With Napster, WinMX, LimeWire, and Kazaa mostly in their graves (SoulSeek is still around, I guess), the world of filesharing has made a swift transition to torrents. Just like the good old Napster days though, public torrent sites and trackers are riddled with trojans and other garbage. The best way to enjoy your filesharing experience is getting an invite to one of the many (but few illustrious) private trackers.
While invite-only web is becoming a slight trend, I'm here to share three niche-specific and very reliable private sites that I use to get my complete media fix. Let's get started.
PassThePopcorn
PTP has been around for quite a while, and through a legacy of staff drama and domain name changes, it still stands today as the best private torrent site for movies.
High-quality rips are added to PTP faster than almost anywhere else on the net, and speeds are generally top notch. PTP is at around 23,000 (of 25,000) users with a daily activity rate that hangs around 40%. Monthly, it's at more than 90%. PTP is hanging right under the 100,000 total torrents mark. They've got over 53,000 individual movies, more than 80,000 subtitles, 533,000+ user ratings, 3.5 million total snatches, and a seeder/leecher ratio of 85.49. That's impressive. The site is very smooth and easy to navigate, also.
As a little added bonus, PTP has some of the most active forums I've seen across private trackers. The community is very involved. This is where I go when I want movies. If you're fortunate enough to be an active, invited member than you can tag along with me. My username there is Craig.
What.CD
What.CD is the premiere private tracker for music. Even their splash page is mysterious and makes you want to join up. Like PTP, What.CD has been going strong forever. The site has not changed much over the years, and that's a good thing. It's here to stay.
Here are the current stats that What.CD boasts:
- Maximum Users: 200,000
- Enabled Users: 147,441
- Users active today: 31,864 (21.61%)
- Users active this week: 75,651 (51.31%)
- Users active this month: 120,045 (81.42%)
- Torrents: 1,274,496
- Releases: 588,517
- Artists: 442,475
- "Perfect" FLACs: 298,750
- Requests: 158,012 (70.30% filled)
- Snatches: 66,631,197
- Peers: 8,836,049
- Seeders: 8,687,317
- Leechers: 148,732
- Seeder/Leecher Ratio: 58.40
Those numbers are completely insane! If you're an audiophile and love your FLACs, this is the place to be. I've never gone to What.CD and left without finding what I wanted. I'm CSS over at that tracker.
TvTorrents.COM
TvT is the up-and-comer of this list. It's much different from PTP and What.CD. It doesn't run on Project Gazelle like those two, the tracker software that What.CD made famous. The invitation and credits system is completely different also.
Again, just like the others, this is absolutely at the top of its class. Sometimes shows are uploaded as briefly as 15 minutes after their live airing. They've even got sections of the website that shows recently aired episodes of the most popular TV series', complete with the matching user-contributed torrents (if there).
These guys are really doing it right, and their approach is definitely changing the way a lot of people watch "TV". No more sitting and waiting, you don't even have to set the TiVo. TvTorrents.com has everything you want, from Dexter to the most obscure foreign sitcoms. I'm over there too, self-named.
Now how do you get an invite to these awesome trackers? That's on you. Just know that they are out there and hold all of your cravings and desires! In the event that you do get invited, you'll want one of these clients to speed up your downloads. Might also want to check this article out too, it could save you some worry.
Don't Forget: The Free A-Z Torent Guide
If you know any other quality sites, get at me in the comments. No begging for invites, either!