I can't believe the operators of what.cd would choose to delete everything without at least a warning, or letting people back it up. So much music and metadata just lost!
Not to mention the crime of law enforcement prioritising private profit over a cultural milestone. It really is like they burned the library of Alexandria because it hadn't paid the copyright fee.
There was an official release that contained just that and a lot of other things like image assets uploaded on Archive.org. You can’t just put a database dump online without doing a lot of cleaning first.
There’s some websites where people made that browsable too so you can go through collages and album and artist pages with the original style sheets too. Just no forums or torrent files or images.
I refuse to believe there's not a database backup somewhere. Such careful curators would surely hate to destroy it!
I'd hope so, but wouldn't it have leaked by now?
https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release
Oh phew, I hadn't heard of this, thank you. Glad this exists, I wonder if Redacted has imported it.
It hasn't, but it was used by the community to kickstart the rebuilding process. I'd wager at this point there's less than 1% of the original catalog missing. Plus, all the music that was released meanwhile. RED already surpassed the number of releases that were on WCD many years ago.
[flagged]