What.CD

What.CD was a private, invitation-only music tracker founded the day its predecessor OiNK was raided. Over nine years it assembled what many people still consider the most complete and best catalogued music library ever built, with obsessive rules about audio quality and tagging. On 17 November 2016 French police seized its servers and the staff wiped everything.

Timeline [edit]

2007

24 October 2007 Launch

What.CD is founded

Started the day after OiNK was raided, by people who had just lost it.

2008

2008 Legal

The host refuses a takedown demand

Moxie Colo declines an industry request, saying Canadian law protects its clients.

2010

September 2010 Feature

Ocelot

A tracker written in-house runs five million peers on three gigabytes of memory.

December 2010 Peak

One million torrents

A record for a private BitTorrent tracker.

2014

2014 Incident

A prolonged DDoS attack

Months of intermittent downtime through early 2014.

2016

17 November 2016 Shutdown

Twelve servers seized in France

What.CD closes the same day and states that all data has been destroyed.

Metric	Value	As of	Confidence
Registered accounts ▲	150,000	2016	Reported Approximate membership at the time of the shutdown

Metric

Value

As of

Confidence

Registered accounts ▲

150,000

2016

Reported Approximate membership at the time of the shutdown

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: French authorities seized twelve servers from the hosting company OVH in northern France on 17 November 2016. What.CD closed the same day, stating that all site and user data had been destroyed.

Our analysis: What.CD was not just a tracker, it was a catalogue with editorial standards that no commercial service has matched. Because it was private and invitation-only, nothing was mirrored publicly, so the raid destroyed not only the sharing but the metadata that had taken nine years to build.

History [edit]

Founded on the day the last one died

OiNK's Pink Palace was raided on 23 October 2007. What.CD was founded the same day, by people who had just watched a community of 180,000 lose everything at once.

What they built was not a warehouse. It was a catalogue. Uploads had to meet strict rules about format and encoding, and had to be tagged correctly, with the release, the pressing, the source and the logs from the disc rip attached. Entries were cross referenced with other releases of the same album. Users maintained ratios, wrote reviews, and argued about transcodes with a seriousness that had no commercial equivalent then and still has none.

By December 2010 it held a million torrents, a record for a private tracker. By the end it held close to three million, covering roughly 900,000 artists, for a membership of about 150,000.

Its own infrastructure

The site outgrew off-the-shelf software. In September 2010 it launched Ocelot, a tracker written to be small enough that five million peers ran on three gigabytes of memory. Its site code, Gazelle, was released publicly and is still the basis of private trackers today. In 2008 its Canadian host refused an industry takedown request outright, saying it would fight for its clients because Canadian law protected them.

Seventeenth of November

French authorities seized twelve servers from OVH in northern France on 17 November 2016. What.CD announced its closure on its own index page and on Twitter the same day: "Due to some recent events, What.CD is shutting down. We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed."

There is still argument about whether the data was seized or deliberately destroyed by the staff to protect their users. Either way it is gone. The music can be found again. The nine years of cataloguing cannot.

Last verified: 13 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).

Timeline [edit]

The site through time

Ownership [edit]

Key figures [edit]