NotWhat.CD News - Project Mirage

October 27th marked what would have been the 10th birthday of what was for most of us our much loved former home, What.CD. It was fitting then, that those who led us for so long chose such a bittersweet day to give back to the community that which we all helped to create and curate - the What.CD metadata. Torrent, artist and collage work that many of us believed was forever lost has been returned mostly intact, along with many wiki articles and art that What.CD members created throughout the years.

It has always been the primary focus of NWCD to catalog and curate 100% accurate metadata for our library. For this reason we've discouraged irresponsible mass uploading and have forbidden the guessing of edition information when uploading content. Our folder naming standards and Gold standard for personal CD rips has been a great effort by users and staff alike to ensure accurate edition information is cataloged on site and preserved locally for our users. The restored What.CD metadata now represents an opportunity for those of us still holding unidentifiable torrent data to be able to identify much of it before uploading. Equally as important is the chance to cleanup and correct the metadata of torrents that were uploaded prior to the introduction of folder naming standards on NWCD. Dedicated users and FLS have spent much time reporting existing torrents for bad folder names and marking some as unknown editions. Thanks to the work of the What.CD staff, we as a community are now in a much better position to be able to continue this task and pin down a considerable portion of edition information and perform the necessary edits on site.

With this in mind we have been working non-stop since the metadata was released to make it available in the most useful form for you our community to be able to not only take advantage of the precious data it contains, but to also be able to browse what is essentially the skeleton of What.CD, find your personal collages, rediscover similar artist and remember how special What.CD was and always will be, and how as a community spread across a number of new trackers we all have much to live up to and work towards before any of us can say WhatCD and what it represented has truly been replaced.

We are happy to present to you Project Mirage, our restoration of the What.CD sql files that were included in the release installed on our gazelle fork and accessible to all our users via the Mirage link that can be found in your quick links or drop down menu (depending on your stylesheet). Mirage has full JSON implementation and therefore torrent metadata can easily be exported and imported to our upload page once accurate edition information has been established. Its use is highly encouraged in order to help you repopulate NWCD with What.CD data. Full JSON permissions have been granted to all our users allowing unrestricted importation. Please use this wonderful resource and the accompanying JSON tools in a responsible fashion. You are at all times responsible for ensuring that edition information is accurate, that your folder names correctly specify exactly which edition you are uploading as per our folder naming standards and that your file names and tags adhere to our rules. Given that NWCD require named editions and that much of the What.CD metadata will have been cataloged simply as an "original release" we remind you that any data that remains either partly or completely unidentifiable should continue to uploaded as an unknown edition. Use additional resources such as discogs.

Over time we hope to be able to populate Mirage with additional metadata and features in order to improve the resource and help our users rebuild. We are currently working on importing log files, descriptions and lineage where we can, as well as the What.CD requests. Further ideas or suggestions on this front would be most welcome.

What.CD staff, wherever you are now, know that you and all you've done for us will never be forgotten as we will carry the torch forward and preserve the monumental community achievement that once was called What.CD. It's with our heartfelt thanks that we take what you have given us and move along.