Wednesday, October 24, 2007

What is Oink?

In my day Oink was a comic for kids. Now I am old and writing what is in some sense meant to be a music blog, but over on Freaky Trigger Tom talks about something called Oink that has apparently busted in a manner significant for people who write music blogs. I have no idea what this Oink is. I am so out of the loop.

5 comments:

kvlol said...

I am embarrassed for you old man... O1nk was meant to be the bees knees for leaked albums and rarities. It was invite only, you had to keep uploading a certain amount to keep your membership. I won't try to explain bittorr3nt not least because I don't actually understand it!

What's also slightly amusing is the first letters of data capture thing are HRT. Oh the ironing etc

Justin Mason said...

OiNK was a BitTorrent site dedicated to swapping extremely high-quality rips of
albums etc. I never used it, but I've heard it was truly amazing in reach,
coverage and quality.

read DJ Rupture's thoughts on the subject: http://www.negrophonic.com/2007/defending-the-pig-oink-croaks/ -- here's the key paragraphs:

'More than anything else this year, music & software file-sharing site Oink changed the way I thought about the music industry & BitTorrent technology. I’d heard rumors of Oink for years but hadn’t seen the members-only site until early ‘07. Oink was anal, Oink was comprehensive. The site administrators were fierce about quality — only high-quality files from original CD/vinyl rips could be posted. Many releases were even posted as FLAC (lossless) files. Oink allowed only entire releases, with complete tracklist information (uploading an incomplete album or a poorly labeled MP3 could get you kicked off). No bootlegs or concert recordings or unfinished pre-release mixes were permitted.

In many cases, I believe that downloading an album from Oink would be both faster (more on this in a bit) and give you more information about the CD than sites like iTunes.

Think about that… a free website, which gives fast downloads of music at equivalent or higher quality than the paid music sites. And this free site has an incredibly deep collection of both new and old releases, usually in a variety of file formats and bit-rates. It’s overwhelming! First thought: wow, Oink is an amazing library. Second thought: wow, I really need to start selling DJ Rupture t-shirts, CD sales will only continue to drop & I gotta make money somehow!'

ian said...

Mmm, this doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd like at all, what with being against file sharing, downloading, and all that. If that makes me an enemy of freedom, then so be it.

kvlol said...

No, it makes you a man with a dial up...

Chris Gilmour said...

I'd never heard of o1nk either until I read stories about it being busted. For all its alleged reach, coverage and quality it couldn't have been that good then.