Comment by Semaphor
14 hours ago
I loved OiNK (and had the t-shirt), but neither What.cd nor waffles ever were a proper replacement for me.
What got me that feeling of discovery again, decades later, and even surpassed it, was doing release Fridays and just listening.
I mostly know what (sub)-genres I like, I go through upcoming release lists for the next week, open every bandcamp link in a new tab (or for those that don’t have bandcamp, I see if I care about the genre enough to search for a single on YouTube), and then I have maybe a hundred links, I sample everything for a few seconds and decide on yay or nay, and about 10 - 20 % go onto my excel sheet. Then on Fridays (up to Sunday, depending on how busy the release day is) I start listening to all those albums to see which of those I’ll buy (usually 1-2).
It’s some effort, but my appreciation for music was never this high.
What do you mean by "doing release Fridays"?
The paragraph following that explains what I mean. It’s technically not always all on Friday, as Japan doesn’t join in, and smaller labels or non-labels sometimes also pick others days, but the bulk of releases happens every Friday. For tomorrow I have 9 albums on my list, plus an extra one that releases on Sunday.
I really loved OiNK and all of that era. Was genuinely gutted when it all fell apart, as it was also about the community of it all. Always wanted a tee - I'm envious.
When waffles and What.cd appeared it seemed to me like waffles would be the long-term successor, but definitely didn't work out that way. Neither ever felt the same, and I wasn't engaged with them like I had been on OiNK.
Nowadays I'm just another streaming service zombie when it comes to music, aside from my old library sitting in Plexamp, like my own little musical time capsule.
I've been on OiNK, went through the waffles and w.cd era (which had the best forum community, collections, invite forums to other private trackers, Userscripts to enhance Gazelle), now on RED and OPN, it's just not the same, gets worse abd worse with each generation.
Been on Orpheus since it started, I loaded about 800GB of my music collection from what onto that site, but could never find an invite to RED, if you can share one I would love a chance to check it out.
I haven’t seen the headline before, so I searched it now. And it seems you can have your T-shirt :) Redbubble or other on-demand print sites have it available.