Aren't you glad I forgot to mention anything about "rubbing my hands together in anticipation?"

But seriously: what is Soulseek? I haven't used a P2P for anything since WinMX closed down a while back.

I was just reading the web site wondering what it's all about. Hopefully someone gives us the inside dirt.

Like -- it's community based, with a focus on chatting and meeting people with similar interests. Does this actually happen?

And they discourage trading copyrighted files.. do people actually avoid that?

yhbc, I think WinMX is back. (Can't help you on Soulseek.)

I use soulseek all the time. It's great for finding rare music. You enter your search term and download from individual users. You have to wait in a queue though.

THE FIRST RULE ABOUT SLSK IS THAT YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT SLSK

Copyrighted? I dunno. Copyliberated? Probably.

I actively avoid sharing any RIAA/MPAA material on SLSK. I go to BitTorrent if I want movies/TV or unit-test-able software.

I try to maintain my SLSK folder so it's nice and tidy and easy to browse.

Pretty much everything I share is out of print and/or unlikely to ever be rereleased. I've emailed and asked a lot of the artists whose works I share and so far every single reply has been positive.

SLSK has been the secret to my eclectic/obscure/weird MP3 collection for almost 3 years now. There's lots and lots of independent stuff, remixes, mashups and unreleased/unsigned stuff, as well as special SLSK only releases by more well known (yet probably still fringe) artists. I first discovered 8-bit/chip music through SLSK.

I also once discovered some weird anthology/compilation or jam session by a group/band that's totally awesome on it's own, but also somehow features a few cameos from Bjork. I still haven't been able to figure out who this group is, or where they're from, or what ever the fuck else is going on, and no one I've talked to knows who they are and it's been driving me nuts for almost 2 years.

Please take care of SLSK and spread the ethics message. I know it is most likely a hopeless battle, but at least by attempting to keep MPAA/RIAA titles off the network we can at least say we tried, and we can at least say we tried to live as though the RIAA member companies didn't even exist.

Make separate folder(s) apart from your mainstream collections for your SLSK sharables. Talk to artists. Ask. Share rarities and weirdness and good stuff. Do homework. Be part of a library.

Thanks, loq. I'll check it out, and do as you say.

Good deal. Go forth and propagate.

*rocks out to Plaid's Coat*

Heh. OK, the band with the Bjork cameos in it is supposedly called "Thee Notorious 23" according to the ID3 tags. I just searched for it again.

The first Google result for a search on that band name? An AskMe post I made a while ago. Bloody hell, I'm pissing upstream from the past in my own search threads. :\

Heh!

Soulseek is an utter waste of time unless your idea of good sound quality is 128kbps CBR mp3.

Huh? You can choose to not download 128k files. There's plenty of stuff that's high bitrate VBR files.

Not in my experience, but heck.. The last time I checked into it was nearly a year ago.

I tested this with one of the most obscure albums I owned and they had it, it had been released as a double CD and had more than my vinyl release which vanished and is impossible to get here (in Australia). It is awesome for the hard to find stuff. Having said that, I've often downloaded more charty stuff as well, I find the bitrate and/or encoding to be dodgy on these.

But if we all get on it, all of us, with our collections...

jonmc??

I've belonged for about a year and it easy and fast. My username is metachatter, usually. Click where it says Click Here to Download. I've found every weird song ever asked for here, at Soulseek, except jonmc's request for Bo Donaldson's Teenage Rampage, and something I think me3dia asked for, called Drink Me by something Chicago something. I used to have them on my soulseek 'wishlist' (which I love - it searches in the background) but my computer's crashed since then, so they're no longer on my list.

Drpynchon, I've been on Soulseek for years, and everything I rip is EAC (well, or vinyl)/LAME/alt-preset-standard. I've always been able to find plenty of stuff that's encoded to similar standards.

Also, everything loquacious said.

I like it although the interface sucks ass. There's a social contract about sharing -- people will ban you if you don't -- but I ran out of energy to check every user downloading from me months ago (and sometimes the "No files shared" message is wrong). If I could restrict search results to >160 or downloaders to share>1000, I would, but I can't do that automatically.

Definitely it's great for obscure stuff, though. The best feature is the wishlist, which periodically searches for keywords. Oh -- a quirk to learn is not to use any extended characters in searches, not even apostrophes. Had many fail until I learned that one.

It's much better than any other P2P I've ever tried for single-song purposes.

Oh, a few months back there was a problem with RIAA search-result spammers, on the weirdest artist/album searches, but they seem to have blocked those now.

It's only a matter of time before they have a Grokster problem, though.