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| Rant on BT servers and trackers! by Zseni 09/27/2004, 3:41am PDT | ||||
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| Most of the sites that have ratio requirements expect .5 and that's about it. Pedro's BT Music is a little TOTALLY BITCHY about ratio and total GB uploaded - you have to wait a little if you aren't up to SPEC, the whores. Not that I really HAD TO HAVE THE PASSENGERS ALBUM TONIGHT. It's the principle of the thing. But you can't argue with the quality of the releases: in most cases, it's equivalent to paying for the full album. Lossless, cue files, liner notes.. But even Pedro lets you get away from the ban threat once you're over .5 share.
In general, servers that require logins and ratios have better stuff than those who don't. Demonoid has logins and ratios and it isn't as good as TorrentBox, but guys like Pedro or Oink's Pink Palace go the extra step. Then there are the speciality trackers - The Public Morning Musume Tracker has optional logins, ratios on the honor system, and concentrates on J/K rock and pop and video releases, and they carry something I really love: fan-compiled introductions to artists, and some of the affiliates even have fan-based mix tapes. Desitorrents is the same story, except with an even more comprehensive take on Indian media. I've run into like five Polish BT trackers, but none of them specialize in Polish stuff. There's a Romanian tracker that only carries Romanian crap, but not even I can bring myself to give a shit. Chinese trackers run by Chinese dudes are 99% ads, the torrents are impossible to find. Which pisses me off because just a couple years ago the Chinese dudes were shelling out to host buckets of albums for free download. I have found plenty of English-speaker websites that handle Asian media torrents but no actual Japanese BT sites, though I know they are out there somewhere. Anime is a prime example: most fansub groups took to BT with feverish passion. The raws are shared out on English-language BT sites like Saiyaman straight from Japanese TV without a Japanese BT site ever coming in to the flow. BT was perfect for anime, though: episodes took forever to share on IRC and the bandwidth for HTTP and FTP transfers was expensive and therefore scarce (olde tyme anime traders remember the heyday of Caltech and MIT student homepages fondly.) Yet lots of the fans, even just a year or two ago, were college kids on fat pipes. Now everything fansub is glued to BT, with the scarywater tracker handling a huge percentage of the total volume especially for the high-profile groups like Hawks or AonE. There's a guy sitting like a spider in the middle of his web over at Laughing Man Fansubs who has such a FAT FAT PIPE that he seeds for two P2P communities and a huge range of torrents 24/7 (he's scary, hostile, enigmatic.) Surprisingly, the scanlation community has been very slow to adopt BT - most of the groups want to deal with IRC exclusively, and have since the advent of big time BT cut off their HTTP downloads which is so confusing. But scanlation files are usually so small. I suppose there's not much point in it. Brian Eno wrote some years ago about how the internet was going to bring the rise of "curatorial" culture - in which consumers of culture products do not so much go off and explore, or depend on advertising or other promotional tactics, but would instead look to amateur experts like bloggers or well-known P2P sharers or things like that to guide their purchasing and consumption habits. BT is a system perfectly structured to encourage exactly that kind of behavior, I think. |
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So okay this is the Bittorrent/where to find files forum now. by 09/26/2004, 6:02pm PDT  Re: So okay this is the Bittorrent/where to find files forum now. by 09/26/2004, 8:29pm PDT Rant on BT servers and trackers! by 09/27/2004, 3:41am PDT Ratios aren't that bad. by 09/27/2004, 12:09pm PDT All the torrents I click on say... by 09/29/2004, 7:13am PDT Re: All the torrents I click on say... by 09/29/2004, 3:55pm PDT |
