If you are looking for high quality music downloads, here’s a torrent tracker you’d be interested in. KillaWaves (better known as KWS) is a Gazelle based private BitTorrent tracker that specializes in Drum and Bass (DnB), Oldskool, Jungle, Ambient, Techno, Garage and Dubstep music. Launched just a few months ago, KWS is still a pretty young BitTorrent tracker – however it has already made a name for itself when it comes to high quality music album rips. It recently underwent a domain name change is now accessible from the URL http://killawaves.org. Ever since it’s launch, KWS has remained an invite only community and has never once opened its doors to the public – however, interested music fans can easily get free invites from the site’s official IRC channel.
KWS’s relatively silent entry into the BitTorrent scene several months ago hasn’t gone unnoticed by music fans. Although never opened for public signups, KWS has managed to recruit a user base strong enough to keep the torrents alive. Speaking of torrents, KWS is dead serious when it comes to audio quality and only only V0, 320 and FLAC formats are allowed on this tracker. Although they are selective of quality, the number of indexed torrents does not seem to be affected. As of 4/19/2010 KWS tracked over 3100 torrents spanning across 2400+ albums by ~1400 artists.
As mentioned above KWS primarily tracks music related to DNB, Jungle, Ambient, Downtempo, House/Techno, Break, Dubstep and Garage music. Available music releases include latest albums released in 2010 as well as popular hits released back in early 1990s. As we mentioned earlier, quality of music uploads is taken very seriously on KWS – site rules indicate “All torrents must be of a bit rate no less than the VBR preset, V0. Therefore, only V0, 320 and FLAC are allowed onto this tracker. When uploading FLAC, you can easily convert it to both 320 kbps and V0”. A screenshot of KWS interface which captures several releases and category icons can be seen below:
Note that KillaWaves makes extensive use of Gazelle’s Collages feature (which is renamed ‘Labels’ in this iteration). All new torrents are automatically added to a label and thus users are able to browse entire music collections released by a particular music label at any point of time.
KWS is closed for signups and would probably remain closed forever. Interested users can gain access to the tracker by going through the IRC interview. You will be asked a few questions about audio quality, general knowledge of BitTorrent, etc.
Server: irc.killawaves.org
Channel: #Invites
Direct Link: irc://irc.killawaves.org/Invites
Newbie to IRC? Never fear – it’s not remotely complicated as it sounds. Read this brief tutorial and you will be all set.
Note: Once on the channel, do as the topic says. There may be delays due to staff not being available on channel sometimes. This may be caused by various reasons such as time zone differences, etc so please be patient.
Special thanks to KWS staff for the support given.
