you just have to upload one perfect torrent and they leave you alone. it sucked because I had a lot of stuff to contribute but I didn't want to get a lifetime ban because I didn't post the correct serial number right away so I just kept it to myself

If you thought Oink was bad re: miserable twats, you should've seen what followed: what.cd. Sheesh, fascism indeed. Buying your way up to VIP+++ user and some shit.

It can still be done in a great way, like k4r4g4rg4 imo. If you go to their donation page it now simply says "we don't need any money right now, we're good".

i'm just way too old for all the vpn/ratio/whatever bullshit. but it's not simply a matter of convenience, these autodidacts who fancy themselves "archivists" and believe they're building some sort of fucking eternal historical monument are wrong, everything is impermanent. standards are fine, necessary even, but the main thing is to enjoy what you can, while you can. my "library" is a mess and i can't even fucking find stuff in it and most of the stuff in it i've forgotten is even in there and it's pretty wonderful. five clicks and i can get to "oh wow i have a vybz kartel remix in here, awesome, i totally forgot about this". i don't even fucking know who vybz kartel is. amnesia rules!

If you thought Oink was bad re: miserable twats, you should've seen what followed: what.cd.

yr absolutely correct. i was getting oink and what mixed up.

lol. i thought you were just making this stuff up. I can remember Win MX though.

ppl who don't rename folders titled cd1 ... cd2... etc can get fucked as well.

I mean I do see why that stuff was necessary back then....back in the mid-00s the internet was full of bad transcodes, albums missing tracks, stuff that was tagged incorrectly, or not tagged at all. But it was crazy how they'd give you long bans and make you grovel just because you uploaded a torrent that was slightly incorrect. dudes were definitely on a power trip, right down to that pretentious message you'd get when you loaded up the page.

It turned fascist really fast, which shouldn't be surprising but it was staggering to see it unfold. What.cd was like the Stanford Prison Experiment of the torrent scene!

Oink introduced me to loads of good music though, I look back on those days with fondness, and the bust-up was a huge event - and also interesting: this network of music (lovers) you'd carefully crafted was just gone all of a sudden.

Shoutout to Audiogalaxy too.

I remember when you would check your PC in the morning and be thrilled that you were now up to 79% on that Avalanches Breezeblock you were downloading

lol - it is weird how nostalgia makes it seem thrilling, but i do have that same memory. i remember it taking half a day to download a 10-minute house track on my parents' dial-up. oh but we appreciated tunes back then - not like the youths of today.

obv joking but it does feel so different. all the bootlegged dj mixes too, like the first time you could suddenly hear loads of unofficial mixes and all that music from clubs around the world spreading faster and faster.

I have that same memory of it being thrilling - particularly with Audiogalaxy, which took days of my life watching green and red progress bars. The thing I remember about what.cd was daring to go on holiday and turning your PC off and coming back to find you'd been banned and your extended family murdered.

what ever happens to people who get busted for this stuff, like at Oink? is anyone doing hard time for torrents? or is he out like working community service A&R?

Paging modestmickey...

standards are fine, necessary even, but the main thing is to enjoy what you can, while you can.

that's my philosophy, marty

what ever happens to people who get busted for this stuff, like at Oink? is anyone doing hard time for torrents? or is he out like working community service A&R?

― maffew12, Thursday, May 23, 2019 2:01 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They all got out pretty much ok

Wish I still had my soulseek shirt...wish I'd gotten shirts from all of them. Would love to rep an AudioGalaxy shirt.

getting frustrated at folks with locked files or trade only is p lol generally, like ppl can use a program any way they like, BUT: having found that there was a digital reissue of a CD I own that indexed hidden tracks and interludes which were combined on the original release, I went to upgrade my 2006 rip... and the one guy that has it keeps everyone queued to like 11,214 and sends messages telling you to sign up for his music-stealing website at $9 a month. fuck THAT guy.

What's the album?

Tiga's Sexor.

I think I've only been unable to find, like, limited-run vinyl releases by acts from my college town. It may take years of unyielding tenacity, but I believe I've eventually been able to track down everything else I've sought out. It's a little spooky, tbh.

The Wish List search has saved me on several occasions - often months (and sometimes years) after adding the search term.

yeah wish list is key

one weird thing I've noticed - sometimes it'll take months for something to pop up from my list but then suddenly other people sharing it will, and not always the same rip as you'd expect.

sic fwiw when I ripped my copy of Sexor I split the tracks with interludes/hidden tracks myself, I can put that up on slsk if you want

that's very kind of you, thanks!

does your ILX email work? not sure if I should post my username here? it's up anyway so searching might find it, it's in flac which might narrow it down

ilSexor

I believe I am getting it from you now! and I have installed a flac converter

yeah looks like it. that was the first time I've updated my shared files in years I think

i am trying to change my upload speed throttle in slskqt 2017.2.20 and i can't for the life of me figure out how i set it in the first place. i only mention it because somebody sent out a mass message saying they were going to start banning people who had throttle set to under 150 k/sec - i could complain but honestly, you know, fair enough. i just can't figure out how to do it!

literally the second after i posted that! it's on the "uploads" tab and not the "options" tab for some reason

Eh let them ban you who gives a shit. If you haven't set it before it'll be whatever your connection allows anyway iirc

soulseek still absolutely amazing. pretty hard to stump it!

It overwhelmed my router and assassinated my internet connection

long may it continue. well, let's fucking hope so.

well, not that bit. xp

i still don't use, or even know how to use, any of the functions besides searching and downloading. i've set my share folder and occasionally people will get something from it. that's it.

streaming kinda eclipsed soulseek for me :(

not me, still use it constantly

I was on it recently, and couldn't resist the urge to check if my own music was on it.
It was, which proves that they have pretty much everything on there, as I am extremely obscure (the struggle-to-sell-50-records level).

Incidentally, I wasn't offended, I have downloaded loads of stuff off there myself so can't really complain, just karma I guess.

#humblebrag

I will never log off (from soulseek)

I browsed rushomancy's files today iirc

that wasn't a humblebrag.

but now v interested in who mirostones is!

It kind of was but a completely acceptable one imo (and ditto tbh)

not me, still use it constantly

― Simon H., Saturday, September 28, 2019 6:25 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

curious (since i feel i have a decent grip of what music you listen to from ILM) what you find on there that’s not on streaming?

for me house/techno are the main barrier from streaming . but artists have been getting better at putting stuff up, and ive adjusted by listening to more mixes

punk/underground rock is pretty much fully covered by streaming + Bandcamp

There's still tons of stuff that isn't on there though, my wishlist is a mile long.

I ripped a tape by a somewhat obscure punk band a while ago (I have posted about this band on ilx before and they do have some fans on here) and I was perhaps absurdly happy to see someone I have probably downloaded hundreds of obscure punk records over the years had downloaded it off me yesterday. I don't usually look at the uploads tab I must've been especially bored earlier

I often do my checking out new bands listening on the train so I'd rather download it off slsk than stream band camp tbh

If B camp enabled d/ls that would be huge

don't know why it didn't occur to me until this year that soulseek would be a vastly quicker and easier way to get stuff than it was in 2005

Somebody go do that and make some bill

I downloaded my wife from soulseek so I'm probably more attached to it than most people

punk/underground rock is pretty much fully covered by streaming + Bandcamp

enh there are still weird occasional gaps and not even that-underground stuff, see the Juno record I nommed in the 00-09 poll for example

also b-sides, outtakes etc are often not on streaming

There's loads of 80s/90s punk that isn't on it. Ok mostly tapes at this point

I downloaded my wife from soulseek so I'm probably more attached to it than most people

really? did you meet your wife on it?!

Yep! There's chat rooms on it, they're completely dead nowadays but in 2002 it was happening

amazing!

It was timing really. both of us were unemployed and had a lot of time on our hands to message weirdos halfway across the world who liked Slumberland records

:DDDD

that's amazing and also I now feel like a dummy for having shunned that aspect of the app for almost two decades lol

Tbh the chat side of it died about 15 years ago. Facebook probably

"If B camp enabled d/ls that would be huge" I think you can? well if you buy something you certainly can.

I browsed rushomancy's files today iirc

― Colonel Poo

Sorry the organization is a complete fucking mess

I find I can stump slsk pretty easily myself - there's a lot of stuff that's not on there but is on bandcamp or youtube, not to mention Spotify, which at this point I refuse to use mostly out of sheer cussedness as opposed to any actual principle. Honestly I'd love to get away from using Youtube altogether as well as I consider that site to be very bad. I just have this learned distrust of the "streaming" ecosystem (I don't use either Bandcamp or Youtube primarily as "streaming" sites).

A lot of music these days, I suspect, doesn't have multiple discrete extant copies of it. Which makes it easier for all extant copies of those recordings to be lost. I'm less bothered about this than I used to be, as eventually everything we know will be lost. Humanity will somehow survive despite not being able to hear Crazy Fucking Landlady's Son for themselves. Downloading random shit from the Internet does not make a professional archivist.

I have a fairly long soulseek wishlist myself. Most of it is stuff I probably could or should just buy copies of. It's probably not moral or ethical for me to do this stuff, which is why I tend not to talk about it much.

Ilxor group share !

Yeah there is an ethical consideration especially with stuff you can stream.

I guess I don't like streaming sites because those songs might disappear at any moment and the aforementioned train/no data connection problems

But I have spent and continue to spend a lot of money on music so fuck it imo

records i was recently annoyed weren’t on streaming

jordan fields - moments in dub
default genders - main pop girl*

i have the mp3s on my phone but it’s still annoying i can’t put stuff in playlists etc

*as i understand this is intentional by the artist for political(?) reasons

I'm past the point where I feel like there's any moral or ethical justification for piracy. I should probably stop, particularly with a username with which I can be uniquely identified being mentioned on a public forum (is this thread at least search-deindexed? If not, can it be?)

that's a good idea, actually (from someone not called What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers or jed_ on slsk)

that wasn't a humblebrag.

but now v interested in who mirostones is!

― What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers (jed_), Saturday, 28 September 2019 23:59 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It kind of was but a completely acceptable one imo (and ditto tbh)

― Colonel Poo, Sunday, 29 September 2019 00:03 (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lol!
I can see how it comes across that way, but I also think it's relevant to the thread, as I am sure I am not the only musician to have done this.

I remember Kelly Moran commenting on a similar experience, saying she felt conflicted as she never thought people would care about her music enough to steal it. I wouldn't put it in those terms myself, but I see what she's getting at.

I know some musicians get furious at this discovery, but I personally think that's a waste of time and energy in 2019. Never going to be 1997 again, better to move on at this stage.
As for my own identity, all I will say is I don't think I've ever been discussed on here, so that really is pretty obscure.

apparently not de-indexed, but also for some reason doesn't show up on the first dozen pages of google results. (seriously we have had a lot of soulseek threads here, i didn't even know.) i will stop worrying so much until or unless i receive some indication that anyone, anywhere, gives a fuck about my continuing habit of downloading records nobody cares about off soulseek in addition to my downloading records nobody cares about off youtube.

I have an embarrassingly large Discogs list of “stuff not on Spotify”... like a couple thousand entries, not insanely limited stuff or anything

There’s a lot of music out there! A lot of old music

the dream of the celestial jukebox isn't ever going to be more than approximated in a world with the proliferation of rights-holders we have. there are plenty of well-intentioned pirates who have done a lot in the cause of "freeing the music for the people" or what have you but at the end of the day piracy is an amateur activity, in most jurisdictions an illegal activity, and such can't possibly be as thorough about distributing music as professionals like the people at spotify can. not to mention that pirating music not on commercial streaming, at this point, really only benefits commercial streaming - "hey if you don't sign with us those nasty pirates will distribute your music and then you won't get _anything_!"

you know, it doesn't matter. we don't need to be able to hear all the music, or even all the _best_ music. whatever we have now, it's probably enough.

tl;dr

since quitting physical music and selling all my records my ethically compromised mix is: stream everything i listen to, but go to shows and try to spend 20-50$ per month on bandcamp

there used to be an ilx room

I pay for Spotify to alleviate my guilt over how little music I buy. I go to gigs as often as I can and I use Bandcamp whenever possible to buy. Soulseek still returns nothing when I'm searching for deep cuts of UK Garage and street soul unless you want hissy 128kbps files but thats still better than Spotify a lot of the time.

I dont want to turn this into the "what isn't on Spotify thread" but:

The Chimes "Stronger Together (David Morales Mix)"
Lil Louis "Luv U Wanted"
Movement 98 "Joy & Heartbreak"
Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay "Hold On To Your Dreams"
Moodswings "Spiritual High"

I was gonna turn this run of autoplayed Youtube faves into a Spotify playlist, but I can't. And I don't want to use my phone data to stream videos on the train. So off to Soulseek it is.

great micro-story Col. Poo!

I hardly ever use soulseek because it's such a mess. The biggest private torrent music site has pretty much everything I need and it's all properly searchable and curated with different bitrates and stuff. Much prefer that.

can i get an invite

soulseek is great. the only stuff I can't find on there is afrobeats stuff

Jesus.. Seeing so many new answers to the thread have me a right scare! Fortunately it's just an ilx love-in praising the many glories. And CP that story is amazing!

What’s “the biggest private music torrent” site these days ?

I downloaded my wife from soulseek so I'm probably more attached to it than most people

― Colonel Poo

Awwww <3

Anyway, I love slsk, was so happy to find it was still going after I had a break from it of about a decade. My files are horribly disorganised but the main folder it connects to contains a bunch of my own music, so I'm fucking pirating myself, m8s, that's how much I give a shit -> at the end of the day piracy is an amateur activity - this is why I'm for it but anti-Spotify, piracy is about people who can't really afford to buy shit sharing stuff and finding joy, streaming companies are about building a business model that shafts artists in favour of business. It's a whole different world.

red

xxxp

i don't even know what the big site is post-what. had a what account, never used it. fucking scenester gatekeeper bullshit of the sort i would have been happy to leave on the bbses, ratios and artificial scarcity with a healthy dose of "pay-to-win" in the form of seedboxes, the opposite of the "music for the people" ethos, problematic as it is, of napster and its clones.

It's a mess? Seems pretty clean / straightforward / easily navigable... it's effortless. simply enter 2-3 keywords into the search field, and you're instantly met with results. Typically, you're able to to choose between flac and varying levels of high-bitrate (or vbr) mp3s. Everything seems to be pretty well organized? Haven't ever really got on with torrents, however

fuck Spotify, by the way. i don't really get any focused listening done at a desktop computer, or when i have my phone around. still use SC and Bandcamp, though. with Bandcamp, you can actually pay artists for their music.

Yeah there is an ethical consideration especially with stuff you can stream.

delicious irony here

but anti-Spotify, piracy is about people who can't really afford to buy shit sharing stuff and finding joy, streaming companies are about building a business model that shafts artists in favour of business. It's a whole different world.

otm

I still use it occasionally for individual songs--rarely for whole albums anymore.

How has it managed to keep going when so many others were shut down?

By means of the Russian torrent tracker and interlibrary loan, I have managed to find the vast majority of popular music I am looking for, and even a lot of the obscure avant-garde classical I listen to. For the rest, I don’t mind buying the occasional CD and ripping it myself.

I am used to being told that I listen to weird music. But when people talk about Soulseek as vital source of music they couldn’t find anywhere else (even commercially), I worry that my tastes are pretty ordinary!

I think you guys are engaging in some ethical gymnastics to argue that artists getting nothing is better than artists getting something. (download all u want, follow yr bliss... but c’mon)

I think you guys are engaging in some ethical gymnastics to argue that artists getting nothing is better than artists getting something. (download all u want, follow yr bliss... but c’mon)

― #YABASIC (morrisp)

I don't know which "guys" you're referring to here. I certainly wouldn't argue that. On the other hand, the argument that artists getting .01 cents for their work is better than artists getting nothing for their work is true only in the most technical and nit-picky of senses.

My refusal to use Spotify is probably morally perverse. I don't think the people running Spotify are bad people. I think they want the artists to get paid. I think that Spotify in practice is more an exercise in self-serving convenience masquerading as virtue, however, and my refusal to use Spotify at this point is not really a lack of willingness or ability to pay - as money is only one way of quantifying the effort expended in pursuit of a good. It's more a conscious ascetic measure; opting out of a partnership of convenience, choosing not to collude in injustice masquerading as virtue and to sticking to actions that we as a society can, in principle, collectively agree are selfish and unjust.

Ultimately it's a futile and incomprehensible form of protest, me being my own little version of the Umbrella Man in Dealey Plaza. I will probably keep doing it, though.

I wasn’t referring to you, rush

fwiw i don't get new releases off slsk. it's stuff that's impossible to find or only for a lot of money on discogs. i do like to buy records when i really like them and can afford it and i do.

after decades of searching out and discovering music in record stores, searching online (mail order sites like Forced Exposure and Mimaroglu) music forums, et al.. reading about music in WIRE magazine, and making purchases based on reviews, write-ups, etc. i feel almost no inclination to use Spotify. i don't have any strong (ethical) feelings about it. like others, i started using sites like Audiogalaxy and slsk during the early 00s, and probably abused the privilege more back then, while continuing to purchase music. since acquiring a smartphone, and using both Bandcamp and Soundcloud (great for streaming curated, 'amateur' content) to share music, i'm more inclined to make impulse purchases on Bandcamp, or order physical copies directly from the artist/label. slsk is still a great resource for listening to new/impulse discoveries, and to sample new releases (rarely) ... beyond that, CDs (or tapes, if they're of decent quality) are the preferred medium for listening

https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/ds68t6/serious_souls_travelling/

wtf

*metempsychotic nod*

who the fuck is deejay.zone and can they please fuck right the fuck off with their fucking padlock and 50 versions of every other track I want

Sorry, I'll unlock them right now.

There should be a way that you can share whatever files you want but not share them to users whose files are locked.

I don't want to understand the psychology of people that will put stuff in the shared folder zone, but not actually fucking share it.

Fucking hoarder hagglers and braggarts. Truly the worst soulseekers.

exclusive footage of scramoutcha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsZyiQFQO0Q

Now there's a name I haven't seen in a while (the ignore list is a godsend).

this deejay.zone guy is a new kind of dickhead threat - seems to be using slsk and various other platforms to advertise his "dj sharing" website. I am not going to click that shit but a google search gives a summary

got a new router with my new internet service and i cannot figure out how to port forward on it. gah.

i feel your pain

trying to remember if I've ever run across this dude, I think I just tune out anyone locked

ALRIGHT BIG MAN, I DON'T NEED YOUR 160KBPS MP3S THAT BADLY BIG MAN

https://i.imgur.com/Np82uvR.jpg

(he'd probably add me to his list if I asked, but I'm not really in the mood to grovel. at least he isn't one of those trade only motherfuckers)

protip: you can exclude a particular user's locked files from your wishlist search results by adding search terms unique to their folder structure and preceding them with minus signs, ex.:

bebe rexha meant to be live acoustic -trevorsmusic -seagate -unsortedmusictorrents -lossy -discografia

...or you can just add them to your ignore list

New SoulseekQt build for the macOS Catalina users out there: http://www.slsknet.org/news/node/3668

ppl still do p2p filesharing? wild.

it's the only way to be

Soulseek is the most important program in my life. I have been using it regularly since 2001. If it ever goes down... God forbid... life is over.

definitely swung back to 'streaming wuh? i gotta get mine and have it' the past year or so

ppl still do p2p filesharing? wild.

^^ ding ding ding.

as if p2p filesharing isn't nuff hi-tech and futuristic! There is no way I want to be reliant on shitty Virgin broadband for music listening and I'll take mp3 players over 4g streaming for music on the go, forever.

yup

I dunno - I systematically download locally the files I want to listen to from streaming services so i don't really see a big difference there. As for permanent ownershipn, if I really feel strongly about owning the files for good, i'll just go and buy the CD. I understand this may not be an option for obscure/exotic/bootleg files (which are the only things I still use slsk for).

no judgment; i honestly didn't even know that services like soulseek were still around.

I still use it a few times a year. I think my profile note thing now apologetically describes my pattern of (offensively low-level) usage as "I share what I download but it's mostly just things that are either not on Spotify and/or I can't be bothered digging out of the physical collection" or similar.

What's wild is how great it still is. Been getting tons of obscure 80s stuff lately that's prob never even made it to CD let alone near a streaming service

i mainly use slsk for out-of-print stuff/imports/dance 12-inches and yeah it's just... ridiculously great. occasionally failed me on the more obscure dance 12-inches but you can't have it all

soulseek is the last good thing on the internet

it pays off surprisingly often for me (knock on wood)... felt like I was never going to find the Naomi N'Uru "Wurm" album or Spikes "Colour in a Black Forest/6 Sharp Cuts" comp(out of print Aussie punk/wave/alt band, CD goes for hundreds) and soulseek obliged me when I added them to my wishlist.

soulseek is still pretty good though not as great as what was before it died

I still stump our streaming service enough to warrant searching for files. Same goes for torrents, for that matter. Bugs the hell out of me that we have five premium places to stream movies and they still regularly don't have the *one* movie I want to watch when I want to watch it. Took us forever to find that excellent Amish documentary "The Devil's Playground" the other night. It was supposedly on Netflix, I think, but we ended up having to watch it on youtube.

I still grab a lot of stuff from there. there's so much that's not available on streaming or only through some foreign iTunes store which is its own adventure (and I'd probably jump through those hoops if I knew the artist was making more than like 40 cents)

Soulseek RULES even more than Pink Floyd. Can you imagine?

"Last good thing on the internet" is so right. Still use it weekly for otherwise unstreamable/unfindable music and movies. Never got into torrenting bc of it.

indeed, I still use it all the time

idk if it's my network but my phone seems to have bad connectivity in a lot of spots when I'm on the road. plus I don't have unlimited data. so streaming is kind of a no-go for me. I'll drop cash on Bandcamp & for vinyl of course but yeah, give me the MP3s and I'm happy

Anyone know how to fix the browser becoming so wide due to copy and pasting overlong text, by mistake? Can't seem to resize it horizontally.

wait you can get films on slsk?!?

it's p2p mahnnn, you can get anything. It's a good epub source as well.

@Paul, I had the annoying way-too-wide-screen thing on. Removing and re-installing did the trick for me.

yeah, I probably use it more for films than music today tbh. I dont mess around with new releases or tv series or anything bc that stuffs available thru other means, but for old/foreign/silent/OOP stuff thats not otherwise avail, slsk is a goldmine.

I've done that thing where I've swapped laptops and been logged in on the old one for so long I've forgotten everything to do with logging in. I was probably paranoid enough to set up a new email address to register too, so not sure a reset is even an option. Will I lose anything by re-registering?

I was going to abandon it as I only use is sporadically but seeing this revive has given me itchy fingers.

it's good for hard to find audiobooks as well. I only just found this out recently.

@Le Bateau - thanks!

Echoing the love for Soulseek, it's my primary download source. There's a few users I've bookmarked with loads of UK pirate radio air checks from the 1960s, and collections of mono vinyl rips that I can't find elsewhere. Great for bootlegs, too, since I hate dealing with FileFactory etc. on blogs. I love it when I stumble on someone's exhaustive collection using the browse feature, too.

I'm pleasantly surprised it's still around, but these things do eventually enter into a phase of fuzzed out low-key stagnation. It feels a little like running IE 6. There are lots of old bootlegs that used to be around back in the day that aren't anymore... there's stuff there that you can't find anywhere else, but the same is true of Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube - there is no One Music Service to Rule Them All and that's probably for the best. Honestly I do think Bandcamp is better than Soulseek these days... at least I hear more music on Bandcamp than I do Soulseek, and I feel better about it...

Whenever it goes I'll miss it, especially as I myself have never developed a basic level of trust for streaming, for anything that I don't have multiple backup copies of.

It's nice for ebooks (like there's stuff there that isn't on Libgen), audiobooks. Not so great for films. Is the ED2K network still around?

New SoulseekQt build

huh, weird, does it chop off the first/last characters of searches for anyone else? i can't tell if it does so in the display or in the string actually searched on

Same here. We need a hotfix for the hotfix.

i guess you could always add repeated characters to the start and end of your string : )

which if you do, does prove that it's a display problem and not a search string problem

Since people here are reporting that Soulseek is still active and useful, I thought I might start up a client again and share what I have.

But then I remembered that when I used Soulseek on Linux a decade ago, Windows users were unable to download any of my files with : in the filename. The colon is permitted in filenames on Linux, but not on Windows, and I use colons a lot because I share a great deal of classical music with multiple movements (e.g. "Symphony No. 4: III..flac").

What used to happen is that people on Windows would try to download from me, the resulting file would be empty on their end, and then they would send me angry private messages and ban me from accessing any of their shares. I wonder if this bug was ever fixed.

macos too

We need a hotfix for the hotfix.

Another reason never to update to Catalina, which is another factor pushing toward a future, devoutly to be wished for, in which I never use a computer again.

Soulseek on windows is a great program

I do love the slsk.exe

You can always try and run soulseek Windows via Wine on a Mac.

I love how if you run a search for The B@atles it won't throw back anything but you can search for individual albums, songs, bootlegs etc: I wonder what other artists/bands it does that with.

yeah, something I've been trying to test, seems they stopped adding popular artists at least 5 years ago.

also stripping those apostrophes out of your searches is always a good idea for some reason

I'm pleasantly surprised it's still around, but these things do eventually enter into a phase of fuzzed out low-key stagnation. It feels a little like running IE 6.

Slsk is an exception to the rule, and it's good not bad that the interface is more or less the same than it was 20 years ago. Only stupid thing is the ability to lock folders now.

Yeah keep the UI the same until I die, I'm not bothered

I wonder what other artists/bands it does that with.

I run across this in weirder areas, some Drag City or Matador bands and indie rock on that level sometimes.

After years of familiarity with the Windows client I do find the Mac version UI even more hideous.

yup

my pet peeve is there's this one user (a lot of the sharing i find has been centralized to a few "seeder" type accounts with fast connections) whose files show up in searches but when i try to download from them always shows up as offline. it's only that user, too. i used to be able to download from them fine, i have no idea why i can't download from them anymore.

is it g4nx0

I think that means they've blocked you?

i thought that was red FILE NOT SHARED in my transfers list

is it g4nx0

― adam

nope

Saw 80 new answers on the soulseek thread and panicked

Is there any sort of alternative to soulseek - eMule maybe?

frostwire

is it g4nx0

― adam,

it is for me! what's his or her deal?

I just had what I think is my first ever 'come and visit our homepage/support our app etc!' message, with an offer of a bunch of freebies. Is that a new thing?

i had one of those the other day. i think i had one a long way back but i hadn't seen one in forever. i did recently upgrade my app, per above discussion, but the 'support' prompt did not at all come immediately

I only downloaded onto my new machine a couple of weeks ago, so that sounds pretty similar to your experience. Got a Windows 10 notification about 10 seconds after, too - telling me about some new EP (I think - I blatted it pretty quick). Weird.

Scramoutcha can fuck right off

Hello fellow Soulseeker! Please review the following points before contacting me:

• Please only contact me if you have an item from my wishlist to exchange (see links below) OR if you have some rare Vinyl lossless rips to offer - Discogs collection links welcomed!
• I am NOT interested in new releases nor unreleased. I exchange complete releases, not loose tracks (exception made for the tracks listed in my track wishlist below).
• Be advised I may ask you to provide spectral analyses to make sure your files are not lossy transcoded (e.g. MP3 128 Kbps converted to FLAC). You can easily create spectrals using Spek: www.github.com/withmorten/spek-alternative#sources--packages
• About my ZIP files: most of my FLAC files are stored on external drives and I keep their references as small zipped files on my computer. If you have something to trade, you will be able to review the files and spectrals before we exchange.
• The items in my collection are NOT for sale. Please do not contact me with monetary offers - I am only interested in exchanges.
• Please do not offer me files that are freely available on Soulseek, Rutracker, open trackers, etc. I have access to them just as well as you do!

......................................................................................................... WISHLIST LINKS ........................................................................................................

1. Lossless ONLY (FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC or APE): https://bit.ly/wishlossless
2. Lossy (MP3, AAC) ≥192 Kbps (unless specified) or Lossless: https://bit.ly/wishlossy

............................................................................. SAME WISHLIST FILTERED BY GENRE (Lossless + Lossy) .....................................................................

• Electronic: https://bit.ly/wishelectronic
• Rare Groove (Soul, Disco, Funk, Jazz, Regional, etc.): https://bit.ly/wishraregrooves
• Rock: https://bit.ly/wishrock
• Hip Hop: https://bit.ly/wishhiphop
• Miscellaneous (Pop, Soundtrack, Classical, etc.): https://bit.ly/wishmisc

..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

🔺Alternatively, feel free to contact me if you have RARE VINYL LOSSLESS RIPS - preferably from the following genres but I am open to all proposals: Soul / Gospel / Funk / Disco / Boogie / Jazz / Folk / Minimal Wave / 90s East Coast Hip Hop / Brazilian / Caribbean / African / Turkish🔺

I will also send you the release you want if you can provide ONE of the following TRACKS in 🔥LOSSLESS🔥 QUALITY (FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC or APE) 💩NOT MP3💩 :

(wishlist follows here)

You have none of these but still want to download from me? Help me identify ONE of the following tracks and you will get the release you want in exchange! (Rare Vinyl rips excluded) [THIS IS NOT A CHALLENGE, I AM REALLY LOOKING FOR THESE!]
• Contemporary Folk track @13MIN in the following mix: https://www65.zippyshare.com/v/iSQDopms/file.html
• Tech-House/Electro-House track @18MIN in the following mix: https://mixesdb.com/?506806
• Brazilian track: ID source release or correct performer of the following cover of "Pena Verde" originally written by Abílio Manoel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTqmpqU1aqo ["Nelson Quinteto" doesn't seem to exist. The performer is not Nelson Oliva]

>> SPECIAL LIBRARY DEAL 📚 :
If you are registered in a public or university library and are willing to loan and rip any CD/LP/DVD from the following Worldcat lists via your national interlibrary loan system, feel free to PM me for a swap agreement:
• USA: https://www.worldcat.org/profiles/RecordsCat/lists/3810567?view=&count=100
• Worldwide: https://www.worldcat.org/profiles/RecordsCat/lists/3811886?view=&count=100

🔺Alternatively, feel free to contact me if you have RARE VINYL LOSSLESS RIPS - preferably from the following genres but I am open to all proposals: Soul / Gospel / Funk / Disco / Boogie / Jazz / Folk / Minimal Wave / 90s East Coast Hip Hop / Brazilian / Caribbean / African / Turkish🔺

🕺 Happy digging! 💃

Yeah, I bumped into that specimen this weekend. Fuck him.

Blocked him years ago, but might unblock so I can tell him to fuck off.

Just the fucking worst soulseeker. I don't even believe he has everything he claims to have.

https://pics.me.me/you-there-fuck-off-and-when-you-get-there-fuck-7666424.png

"Be advised I may ask you to provide spectral analyses to make sure your files are not lossy transcoded"

I saw your mom getting some spectral anal-ysis last night night, again!

LOL

those guys are incredible assholes, but at least pretty rare

more impressed with how many people share nothing. i mean burn two cds, make even a token effort

Sometimes it might be an accident, like a drive getting unplugged and when you plug it back in it isn't shared anymore until you notice. But even there should something in your Complete folder ffs!

there’s a million dudes like that on the ol slsk

nobody ever uploads from me : (

a user i had previously banned for sharing nothing just messaged me: really nigga?

Ah that'd give me flashbacks to 2007-2008

maybe they need to forward their damn ports

I only block (+mute) people for locking their tracks, won't bother browsing people who dl from me so don't encounter people with 0 files shared.

c&p'd from the necrobumped thread:

soulseek has been so completely flaky over the last week or so, whenever downloading one file will go and then the rest will just sit there and never start. i know enough that i'm not the only one having this problem but there's no acknowledgement of the problem or any eta on fixing it. i know soulseek is literally old enough to vote at this point and at some point i guess i should just let it go...

in the meantime here are some messages i got recently from someone else having the same problem

(9:37:19)(redacted) re start your files
(11:56:17)(redacted) he y mushroom restart your files

(my slsk username is the same as my ilx username. it is not "mushroom".)

uh lol @ "he y mushroom". I've been having the same problem lately, and at first I thought it had something to do with the uploaders' preferences (like the way some users will only let you download 10 files at a time before bumping you to the back of their queue). I realized, though, that when I right click on the non-starting files and select "retry downloads", they'll generally start right up. maybe you've tried that already without success?

another issue I've noticed is that when I right click on a file in my search results and click "browse folder", the folder that pops up in the user's library is often several folders above (or below?) the actual file location. I'll be looking for a Krisma album and the highlighted folder will be something by Kris Kristofferson, and I'll have to either scroll up to the right folder or select "browser folder" again to get to the right place. it's a minor gripe, but it's been going on for what seems like years. also sometimes when I right click on a single file and click "download folder(s)", the popup will say "requesting list of files in folder..." but the other files will never show up in the list.

but yeah, I should be thankful that slsk is still functional at all in 2020 and stop being such a
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y28rUFvLXDc

only issue i've had is that

sometimes when I right click on a single file and click "download folder(s)", the popup will say "requesting list of files in folder..." but then totally crash. not sure if they have 50k files in that folder or something, but some users just can't be browsed that way

it remains amazing, as do i as a blazing beacon of ideal tagging

I had the same problem. Un- and reinstalled and it was fixed. Lost my userlist in the process, tho.

ha, I just pay close attention to people's folder hierarchies and avoid downloading from them when it's obvious that their entire library is one megafolder called Justin's Music or whatever. I also avoid users with folders called Música OR Descargas because for whatever reason their files tend to be horribly mistagged or devoid of metadata. it's kind of hard to avoid when downloading Spanish indiepop, though

(not sure why that OR is in all caps)

i love música

yeah i have the same "browse folder" issue, i'm getting better at managing it though

my issues with downloading folders is that i don't get subfolders unless i browse someone's files first, otherwise i just get the dreaded "cd1" and "cd2" directories full of i-don't-know-what

mind you i have wound up being more careful when doing "download folder" precisely because of the continuing all-files-in-one-directory phenomenon; would be nice if some build figured out a way to manage that without crashing the client

and yeah, bad tagging is a continuing issue. i certainly perpetuate it because i don't keep my files cleaned and properly tagged, but few people seem to actually ban me so i'm probably at least doing the bare minimum

i guess i can try un- and re-installing the client. i "upgraded" to the 64 bit version today and it didn't change a thing. mostly i'm worried about my wishlist, which is large and immaculately curated.

When I'll still use it...A friend was doing one of those Facebook things this week on his 10 favourite jazz albums. He posted two by Julius Hemphill, who I don't know at all. Checked Amazon, and both started at $100 (with the CD for one ~$700). So over to Soulseek. Otherwise, just the occasional song now.

i too long for a reasonably priced reissue of dogon a.d.

i thought they just did one?? in 2011??

kate, i downloaded a couple pretty obscure albums from you on slsk a couple months ago that i couldn't really find available anywhere else so thank you!

people with massive "Music" folders with thousands of files in has been an issue for at least 18 years

I haven't really had any issues lately?

I have unsorted folders for upcoming years, 1935-2015, sometimes with thousands of tracks inside, occasionally people try to download them and quickly cancel everything, sorry guys, in a decade or so they will all be nicely sorted.

I've been unable to see my wishlist or dl progress / transfers for over a year and I've just been sorta dealing with it. The Soulseek icon on my desktop will flash but I can't see what it's notifying me about, whether it's something that's come up on my (vanished) wishlist or someone trying to communicate with me via chat. The only way I know something has completed downloading is by searching the Soulseek folder on my desktop. I don't use slsk a ton so it's not a huge deal and is just something I've gotten used to but I bet it would drive some people crazy.

And yes, the users with one gigantic folder are anathema. Because of the situation I describe above, when I do accidentally select "download folder" and it's this, I no longer have any way of stopping or canceling the downloads, so I've had to construct a tedious and elaborate workaround wherein I go in and lock the corresponding folder on my browser so nothing can be added to it, as this is literally the only way I've found to avoid flooding my laptop with someone's entire music library. As a result I have a handful of locked folders in my Soulseek subfolder, variously called "singles," or "my music" or whatever and it's really annoying.

(they remain there because if I unlock them and try to trash them, they reappear every time I open soulseek and commence filling up again)

That's very odd. Have you tried reinstalling slsk? I quit using wishlist ages ago, I remember a friend tried it for the first time and put "beatles" on his wishlist, had to delete and reinstall then too, it just crashed whenever you opened it.

this is of course in the days before "beatles" was a blocked search term

I have literally none of these problems, and I've got it running on Linux and Windows (different machines obv)

Have you tried reinstalling slsk?

Several times. Same problem. It's a weird one.

Not encountered any of the problems above. My only gripe would be that for the last couple of weeks the search results are way less?

Am I imagining this or did they used to have a connect/disconnect to server button, and you could connect to a different server and get other search results?

in 2020 one of my favorite ways of discovering music is still searching on slsk for obscure tracks i like and checking out all the comps that theyve appeared on that show up in the search results, god bless this wonderful program

xp -- check your router settings

firewalls too, seems to be less of a problem than it once was though.

fwiw the version of Slsk I'm running on my Windows laptop is quite old, 2017.2.20, maybe these problems people are having are due to bugs in newer versions?

yeah, installing an old version might be an idea.

i was running 2017.02.20 before

funnily enough once i connected to my vpn things started to work fine... i did see the site did recommend i turn off my isp's firewall software, but i'm not necessarily going to turn off my isp's firewall just because some piracy site on the internet tells me to, y'know? i am not exactly happy with the notion that the major american isp i use seems to have determined soulseek to be a "malicious site" that needs to be blocked and that i don't know a way to tell it "yeah no go ahead and let that through". but fuck it, that's a classic first world problem, right?

i only buy a new computer when i'm absolutely forced to, just so i don't have to deal with all the port forwarding bullshit again

the weird thing there is, on this laptop I haven't bothered doing the ports. they are CLOSED! yet everything still works fine, I get lots of search results and don't have any trouble downloading anything. I'm using the 2018.1.30 linux version here.

I'm not actually sharing any files on this laptop though, it's my ancient spare one but the screen is broken on my other laptop that has shared files on it, I just use this in the living room and if I feel like downloading something. I get banned every now and again but don't care because I can just cue it up on the other laptop if that happens.

yeah you can still download with closed ports -- can't upload tho

ah fair enough then

i try downloading an album, first song works but everything after that stays queued (retry download doesn't work).

thought i'd update or reinstall my client but i can't access slsknet.org for some reason.

;_;

Huh, that's weird. Are you on Windows or Mac?

closed ports also limits search results ime

my old mac is the og downloader but i have a newer windows laptop.

switched to my mobile hotspot, found slsknet no problem. i guess xfinity blocks it, rad. turns out i had already installed it on my new machine though lol and *sigh* works fine.

lately all my download attempts are immediately listed as 'aborted' in red. every now and again they'll be 'queued' for a few minutes and then aborted.

all ports open. music shared. dunno what's going on.

are you on comcast? they implemented some "protection" program that blocks soulseek transfers. you have to turn it off for soulseek to work - i think there's more info about it on soulseek's homepage. i was wary about doing it too, because it's called something like "advanced threat protection", but since turning it off a month ago i haven't had any problems.

No probs here, but we're on Verizon

i'm in the uk. on plusnet, which is owned by BT.

ahhhh i fixed it. after a looong way round with UPnP and all kinds of bullshit. it had nothing to do with that. my Downloads folder was set to a folder that doesn't exist any more! BLEAH

Nice!

What does it mean when the little icon in the top left is red and nothing works--is the site down?

you aren't connected? soulseek itself isn't down.

ive been introducing zoomers to slsk, it's my contribution to youth culture

I guess I wasn't connected--resolved itself after a couple of tries.

I once again want to say: fuck Scramouthca. Want that fucker to burn in hell.

otm

^^^^

This is the thread where we tell Scramoutcha to FUCK OFF

I cannot countenance any of these pricks that house files in their public shared folder and then either want to conduct some trade deal that isn't in the spirit of slsk or have some other convoluted reason for not sharing them. Instant unshare files from user and fuck off forever response from me every time.

blocked that fuckwit years ago and this is how you remind me

Betcha all his files are fake, he’s just there to get a rise out of us.

thedaytheclowndied(full).mpeg

Fuck you Scramoutcha, you wouldn't last a week in this administration.

I clicked on this wondering if everyone was talking about Scramoutcha

searching the net for their name comes up with a lot of results pf people saying they don't actually have all the files they claim they do, and when someone tries to trade with them they just try to grab the files from one of the private trackers they're on, but sometimes that's ended up with them not quite delivering on what's promised lol

lol, just as I thought.

I mean:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaramouche

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQbW75y3P9g

someone pls add him to that wikipedia entry

I guess I shouldn't gender a stranger but its gotta be a dude

I mean, Scaramouche was a dude so no foul imo.

if I ever find that motherfucker you better bet he's gonna do a mfin fandango for me

searching the net for their name comes up with a lot of results pf people saying they don't actually have all the files they claim they do, and when someone tries to trade with them they just try to grab the files from one of the private trackers they're on, but sometimes that's ended up with them not quite delivering on what's promised lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/Soulseek/comments/atkov0/scramoutcha/

can't you block the fandango

blocking all people who lock anything and sending them messages telling them so.

on a related note does anyone have a RED invite?

meeting soulseek user scramoutcha in international waters to trade rare mp3s and flacs pic.twitter.com/upI3Uw0XZK

— m*lky (@malkyyyyy) March 9, 2021

lol

Omg lol

ahahaha

I just wonder why anyone would ever give someone like that any time whatsoever. There's almost nothing I haven't been able to find on SSK given time + tenacity, eff any twerp who guards their ones and zeros like they're the treasure of El Dorado.

Is there a list of the artists/bands that are excluded from the search engine?

I got The Beatles and Prince but it'd be interesting to see what else there is/ain't.

I've struggled with recent K and J pop. Not sure if they're excluded or just nobody has them, but I would imagine the former.

I have a spare couple of invites for jpopsuki, if yer interested Emily

I've found with some JPop stuff that it's just that nobody has it.

Oh hell yes, please Maresn3st.

Drop me a line on nakagincapsuletower at gmail dot com

I use soulseek but don’t understand what this means. There are excluded keywords?

Try searching for 'Beatles', nothing comes up, you could find stuff if you use other terms though.

From Soulseek forum:

Some searches are blocked. I can't go into too much detail about it except to say that we don't have a choice in the matter.

I can't go into too much detail, but 'beatles' is one of the terms we have to filter for legal reasons.

i think beyonce is another one

foreign stuff being missing is typically just no one has it

other filtered acts i remember off the top of my head are chvrches and rihanna

foreign stuff being missing is typically just no one has it

other filtered acts i remember off the top of my head are chvrches and rihanna

scramoutcha doesn't own any of their stuff. it's all zip files to torrents from redacted. the more people block em the better.

Who?

scramoutcha

i have 2 jpopsuki invites as well if someone wants em

scramoutcha

A little silhouetto of a man who has (allegedly) a huge selection of lossless files that he locks and will only let other users d/l from him if they trade him something he wants.

"hed kandi" doesn't work but "kandi" does and then you can filter with using "hed"

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/news-you-can-use-bullhorn-megaphone-d-illustration-79895144.jpg

A little silhouetto of a man who has (allegedly) a huge selection of lossless files

I spit coffee just now

new board description please

A little silhouetto of a man who has (allegedly) a huge selection of lossless files that he locks and will only let other users d/l from him if they trade him something he wants.

Try searching for 'Beatles', nothing comes up, you could find stuff if you use other terms though.

Yeah, I think I used to be able to find individual songs using creative search terms (e.g. a couple of words from a song title reversed), but that was a few years ago.

foreign stuff being missing is typically just no one has it

Yeah, but I'm talking like almost Blackpink levels of pop for the most part. Stuff that I would definitely expect someone to have, coming up with zero results. P sure that's keyword exclusion. (I wish I could remember an exact example of who I was searching for, don't think it actually *was* Blackpink in any of the cases.)

I think even The Db's are blocked

might just be the problem it has with apostrophes

I didn't know there was any search blocking on Soulseek. "beatles" indeed no results!

couple of words from a song title reversed

hey jude and "Hey Jude" and jude hey gave me a load of good results. hey jude, hey just turned up some medleys with "Hey Jude" in them. Don't think there is song title filtering?

might just be the problem it has with apostrophes

It seems good at including punctuation right where you use it. "the db's" is blocked. No results. Funnily "db's" alone is not blocked. And "the dbs" works for the many people who have their files named that way.

"who's zoomin' who" also no problem.

yeah slsk search is a piece of shit

"hed kandi" doesn't work but "kandi" does and then you can filter with using "hed"

― boxedjoy, Saturday, October 16, 2021 8:14 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

newsyoucanuse.gif

― Hans Holbein (Chinchilla Volapük), Saturday, October 16, 2021 9:21 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this made me lose it, don't know why as it actually is news i can use

rutracker for pop music tbh.

Yeah, but I'm talking like almost Blackpink levels of pop for the most part. Stuff that I would definitely expect someone to have, coming up with zero results. P sure that's keyword exclusion. (I wish I could remember an exact example of who I was searching for, don't think it actually *was* Blackpink in any of the cases.)

i usually don't have much trouble finding that sort of stuff on soulseek, but sometimes it's just no one's online & someone has it the next day

Every time I use this now, I have to uninstall and reinstall--something about ports. I reinstall and it works fine--till I log off. Fix?

in the comment tag of something i downloaded:

Thank you for download my friend. I hope you will enjoy. Keep yourself from soulless and pop music. And be yourself.

xp it's to do with port forwarding and your internet router. you need to go into your router settings and allow port forwarding and all that business. not sure exactly what, sorry!

There’s a song that’s been remotely queued in my list for over a year now. How does that happen?

I have a metal demo queued that only one user has shared, he's almost never on and when he is I'm at like 5,000th in the list, just enjoying the absurdity of it at this point.

Oh it's been queued for like 2.5 years now.

Times like that you miss Audiogalaxy's ability to continue downloading the file from other users if the one goes offline

That’s fine if more than one person has that file.

Don't some users bump up downloaders based on their "credentials" or whatever they use to judge them? So if you don't have anything they want, they'll just constantly promote others downloads who do.

idk if anyone does that, but i have noticed a lot of people think they do. i get people asking if i'll bump them to the front and i'm like no i can't even look at my uploads without crashing slsk idk what goes on over there

iirc you'd have to leave your computer/soulseek on all the time to retain your place in queue?

yep that's how it works.

I do leave my computer on all the time!! Do they still do the whole “download privileges” thing?

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. If you donate to slsk you get bumped to the top of the line.

One thing I absolutely love is when someone has a song you've been looking for for years, you set it up to DL, they log off and then log back on and that file's been unshared. Very classy.

how do people have time to be so petty and weird???

good question, especially if it's just one bloody song

sometimes people accuse me of not sharing files. idk if there's an error where it sometimes falsely says things are unshared or if people don't know what a queue is

Another "one guy has the album you're looking for but he's got it locked" night. I don't even know if I want it really but the only way to hear it is to illegally download it. I wanna DM the guy and say "hey can I get that" but I don't know if I would be able to resist appending "Your Majesty" to the request.

so i was looking a flac of "last last" by burna boy to legit purchase and download but i can't find it. i hop on slsk and a few people have it, one even in 24 / 48. they're all in folders called "Singles Week". does anyone know what "Singles Week" is and if there's some kind of legit subscription or something for it?

I don't know what Singles Week is, but FYI you can buy that flac at 7digital:

https://us.7digital.com/artist/burna-boy/release/last-last-21581467?h=01&f=20%2C19%2C12%2C16%2C17%2C9%2C2

I've noticed those Singles Week things before. Oddly higher resolution than you might find a track anyplace else.. including this one. Not into hi res so whatever.. but it's weird and I imagine it's upsampled from I dunno what kind of source.

xp ty

Recently read Stephen Witt's How Music Got Free, which was pretty exhaustive--from the development of the mp3 forward--and was surprised that Soulseek wasn't mentioned.

ssshh ;-)

The first rule of Soulseek is…

If anyone asks just tell them it's a dating app

gotta keep slsk on the dl

there was a whole chapter on soulseek, but you have to be sharing at least 1gb of files to be allowed to see it

actually two chapters but you have to trade scramoutcha for the second one

i could see a book on the topic not bothering with it. Has it had any time on "top" of music file sharing? After the big programs were dead it became all about torrents with immaculate encoding and tagging. Pretty strange. Bless the seek

Though frigged if i know what the main torrent site would be right now... or is it all just fragmented into genre sites?

ime they are all shitted up now and practically unusable. I pay a few quid a month for a usenet nzb site for movies, but if I'm looking for something like Herbie Nichols complete blue note recordings then slsk is still the only place 100% guaranteed to have it.

i could see a book on the topic not bothering with it.

Kidding aside, that was my question: do I think Soulseek is better known than it actually is? The book dealt with all the famous torrent sites (never used one), Megaupload, etc., but not even a passing mention. And it still goes on...maybe it's just not prominent enough for anyone to bother shutting it down, or even to warrant a footnote in the book? (Plus streaming has taken over.)

I feel the author would have to know, and know of its sorta underground status.. and maybe consciously felt it best not to potentially draw undue attention to it.

re those Week xx flacs, I don't know, but:
- someone has a few of these Singles Week xx yyyy folders in a directory called "torrents"
- mostly these folders just contain flacs but a couple of people have some which include a file called "errors.txt", which is a list of track names, un-Googleable numeric IDs and the text "EBUSY: resource busy or locked, open '\T!D@L Music\New Tracks/WKxx/<filename.flac>" (I have Googleproofed the service name here)

So my possibly erroneous conclusion is: someone has a script to rip the new tracks from T!d@l every week and uploads them to a torrent site, but I have no idea how they do this or what torrent site.

(also the tracks have 90% English language titles and like 5% Dutch, so maybe that tells us something about the ripper's location, or maybe not)

I don't have a T!d@l account so I don't know if they still have that Burna Boy track, or whether there's an easy & legit way to get a weekly playlist of new singles releases there.

sometimes i look at what people have grabbed and i'll be like..... wtf i have megadeth albums??

Under the Music section on various torrent sites you'll often see a folder like "UK Top 40 WK 17-06-22" or whatever, which will contain all the top 40 singles for that week, so I guess someone somewhere is ripping them somehow xp

brad downloaded something off me today and i feel so validated

yr goddamn right those tags are immaculate

The other day I browsed the library of a user I was downloading from who had like 50% IDM, 50% 80s/90s Japanese music, and the full XTC catalog - it had to have been frogbs, right? if so, thank you for the Akiko Yano!

When I try to download stuff I mainly just get a red ABORTED message in the transfers window... what gives

not happening for me.

we should have a 77 slsk thread so we can share usernames.

good idea

I’ve been here since 09 and I still have no idea how to access 77 so I guess email me if you want mine I’ve got lots of underground indie post punk

I’ve been here since 06 and I still have no idea how to slsk

Evan, just leave a message here - Request Access to 77 Borad

I started going on this rant on the 77 username thread but probably better to put the posts here:

I've been obsessively curating the album art as well lately so most of my files should have nice clean square-shaped images of the album covers attached. I do this because it's my fussy little project to have my apple "Music" (iTunes) mp3 library as neat an symmetrical as possible. So that should be saved to the metadata of the files... (apple is weird about how it links artwork hence my slight uncertainty - pretty sure it's all there though).

This means some of the rare cassette / underground stuff I've been loading required me to "rebuild" album art into that square requirement that is otherwise seemingly not available on the web, so dorks like me that care about that sort of thing might appreciate this if they stumble upon one of those examples.

I've customized album art for some live albums, too.

― Evan, Friday, March 3, 2023 10:54 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Basically if it doesn't have artwork it doesn't go into my digital library, so if I care about it I'll make artwork from scratch as thoughtfully as possible.

― Evan, Friday, March 3, 2023 11:02 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Anyone else have their little metadata file curation obsessions or does nothing matter except the quality of the sound?

I cannot be doing with incorrect id3 data, "various" as artist name is a particular non-favourite.

Also for selfish reasons I need everything to be labelled with year of recording, if people did this it would save me literally a week of work every year.

Yeah, you can blame Musicbrainz Picard for that. Lots of people use this tag editor now because it conveniently auto-tags everything using Musicbrainz.org - but it annoyingly writes album (re)issue dates into the Recording Date field, which means it's often off by decades.

I tried to make that work a few years ago, but gave up, it could do LPs but not compilations, and the LPs are the easy ones to sort anyway. idk, maybe it works better now, I do have to remind myself that I am probably the only person out there to whom this matters quite so much

I cannot be doing with incorrect id3 data, "various" as artist name is a particular non-favourite.

Also for selfish reasons I need everything to be labelled with year of recording, if people did this it would save me literally a week of work every year.

― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Monday, March 6, 2023 10:03 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I hate "various" as artist name too! In "itunes" (I hate calling it Music now), sometimes the fix is just deleting that common "artist" name and making sure compilation is check-marked. But often I'll have to fix every track so that the artist is extracted from the song name and inputted properly.

I haven't bothered adding the year to all my albums, but I'll probably start doing that too... so far all I've cared about is accurate album/artist/song/artwork info. Year is important to me in general but I've not been compelled to clean up my files to include it.

mp3tag on windows is a fantastic ID3 editor. there's a mac version but I think it costs $.

I've been using mp3tag for years and years. I'm sure my version is many updates behind, but it still works great.

i genuinely try to be obsessive because i can't find shit in my library if i don't do some proper genre and year tagging but i just don't have the _time_, hell, i don't even have the time to _listen_ to music these days. i'm trying to hold down a day job and watch anime and write a novel and sleep and i'm bad at all of these things. so i'll be looking at some record i don't recognize like dream eye colour wheel's s/t and trying to figure out what genre it is. how about dyzack? how about, uh, dzhavanshir kuliyev? e.l. heath? i burned through a _lot_ of music in '18 and '19.

and then there are the tags that are really shitty, like just the name of the country it's from, "indonesia" is not a musical genre. some of the tags though i keep just because they're so bizarre or off-base. "my favorite things" from the Olatunji Concert came tagged as "hard bop". gate's _saturday night fever_ is tagged as "Rock: Noise, Experimental, Hardcore". ok. i don't know what else to re-tag that record as. it's the only record under that tag, but it'll just have to stay that way. and that's why i have 642 genres in my library.

then there's year. like there's albums are tagged with the date of reissue, like trying to tell me the kinks' _face to face_ is a 2002 release. worse are the albums from '66 that are tagged as '67. like why would you fuck with me like that? and what do i tag an archival live record as, anyway? it feels weird to group a live album from '73 under "2022", but if i'm looking for archival releases, it comes in handy.

ultimately i just gave up and i have a big pile of great records that i can't find and haven't heard. fuck it, i'm gonna go listen to some more dead tapes.

EL Heath is a friend, really love his music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9dblAl5t8U

Because I've used itunes since: forever, I have trouble imagining a mp3 library interface without album art etc. I would be way less invested in my library if I wasn't able to browse it by album cover. Totally spoiled.

The iPod was a wonderful device. The biggest annoyance was getting the album art right. That grey box with the note bugged the shit out of me.

Exactly! As upsetting as that is, it is equally as satisfying to establish a perfect square version of the album artwork at the best possible resolution available. So I've been doing that painstakingly. And the art that is the most unavalailable can be the most rewarding to solve for. Like artwork that consists of separate cassette panels or weird photographs of said cassettes or show posters or demo compilations that have nothing at all so it is up to YOU to create the most believable album art via artfully cropped band photos + logos that fit the vibe/era.

I'm feeling quite grumpy this evening but I spent so many years dicking about with artwork and tags in iTunes; sure, it kept me off the streets but I certainly don't miss it.

Love Soulseek though - just more relaxed about keeping things pristine and up to date.

I love curating collections. You have to be into that sort of thing.

I guess the soulseek element has given me a little boost of incentive too. The idea that if someone downloads one of those more obscure examples from me they'll get nice clean artwork attached that you can't find anywhere else (assembled so lovingly at least).

best possible resolution available

My biggest annoyance with tags the past few years has been bought files that come with a several MB humongous album art *embedded* in every single track. I save it out to cover.jpg (or whatever) in a quarter of the size and expunge it from all the mp3's. mp3tag is great. I have a session now and then. Still a bunch of coverless albums in the rotation, whatever.

What interface are you using where the album art is inconveniently big, to the extent where you would need to go through that trouble to expunge it? You're just talking about the files being too big?

Large + duplicated among all the files is annoying. If there is just a big "cover" image file I'm probably leaving that alone these days. The idea of not giving a care because "storage is so cheap now!" is annoying.

But yeah I am used to running pretty low power music servers. Raspberry Pi or nowadays on a Synology NAS.

The turn this thread has taken has led me to believe that I don’t love music in the same way as some of you.

My comments here don't summarize the way I love music, it's just a thing I like to do with my digital library.

I need to categorise everything by year because my obsessive hyperfocus has led me to spend all of my available time compiling, editing and mixing music from different years for a vast and barely manageable web project, which now dictates 95% of my listening. I hope & expect that nobody else does this, and I would not recommend it as a lifestyle choice.

i'm mostly dinking around on Spotify tbf

Anyone else have their little metadata file curation obsessions or does nothing matter except the quality of the sound?

i've been rating every song i have on itunes. helps me when i forget which are the good tracks and which ones suck. also helps when i want to make a smart playlist by year or genre etc, I can just tell it to not include any track that is below a 3. one of the reasons i have never made spotify my go-to music player.
also for that reason i've been keeping the years accurate and fixing the "various" bs. i've also ben trying to keep album artwork accurate lately. mainly because i'm a visual thinker and seeing what an album "looks" like will help me remember things about it (if that makes sense).

I wrote (and use a small part of) a very basic extended metadata standard for use in the comments field of itunes to enable more complexity in creating smart playlists.
I also obsessively make sure year of release data and cover art are correct. I blame this on my librarianship background
Also mp3tag is great because it supports FLAC, mp4 and other standards beyond mp3. Having played with it a little the combination of regular expressions with it's various functions can be scary useful - if you can get your head around the slightly non-standard implementation

I feel like album art and tagging digital music files is something ChatGPT is going to make very simple once somebody figures out the right prompts.

I will never trust AI, not even for album cover art

I used to be a lot more rigorous about metadata, since I used to make a lot of very specific smart playlists. I'd use the iTunes "grouping" field for the record label and the comment field for the exact date (or at least year and month) something was released, in case I felt in the mood to listen to a playlist of, I dunno, summer 1968. Or I wanted to listen to band's work chronologically, with live shows or singles mixed in; I'd turn on the "comment" field so I can sort by YYYY-MM-DD. I'd even go to a compilation like Super Hits Of The '70s: Have A Nice Day and switch the year of each track to when the original single came out, rather than the year of the compilation.

These days I don't have that many actual FLAC files (unless something I want isn't in Apple Music, or I want the mono version and it only has stereo) so there's not much to tag. I also realized I didn't generate those playlists as much anymore to justify the research/work.

I feel like album art and tagging digital music files is something ChatGPT is going to make very simple once somebody figures out the right prompts.

Could go for batch tagging every track with AI art like Moka's track poll rollout. That seems to have taken a lot of input on her part for each though.

logged on today and had the dreaded crash that makes you lose your queued files and chat history :(

honestly i can't imagine spending a lot of time on metadata for music you've downloaded. you don't know the provenance, don't know if it was ripped using EAC with error correction on or off a scratched disc with some windows spyware program.

music you've ripped yourself, however, i can see why you'd get obsessive, identifying the exact release on discogs... maybe you'd even go as far as scanning the album art yourself!

Hmm struggling to understand your hang up about the provenance. If the sound quality is good it's indistinguishable from any other digital album in my library whether I ripped it myself or not.

You mean distinguishing remaster from original - that kind of thing?

the basic fear is that the FLAC you downloaded is actually just transcoded from an mp3, or if it's mp3s you download, that it was ripped from a scratched up disc without error correction, which maybe led to it having artifacts etc. that you don't even know about until you compare it to a pristine, original copy. if you download a vinyl rip, are you really downloading the vinyl rip or is it a youtube-dl rip somebody did of somebody else's vinyl rip? itunes era gets even worse with itunes exclusive content - if you're downloading an album in FLAC that has the itunes exclusive content, it's probably been transcoded as for a certain time itunes songs were only available in 256kbps AAC. ever notice when soulseeking that every user's version of a track or album will be a different filesize? probably 95% of the time it's from different metadata, but maybe there is something different about how they sound?

sort of reminds me of how pirate groups used to include an actual photo of the CD they used for the release, maybe along with the encoder settings (LAME or die), to show it was a good rip.

even if you have a pristine source, there are certain albums that won't sound right when ripped unless the right settings are applied - see this discussion about CDs with pre-emphasis flags https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis i believe there was discussion in the CDs thread about this too. or maybe it's a gapless CD but the gapless nature wasn't encoded right.

look, it all gets a bit neurotic and you sound like you're already pretty neurotic about the metadata, so sorry for introducing something else to get neurotic about, speaking as one neurotic to another. if it helps you can try to become a member of a group like redacted or something, where somebody else has done all the obsessing about the quality of the files before they make their way onto the platform.

(and yes, that's not even getting into the original vs. remaster, and whether the person who ripped it bothered to even doublecheck the musicbrainz or w/e ID3 tags their software automatically appended to the rip. but maybe if you're only into obscure indie releases for which there was only ever One Good Version then that doesn't matter as much.)

i search for flacs with logs/cues (although i rarely keep them in that format because lame v0 sounds perfectly fine to me and i'm running out of space). check the flacs with audiochecker; if for some reason it hates the flacs i'll check the log settings. but honestly if someone knows how to create and save an eac or xld log, they probably know what they're doing in general

also i grew up taping shit off the radio. i mean i'll try to get the best quality but i'm not too bothered if the stuff i'm stealing wasn't ripped with the correct drive offset

yeah i always download from users with logs/cues too

I can’t be bothered at all wrt providence, quality assurance, unless it turns out to be something that I get obsessed with and seriously can’t find any way else

ok actually I am more scrutinizing when it comes to finding rips of ultra specific cd pressings of albums I definitely definitely already own

“unless it turns out to be something that I get obsessed with and seriously can’t find any way else”

by “seriously can’t find any way else” I mean in a physical not-terribly-mastered/pressed format

yeah, see, I just can’t understand this way of thinking or caring about digital music files. seems like a massive time investment for what, to me, is pretty minimal scale of difference.

you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know

Guess you wouldn’t stand for my rare Audiogalaxy 64kb transcoded rips then.

you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know

you should bump all the other threads involving things you don’t care about too, just so we know

loool downloaded something that had an *enormous* selection of proust in the lyrics tag <3

got the dreaded socket error, anyone have experience with this? all their websites also seem to be down?

i think slsk as a whole is down

yep

keep on chugging little guy

kinda scary tbh

https://groups.google.com/g/soulseek-discussion/c/ZGepId6Sdqk/m/IR6qJuVvAQAJ

seems to be back up for me again

jesus christ you guys

oh ok i was trying to use it for the first time yesterday in forever and to download the most 2007 music imaginable but when it didn't work i assumed it was my ancient laptop

Is it back? I can't tell...seemed to be for a few seconds, then not.

it is

Thanks. I sometimes have to wait 30 minutes to reconnect--something to do with my settings. So I wasn't sure.

Message from the developer:

It looks like our main server ports are currently not responding, which is preventing most users from being able to connect. We are diagnosing the issue with our server host, but in the meantime, you should be able to connect by going to Server->Options, selecting a port other than 2416 or 2242, exiting the client completely and restarting it. If the port you selected doesn't work, keep trying different ones until it does. We're sorry for the inconvenience, and hope to resolve this as quickly as possible. Please go to our forum if you want to talk to us or to other users.

time to learn how to torrent, guys

Switching ports worked for me

xp Thing is, I guess because of the user base, there's a lot of music on soulseek that you just can't find on torrent sites, especially electronic music from the 90s

Like I'll hear a track that makes me remember some compilation album I used to have that's long out of print and hey presto! there it is on soulseek

it rules

torrenting as an experience is abysmal

slsk is one of very few amazing internet things that still exist

Yeah was just thinking that the other day like all similar apps went defunct over a decade ago right?? And yet this one still remains. I dunno what I’d do without it!

i stopped using it for several years and when i finally returned it felt like seeing an old friend who i hadn’t seen in years and picking up right where we left off

time to learn how to torrent, guys

― bored by endless ecstasy (anagram)

slsk has outlasted torrenting for me

i regularly find stuff there that doesn't pop up on torrent unless you're on one of them fancy private trackers

rutracker fucking rules, it's the best for lossless music

if i had to choose 1 i'd choose slsk, but they're a tag team. better together

what I love is finding movies and tv series on slsk that are on a faster connection that any torrent or nzb/usenet combo

i regularly find stuff there that doesn't pop up on torrent unless you're on one of them fancy private trackers

Yes, I am on one of those. The main one for music is not that hard to get into, actually.

what I love is finding movies and tv series on slsk that are on a faster connection that any torrent or nzb/usenet combo

― Elvis Telecom

elvis on the real shit

the thing about the private trackers is that ratio stuff. i don't know how anybody maintains a good ratio without a seedbox. sometimes a slsk user will ban me because my shares are disorganized crap - fair enough - but nobody's gonna kick me off soulseek

I've managed to maintain a healthy ratio on private trackers for years without a seedbox. You just need to upload stuff, fill requests for bounty, seed 24/7 and be selective in what you download. It's not that hard, really.

or you can just not do any of that and use soulseek

Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7.

o ya? i will have to look into that for my NAS

thank you for your service. there wouldn't be much to soulseek if everyone just used it a few minutes at a time.

Colonel Pop otm even if I had the time and energy to do all that shit in 2024

Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7.

― Chewshabadoo

at some point i stopped being able to figure out technology

i _have_ a nas running at home but i can't figure out how to use it to sync my important personal documents to the cloud

last time i tried onedrive decided that the best way to do that was to put copies of _all my important personal documents in the root directory of the virtual drive_

no microsoft. that was not what i was going for.

also, my nas files are horribly disorganized and i regularly move them around to try and make them easier to locate. it's just....

i mean look i'm old. if i was young i wouldn't download this shit at all, i'd just find some site to stream it on

people running little data centers in their house itt

I was one what.cd for a time and found it amazing but 1) downloaded WAY more stuff than I could ever hope to listen to and b) found it a total pain in the arse to manage the ratio stuff. Don't dare turn off your computer, let alone go away on holiday.

Short answer: slsk rules.

I was on what too for awhile and level of obsession with say, different pressings of Beach Boys stuff, was staggering, like a hundred varaitions of Pet Sounds from different countries, formats, etc...

Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7.

This may be veering off-topic, but does anyone know a good beginner resource on this kind of stuff? I'm thinking about moving my plex stuff from my gaming PC to a dedicated, always-on mini PC so that my partner can watch stuff without having me be home to log in (an NAS seems a bit overkill for my needs, especially price-wise) but don't know the basics such as getting new content onto that remote PC's external drive, or anything about linux.

It does seem like there's a natural place for a designated nerd to run this stuff for a small cartel of fellow music nerds to give private access to. Soulseek as a Service?

For people in the US that still uses Slsk: have you ever heard of people getting legal notices for using it? Do you use VPN with it? When I came to the US, I stopped using it and any P2P/Torrent out of pure fear of being something that would screw my Visa/immigration status (I had friends who went through bad things in Germany, they also were on a Visa)...

I had a look at slsk once and couldn't get my head around it at all. It was all so messy and unstructured. The beauty of private trackers is that it's all well organised and you know you are getting exactly what you want, be it a flac or v0 mp3 or whatever. Everything is easily searchable, properly labelled and tagged, there's high resolution artwork, etc. As I said in my last post I have never had a problem with ratio. It's really not that hard to maintain a healthy ratio even without a seedbox.

ok soulseek is so simple tho, it’s basically Napster. But I don’t really care about rip logs and being 100% certain that the 192 thing I’m downloading isn’t a transcode

Yeah, it’s a search box

you can see the bitrates and extensions when you search, sometimes the bitrate ain't accurate but the file size is also there so you can do a little quick math (if you know roughly how long the songs are)

for the most part I think bad rips are a thing of the past, I haven't seen a 128kbps MP3 in like a decade

have you ever heard of people getting legal notices for using it

no, which is why i use it and don't use torrents, because i *have* gotten legal notices for torrenting in the past

you usually know what you're getting on slsk to a reasonable degree. there's a whole column that tells you what the files are. the biggest issue is whether something's been ripped from a scratched CD, which is something i encountered in torrents all the time too

I've been a heavy user of torrents for over a decade and I've never had a legal notice, although that may be because I only use private trackers not public ones.

look I’m a massive nerd so I have my own preferred way of naming files, I refuse to follow some torrent’s falsely objective standard

i pretty much only ever used private trackers too, but i'm just always terrified bc it happened once, lol

I've only had one notice ever, for a torrent when I forgot to turn on the VPN. Generally use VPN for both torrents and slsk, better safe than sorry.

people running little data centers in their house itt

― calstars

i mean i'm paranoid, shit disappears and one of the best ways to keep shit from disappearing is to have a personal... i wouldn't even call it a "library", it's not curated very well at all. i save what i can save and when the stuff i'm interested isn't endangered then one can worry about things like curation and organization. it's one of the reasons i fixate on obscure shit nobody else cares about. cuz that's the shit that's endangered. yeah i download youtube videos that have like 100 views. not systematically or comprehensively, but if something's niche and i'm interested in it, i do make a personal copy of it. it was interesting, i was watching geoff thew's videos and he has changed his mind on piracy, does recognize that it's an important form of preservation. personal archives are _important_. shit will always get lost and weirdo internet nerds are key in keeping that from happening.

no, which is why i use it and don't use torrents, because i *have* gotten legal notices for torrenting in the past

― ivy.

same. i mean the thing about slsk is that even as wonderful and sprawling a place as archive, they _do_ get copyright takedowns and slsk doesn't. it's a pretty useful underground information economy, in part _because_ of its unstructured nature and 1999-era user interface. it's a lot like ilx itself, really - still a viable place _despite_ its obvious technological obsolesence. whereas a torrent site like DIME, that was a really useful place for niche content for me for a while, but it doesn't really serve that purpose for me right now. a lot of that is the interface. i don't know how to use that to find useful stuff, and less and less useful stuff gets posted. it gets drowned out by the latest remaster of some old zep bootleg. back when i could check the new torrents every day, i found some cool stuff, but i can't do that, and if i'm not just looking at the new torrents, i can only view them 25 torrents to a page. excruciating! so there's a case where technological reasons mean that i can't use a site that i use to use really enthusiastically.

with slsk, i do find a lot of my downloads coming from a few users. just like for legal streaming services, there are different services with different things, so there are different underground services with different things, with distinct advantages and disadvantages. for some people, it's NZB files, for some people, it's torrents, public trackers, private trackers, for some people it's rutracker. in my case, shit, i've been using slsk continuously for 22 years and i don't see any reason to quit. it's a low-risk way of accessing the sort of information i'm looking to experience.

I had a look at slsk once and couldn't get my head around it at all. It was all so messy and unstructured. The beauty of private trackers is that it's all well organised and you know you are getting exactly what you want, be it a flac or v0 mp3 or whatever. Everything is easily searchable, properly labelled and tagged, there's high resolution artwork, etc.

― bored by endless ecstasy (anagram)

see i look at that and say "yep, that's why i use slsk and not private trackers". i'm a messy and... _inconsistently_ structured kind of girl. there's a lot of stuff i struggle to find on my nas. i download a lot more than i watch. i kinda love it, not being in complete control. i love the mystery, the novelty. i love not having to spend a lot of effort _deciding_. uwu.

as far as notices... the companies have gone after slsk in the past, but it's only ever been sporadic, and they don't seem to have found it worth the bother for the most part. that can always change, but it's been a _long_ time since i've heard of people getting notices from slsk shares.

look I’m a massive nerd so I have my own preferred way of naming files, I refuse to follow some torrent’s falsely objective standard

are you browsing Soulseek hits for files named how you like? ...cuz you need to get mp3Tag or something! Fantastic complement to all this business

lol what was I even saying there, what a mystifying post by me. I used to use mp3tag, bulk renamer to do it when I had more time, yeah, now I have too many to really deal with it. I guess I was thinking back to the stringent encoding/logging/filening requirements these sites often have for uploading stuff

I wonder if there's a point in an artist's career where they get big enough that even the small risk of blowback from being found out running a soulseek client makes them wistfully close their connection forever.

or conversely who is the biggest artist who is reckless enough to shout out their soulseek username unprompted?

twice I've been messaged by artists whose work I'd downloaded, it was like "hey glad you're interested in our stuff but uhh if you like it maybe consider buying a copy...", both times I did because I felt guilty. obviously they could use the money.

One of my biggest uses of the thing is getting digital copies of new releases i bought on vinyl. Remember download cards?? Slsk's easier anyway!

but yeah to rush's point I think we're at the stage where stuff is just permanently disappearing from the internet, particularly as certain users leave soulseek it feels like there's just stuff you can't get anymore, maybe not everything deserves to live forever but I do get kind of a lonely feeling now listening to something that just doesn't exist online anywhere anymore

One of my biggest uses of the thing is getting digital copies of new releases i bought on vinyl. Remember download cards?? Slsk's easier anyway!

― maf you one two (maffew12), Thursday, June 6, 2024 11:46 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I do the same, when soulseek was down a bit ago I remember thinking "uhhh am I actually gonna have to use these things now?"

plus if you ever sell the vinyl, you could advertise the download card as unused?! lol

yeah i have pirated many releases that i own physical copies of because it's faster and easier than ripping them, let alone fishing them out of storage.

fpsa, fwiw in my experience Germany is one of the worst countries for that kinda stuff, they're very proactive in fighting file sharing, torrenting, etc. My perception is the US is less so.

An ISP email notice in Canada is just noise - nothing will come of it. How bad can that stuff get?

Well, when you're on a visa...

yeah if you're on a visa everything scares you

What VPN do you use, CAAL? I don't torrent/slsk much at all but should probably cover my arse.

whichever one is offering the best deal at renewal time, last time that was surfshark. don't think there's that much difference tbh

i've just really grown to hate nordvpn, they're obnoxious. particularly all this shit about "online safety", bullshit, all anybody uses vpns for is because they want to pirate shit without getting legal notices

First seven years I was using VPNs it was because that's the only way to access the western internet from China, it just became a habit, couldn't bring myself to torrent or fileshare without it.

http://imgur.com/a/aQe4Jhc.jpg

all hail the hardcorest slsker in town

http://i.imgur.com/vzMSlH9.jpeg

apologies for sharing a giant image of my dirty tennis hat

Probably wanna wash that hat

in my defense it had just been used

I love ILX because we can steadfastly hold onto lore like this (and slsk) for 20+ years

I've managed to maintain a healthy ratio on private trackers for years without a seedbox. You just need to upload stuff, fill requests for bounty, seed 24/7 and be selective in what you download. It's not that hard, really.

OTOH, if you're on Karagarga you can do what I do and look at whatever is up on free-leech. That 8GB download of something unexpected that someone went to all the trouble of handcrafting english subtitles to might be really good - as well as good for yr ratio.

I mean, right now there's a trio of Von Sternberg silents that will improve your life and your KG ratio - get on it!

Great hat. new Zing logo

Yeah I'm on KG as well, great resource and very easy to maintain ratio.

I think we're at the stage where stuff is just permanently disappearing from the internet, particularly as certain users leave soulseek it feels like there's just stuff you can't get anymore, maybe not everything deserves to live forever but I do get kind of a lonely feeling now listening to something that just doesn't exist online anywhere anymore

KG is the most valuable resource for arthouse and obscure film anywhere. But the same applies to red for music, it has an archival function which slsk is never going to be able to live up to.

I have a few hundred 7" singles I bought in the mid-late 90s and a significant amount are not to be found anywhere, not slsk, not youtube, not spotify, not torrent sites, certainly not commercially available. Even The Yummy Fur's album Night Club, which was in the Melody Maker's top 20 albums of 1996, is only to be found on slsk.

It's on the private tracker of which I'm a member (as are Sexy World and Male Shadow at Three O'Clock)

honestly the technical speak about torrenting and trackers and etc is most of what turns me off. i know that’s an unpopular opinion here, but i want to download music, not learn a bunch of technical speak in order to download music.

i open slsk, i search, and then i can pick what suits my needs. it’s easy and fast enough for me.

I don't think that's an unpopular opinion on this thread

all seekers welcome

sweatin’ to the ‘seek

Did I mention I'm on a *private* tracker?

(I'm only teasing. Mostly.)

havent bothered with private tracker world since what.cd went under. anyone got a spare KG invite? sounds interesting. will seed on NAS keep that ratio sterling yeeeaaaaa

o ya? i will have to look into that for my NAS

I use this to run Soulseek on my Synology NAS: https://github.com/realies/soulseek-docker

_Just be a nerd like me and keep a small NAS running at home 24/7 for torrents, it’s handy for a load of other thing too. I also run Soulseek on it in a Docker container which also runs 24/7._


This may be veering off-topic, but does anyone know a good beginner resource on this kind of stuff? I'm thinking about moving my plex stuff from my gaming PC to a dedicated, always-on mini PC so that my partner can watch stuff without having me be home to log in (an NAS seems a bit overkill for my needs, especially price-wise) but don't know the basics such as getting new content onto that remote PC's external drive, or anything about linux.

Just had a very weird thing where I was d/l a tv show and got a 'banned' response followed by a one word message from the user naming a city fairly close by to me. Something I need to act on or keep my head down for a bit?

were you using a vpn?

It's on the to-do list! So, no.

I guess a good spur to get my shit together.

lol what

was it guitarlover59?

I felt bad for a slsk user from Georgia (the country) who was downloading loads off me with an impossibly slow, nought point something mbps internet connection. And they messaged me thanks for letting them queue up so much stuff (that would take them days to dl in total), and I was welcome to help myself to their folder.

I got a follow-up message: 'let me guess a mac-using fa**ot from the UK?' A real charmer!

what were you downloading? lol I know it wasn't a Ted Nugent mega-folder

Lol.
An episode of Slow Horses! All seemed fairly benign; can't work out what pissed them off so much!

some people just want to be dicks

Aye.

Ive been a devoted slsk user for decades and I dont think I’ve ever once sent anybody a message, have never once been tempted to do so. But think i’m gonna take a lesson from calzino’s Georgian friend and increase the positivity by throwing a few thank you’s around, many users have enriched my life a great deal

one word message from the user naming a city fairly close by to me

they probably just got this from your ip, though i've no idea what's with the bizarre hostility

I often compliment sharers on their taste or thank them for making something available.

Same here. Especially if it's on the harder-to-find side.

An episode of Slow Horses! All seemed fairly benign; can't work out what pissed them off so much!

i'm guessing they didn't want their upload slots getting clogged by large video transfers. why they were shared in the first place is anybody's guess

Yeah, this is what I figured, and I had the same question about why they were sharing at all. Eh.

they probably just have a general piracy folder and can't be arsed to limit the soulseek directory to just music

for video files you're better off t0rr3nting anyway

i get my videos off slsk because i'm less likely to get a copyright hit

hi i'm on my laptop, but normally I am uploading 16tb worth of stuff from my server

"President Zelenskyy" currently hitting me up for cash on slsk.

seems legit. or don't you want to fund russian resistance with cash and terribly named folders of music lists.

It's important that he thanks you for the downloads.

The extra y is for sayvings.

that’s actually how his name is spelled?

Haha, I noticed I got this one too!

someone who appears to have essentially everything frank zappa ever recorded anywhere, in multiple pressings/formats, is now downloading rautavaara concertos from me <3