elghoto

There are always rules. Typically, in most trackers, you are required to maintain a ratio > 1, but there are ratioless trackers where they don't care about the ratio. Also, you often have a minimum seeding time required meaning that you need to seed the content for X amount of hours (X varies from tracker to tracker). But it is not a big deal, because in private trackers you don't have hundreds of peers connecting to you, therefore seeding doesn't necessarily mean they are going to choke your bandwidth.

If you need to build upload buffer (to improve your ratio), private trackers also offer Freeleech content, and seeding bonuses that you can exchange for virtual upload data. So with some time and little patience, you can download from PT anything.

But again, each tracker has its own rules, and at the end of the day, these rules make the tracker better for you and everyone.

Private trackers are typically free and run by donations. In private trackers there are rules to follow. Most of them targeted at maintaining quality and availability of content. You get there through invitations or interview. You reputation in other private trackers help a lot when you want to join other trackers (you follow the rules).

Also, since the process of getting in a private tracker is harder, this helps keeping out bad apples. So the harder the tracker the more "secure" you are of getting copyright complaints. But there is always the risk.

Have you heard of "Navidrome"? you can be your own Spotify. It also supports transcoding. For instance, if you are on a phone connected to data, you can set the bitrate to 128kpbs to save some data.

You had your Plex open to the public with that setup. That's not secure at all, unless you wanted anyone to access it.

If you can port forward from your own IP and it's kind of stable, you can run a wire guard server to access your network and Plex.

If you can't portforward you can try a mesh network like tailscale.. there are other solutions as well. The fastest apparently is netwmaker, but you need to have a server with public IP. You can use a cheap VPS.

Found some used CDs on Amazon. I'll probably get a copy.

A Tale of Two Cities

Now I'm looking for the album, and in the first 10 minutes I can't find it.

If a band is popular, albums get ripped/downloaded from streaming services and put on private music trackers within hours of release.

If you don't have space, like recommendations from streaming services, or their app, or not wanting to catalog your music (or setup services that do that), then I would recommend a streaming application.

using Spotify is much easier... until they delete a few tracks from your playlist.

they don't have port-forwarding, how can be that not an issue for torrenting?

I have had them. At least for torrenting they are crap. No port-forwarding and crappy speeds. I'm not using them now, and I'm very happy.

Also to watch content from other regions from streaming services. All their servers were banned..

At least in the context of the question:

1. they don't have port forwarding. 2) their speeds for torrenting are crap.

but no PF, so it doesn't matter how nice it is.