The What.CD Fifth Birthday Celebration: Day Two

Though the first day of our birthday festivities has passed, don't fret - there's plenty more to come! We have quite a few surprises in store for you as we kick off the second day of celebration. Scroll down to explore the update.

Today's offerings include an amazing new album voting feature designed and coded by Changles, a very special announcement regarding a new partnership, more from irredentia's statistics visualization project, another special gift and a round of picks from both our Build Team and Forum Moderators. Enjoy!



We're pleased to announce a new album voting system. You'll now notice a 'Favorite Album Votes' section on each torrent group page. The system is simple: you can upvote or downvote a given torrent group, and you can vote on as many torrent groups as you like.

With this comes a host of new, related features. For one thing, you'll find a new Top 10 page based on the torrents deemed most popular by votes. Another feature we're very excited about is recommending new music based on votes. On every torrent page, you'll soon see a box of listing the 10 most popular albums among people who upvoted that torrent, and plans for recommending users with similar taste are in the works. We're also quite excited about how we're calculating the rankings. Rather than just counting upvotes (which prioritizes better-known but perhaps less loved albums) or the ratio of upvotes to downvotes (which is unreliable for albums with few votes), we're using binomial confidence intervals to handle our ranking like Reddit handles theirs (more information here). Please discuss our new ranking system in this update's discussion thread, as we'd love to hear your thoughts. We also welcome you to visit the running tally of fifth birthday features being documented on this wiki page.



Given What.CD's focus on access and organization, it's no surprise that we would attract the attention of other archival organizations. One such organization is the phenomenal Internet Archive, which shares our vision of universal access to art, culture and knowledge.

So, for the past several months, we have been quietly collaborating with the Internet Archive team, helping them to back up as much of our vast accumulation of metadata as possible. We hope that this collaboration will both improve the state of music organization in the present and benefit other archivist organizations one day when this site is gone. For the official announcement of this collaboration, we would like to share a message from Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle:

Brewster Kahle wrote:
The achievements of the What.CD community are astonishing, and the site's superb metadata can significantly help open-source projects such as MusicBrainz.org and acoustid.org to make a catalog of all recordings.

To that end, the What.CD archive project is a continuation of the Internet Archive's goal of preserving the cultural zeitgeist of the world through time. Along with our book scanning projects and web archival projects, this well curated repository assists us in our mission of obtaining an archival quality copy of every piece of culturally-relevant information. We attempt to make all material as accessible as possible and appropriate.

Please let us know what you think the Archive should do to serve the goals of preservation and access.
We at the What.CD staff are immensely proud to work with the Internet Archive team, and we hope our work here will eventually benefit music fans all over the internet.

And of course, we want to thank you, the users. Our dedicated uploaders and editors ensure that our 276 terabytes of content is well-tagged and well-organized for the benefit of others, and of course our entire userbase helps to keep this content available. You guys make the Internet Archive's work possible, and we are working hard to bring tangible benefits back to you, the users. We are very excited for the possibilities this collaboration will bring! Stay tuned.



irredentia's stats overdrive project bursts into our day two announcement with a special list of the Top 100 Releases by Collages as of September 2012. This is a list of the top albums as ranked by their presence in all collages. We'd love it if you gave the list a look and shared your thoughts. Our sultan of stats is just getting warmed up, so expect even more interesting statistical visualizations in the days ahead.






Here's five more Freeleech Tokens to spend at your leisure! Remember: FL Tokens are intended to help you snatch albums you can't afford, so use them wisely. Every user has been awarded Five (5) additional Freeleech Tokens. Please read the token wiki to educate yourself about how the token system works.



The day wouldn't be complete without another round of picks. This time we've turned to our Build Team and Forum Moderators for inspiration. These picks are Neutral Leech selections. Check out the picks below, and remember to discuss your favorites. We recommend that you test out the new album voting system after listening!



DutchDude's Build Team Pick

Dusky - Stick By This

Genre: Deep house, Progressive House

Torrents: torrents.php?id=72067731

Review:
If you were to create a soundtrack for your life, where would you begin? What landscape would provide the canvas? Which songs would represent the most important moments – the trying, the difficult, the eye-opening, terrifying, joyful periods of your life? Most likely, not one of these songs would be like the other, and yet they make up one identity. Dusky’s debut album, Stick By This, released on Anjunadeep in late October is an enchanting audial journey through stories of landscapes and sound-scapes, exuberant self-discovery and emotional exploration. Also known as Solarity, London-based duo Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman, present 14 eclectic, production-perfect stories, each one introducing a new moment and complimenting the last.


hateradio's Build Team Pick

Zomby - Where Were U in '92?

Genre: breaks, electronic, rave, jungle, dubstep

Torrents: torrents.php?id=300765

Review:
Remember when you were a kid living in the early 90s? No? Then you shouldn't be on this site!  But, really, this album should allow some of us to reminisce on our childhoods. Music such as this was on the periphery of our ears, but once in a while, you'd hear great beats, futuristic beeps, and strange noises that made you go SONIC BOOM!


Gwindow's Build Team Pick

Junior Wells - Hoodoo Man Blues

Genre: blues

Torrents: torrents.php?id=223068

Review:
Snatch it back and hold it.


Theophylaktos's Build Team Pick

Popa Chubby - How'd a white boy get the blues

Genre: Blues

Torrents: torrents.php?id=654224

Review:
...The genius of Popa Chubby, as he exhibited on this night, is how he can move from Hendrix straight into an instrumental version—delicate at first, then artfully raucous--of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and make it seem like a perfectly natural development. Chubby then offered up an emotionally compelling rendition of Leonard Cohen’s dystopian “The Future,” showing that while he is known for his guitar playing, he’s no slouch in the vocal department either. He bellowed the line, “When they said repent / I wonder what they meant?” with particular ferocity. “Hey Joe,” which followed, was funky and Stevie Ray Vaughan-like, with some nifty wah-wah guitar spicing up this well-worn rock classic.

After slyly requesting a hand for the man who “took the biggest dose of LSD in history,” Chubby and his band kicked into perhaps the highlight of the set, the new “Pound of Flesh,” a simmering, dark rocker about the emotional desperation of a man who is losing the love of his life. The dramatic intensity conjured up here was reminiscent of greats like the aforementioned Cohen but also Townes Van Zandt, with Popa Chubby proving to be a very talented lyricist as well as a gifted guitar slinger and singer. “Pound of Flesh” is an instant classic, and would be a hit single in a better world than this one. Providing a lyrical contrast from those explored in "Pound of Flesh," a new blues ballad called “A Love That Will Not Die” allowed more room for Chubby to stretch out with some searing guitar solos. So did "She Made Me Beg For It," the funky instrumental workout that followed.


ipof's Forum Moderator Pick

Peter Evans Quintet - Ghosts

Genre: avant-garde jazz, post-bop

Torrents: torrents.php?id=72022380

Review:
Peter Evans has been featured on a lot of albums this year. I don't like most of them. In fact, of the four or five I heard, Ghosts is the only one I like. The ones I don't like are all different variations on meandering, near-formless noodling. They assault the ears and mind without challenging either, and, as a result, they fall flat. What makes Ghosts different is that its tracks all have a clear form. First and foremost, this is gleefully perverted hard bop. That foundation gives the music the structure necessary to support its experimentation, which is where it comes alive. ...One to Ninety-Two is a seething opener that captures Evans at his best, blazing through themes and spinning off into wild solos (Carlos Horns on piano gets some time in the spotlight in the middle). On the opposite side of the spectrum is the restrained Ghosts, in which Evans makes deliberate and phenomenal use of space (and, again, Horns uses his solo marvelously). In the midst of a breakneck album, Ghosts lets it breathe. On Articulation, Jim Black shines on drums, hopping from rhythm to rhythm, establishing each but never settling into a groove (and each of the rhythms could easily sustain an extended groove). His performance here is the album in miniature: restless. Ghosts is certainly a "heady" album in many respects, but it also very vibrant and isn't a purely or even primarily intellectual pleasure.


Falconor's Forum Moderator Pick

Hossein Alizâdeh and Djivan Gasparyan - Endless Vision

Genre: World, Persian, Armenian

Torrents: torrents.php?id=623098

Review: Christina Roden wrote:
Any recording featuring elderly Armenian duduk (an ancient, nine-holed shawm-oboe made of apricot wood) virtuoso Djivan Gasparyan is worth treasuring. But this time out, he was heard in particularly august company and under extraordinary circumstances. In September, 2003, the maestro, along with Grammy-nominated Iranian plucked string virtuoso Hossein Alizâdeh and a hand-picked group of collaborators, gathered at Tehran's Niavaran Palace. The personnel included Alizâdeh's own Hamavayan Ensemble, with Armen Ghazarian and Vazgen Markaryan on duduk and bass duduk, plus vocalists Afsaneh Rasaei, Hourshid Biabani, and Ali Samadpour. Alizâdeh is a renowned composer and a foremost living exponent of the tar and other members of the Persian lute family. However, for this recital, he is heard on the six-stringed shurangiz, a relatively recent and notably resonant descendent of that clan. Gasparyan’s mature grace ignites Alizâdeh's impetuosity as the two men negotiate the highest peaks of passion and inspiration; both are captured at their best and that’s saying a lot. But aside from the musical brilliance on hand, the event also constituted a social breakthrough, in which a female singer performed live with an otherwise male roster and appeared before a mixed-sex audience. (review from Amazon)


mubydram's Forum Moderator Pick

Howlin Rain - Howlin Rain

Genre: indie, rock, psychedlic, stoner

Torrents: torrents.php?id=84864

Review:
Howlin Rain is the psychedelic country/garage rock side project of Comets on Fire guitarist Ethan Miller with Sunburned Hand of the Man drummer John Moloney and bassist Ian Gradek -- described as an "iron worker." If sunshine visions of a West Coast acid-drenched flannel-garbed truck-stop confab hanging out and letting it rip are your thing, then this one's for you. For a defining moment, one need not go any further than "Calling Lightning with a Scythe." While the cut opens with strolling banjos and shuffling drums as acoustic and electric guitars gurgle in a midtempo country ramshackle choogle, the tension begins to build until about three minutes in, when the laid-back hedonism gives way first to empty space and detuned slide guitars that explode a few seconds later into pure squalling psych overload guitar chaos -- as the acoustics continue to strum the melody, of course. If anything, this music reminds one of the greatest country-fried moments of Tucson's Giant Sand, but drenched in post-rock humidity. There's also a bit of the Grateful Dead in here, but make it the Dead of the American Beauty tour -- guys who still understood what rock & roll was instead of noodling themselves to death. Miller's a ragged-as-hell lead singer, but it works splendidly for this material. These songs are loose and shambolic but well crafted; other favorites are "The Hanging Heart" and "Indians, Whores and Spanish Men of God." The overall feel is a bit reckless but utterly lyrical. This isn't alt-country; it's dope-fueled country-rock -- perfect for the acid folk generation who like their genres mixed up -- produced by the band and engineered by Comets on Fire boardman Tim Green, with sax on a few cuts played by Tim Daly (who guests regularly with the Comets). This is rough, woolly, and utterly hummable music that wears its mange proudly but not pretentiously. Howlin Rain's debut is rather timeless. It feels like it could have come from anywhere in any present rock era and that's one of its strengths. In five or ten years you'll still be scratching your head as to why it sounds both so timely and dated. Highly recommended. - AllMusic


cluck_u's Forum Moderator Pick

Double Dagger - More

Genre: post punk, punk, graphicdesigncore

Torrents: torrents.php?id=451850&torrentid=988031

Review:
Basically this will blow your socks off and make you want to move to Baltimore (AKA the coolest city on Earth).

What genre is this album? Post-punk is probably the most apt label. It's often loud, mostly fast, and while it often hearkens back to your standard punk chord progressions, you'll also find a lot more depth and texture here. And it's not always loud and fast - it just happens to be most of the time. Oh, and there ain't no guitar in this album. It's bass, drum, and vocals.

Finally, I was going to use the word "anthemic" in this review, but when I googled, I discovered the following definition....

dictionary.com wrote:
a musical composition for a choir [...] sung as part of a church service
a religious chant sung antiphonally

Wait a second. That's perfect. This shit is anthemic. Check out "The Lie/The Truth" to see what I mean.

No, scratch that. Check out the whole album, because it **ing rocks.
PS: Double Dagger called it quits about a year ago. RIP




(Discuss this post here)

今天又有神马花样？又给了5个token

坑爹，全是不计上传的

ilovin 发表于 2012-10-28 11:55
今天又有神马花样？

多给了你5个Token，现在一共10个
然后一堆 Neutral Leech!

全是NL的。。。

是不是又多了几张SP？

坑爹啊{:7_738:}

哈哈，都是NL。{:7_705:}

有優惠就下載
不過怎麼都是NL

{:7_734:}都是NL的说。。。

多了5个币，也不错~