Redacted: News

Tubthumping & Tooling

I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down

Our site and tracker recently experienced a few wobbles; we want to thank you for your patience and support during that time. A special shout out to our developers and other staff, who work tirelessly to keep this ship afloat.

While we are often busy behind the scenes, maintaining and improving the plumbing, many of our inventive users are also hard at work. Thanks to their efforts, this site has become an even better, easier place to congregate and contribute. Examples abound, and only some are noted below. Please do check out these tools, offer gratitude to their maintainers, and share in this thread what other tools improve your RED experience.


DropSpec
A fast, effective tool for generating SoX spectrograms on macOS. SoX is an invaluable command-line tool for generating spectrograms. These are graphical representations of audio, used by our users and staff to determine whether a song is lossy, or perhaps a transcode. This GUI application makes a somewhat complicated CLI tool more accessible to a wider range of users.

Mofo
Mofo, short for More Information, operates on a torrent group page, searching various online outlets for a release. Matches are neatly arranged in a list of links, appended to the bottom of a torrent group description. As with all automation, please review the results for accuracy before posting the results!

Pollenizer
As described by its author: pollenizer helps cross-seeding automatically, between RED & OPS. You might have snatched things on OPS or RED indiscriminately, or only on one side or the other. A lot of content is actually shared, thanks to the efforts of original uploaders using both sites, or thanks to other users using scripts to migrate releases from one to the other. In the end, you probably are seeding a lot of things that can be cross-seeded directly. pollenizer aims at making this effortless, in both directions.

Propolis
This tool closely analyzes torrents for common rule violations, such as excessive padding, inconsistent or missing tags, bad folder or filenames. Its author notes it can be used before uploading, to confirm your upload is conforms to the rules and best practices. Or, after downloading, to identify trumpable releases and further improve our catalog. We love this one so much that we have integrated it into torrent moderation workflows.

Gazelle Edition Edit (GEE)
Gazelle Edition Edit (GEE) is a simple, straightforward time-saver, especially for our ardent editors. It allows users, with a single click, to apply edition field changes to all torrents within the same edition.

Yet Another Various Artists Helper (YAVAH)
This tool, like the others highlighted here today, makes life easier. Specifically, it simplifies adding lots of artists to an upload/torrent group, especially when there is no listings for a release on sites like MusicBrainz and the like.

downsampler-threaded.sh
This is a Bash script that automatically resamples 24-bit FLACs, based on their sample rate, using multiple threads. Do not be deterred by the technical jargon, and review the full set of features and documentation in the thread.

SpecDiff
This utility simplifies spectrogram comparison of FLAC files. The most common use case around the site is to identify watermarks, or compare the same song across two different media types, e.g. CD and WEB.

FLAC Upload Quick Buttons
This one is for our regular uploaders looking for efficient ways to cut down their clicks. Head over to the thread for more, and take a look at this picture to get a sense of what's in store:
https://ptpimg.me/6j4ae6.png

Remove torrents from main collage, or torrent group page
This tool allows you to remove torrents from collages on either the main collage page or the torrent group page. It is especially useful for removing torrents from larger collages as you no longer have to search a collage for the specific release you want to remove, nor would you need to use the 'Manage Torrents' interface.

While on the topic of collages, we love when our users team up with staff to undertake special projects! A recent example is the initiative hypermodified undertook to explore where our cover art images were hosted. After finding that many were on questionable (or already dead!) hosts, he wrote a script to re-host them to ptpimg.me, while also sorting dead hosts and low-quality images into collages. This project prompted excellent collaboration among the community and staff in #red-dev. The group approached this with actual statistics from our database, thus avoiding undue strain on the site during the process. As of this writing, all HTTP-hosted art has been migrated, and HTTPS cover-art is about 70% re-hosted.


Oh, there's one more project with which we need your help! Let us preserve some of our oldest lossless torrents. As of right now, all FLACs with three or fewer seeds, uploaded in the first three years of the site (before 2019-11-24 01:34:03) are freeload, and will remain so until around 23:59 UTC on 2022-09-24. As a reminder, users who were seeding such torrents within the last week will still receive credit for their upload during this event.

Snatch and seed!


s,
RED Staff