Thread: What.CD interview: TIPS and TRICKS

Originally Posted by newmessiah

I passed first shot. I think I overstudied because everyone freaked me out with stories of failing for silly reasons. It probably does depend a bit on the interviewer, but I got the distinct impression that you basically just have to be polite, understand which major music formats are lossy and lossless, know definitions of ABR, VBR, CBR and the basic LAME settings (V0-V9). I actually got (politely) accused of cheating because I got this all right just from reading this thread and the information in the whatinterviewprep website.

The people that have failed and given advice on here simply have not understood the concept of lossless and lossy encoding. It isn't hard, but YOU CAN'T RECODE A LOSSY FILE. PERIOD.

Oh, its an MP3 - YOU CAN'T RE-ENCODE IT! And no I don't care that its 320CBR, or some super awesome-sounding kind of encode. Its a lossy format. Literally 3/4 of the questions in that section are simply this concept.

The other stuff is probably forgivable, but mozerate has it all covered in his excellent post.

After doing the interview and seeing how straight-forward it is, I am totally on board with the interview process. If you can't pass that interview, you are too ignorant to be able to contribute to the community. You'd end up sharing poor quality files.

You may have gotten accused of cheating because you spent too much time responding.

It is important that you understand the material. If you don't and you get the invite by cheating, you will eventually get banned by trying to upload bad files. And you need to upload to attain higher ranks.

Know the bit rates for various encodings. Know the rankings of encode quality. Know the difference between cbr, vbr, abr
Know what rules (what they allow for uploads, transcodings, etc)
Be truthful. It's easy to catch a liar. If you don't know the answer to a question, list your assumptions and give an answer. If you know the principles but misplace simple knowledge (for instance, the bit rate for some obscure encoding), state that up front, state the principles, give an educated guess. They aren't going to be jerks and fail you if you forget one variable bit rate encoding.



Don't freak out over the interview. If you've studied (it's not a lot of material) you will have fun and be rewarded with an invite to arguably the best tracker out there.

Thanks for the info, guess it's my time to try my luck.

the tips mentioned are really good. wikipedia read up on flac and other encode forms really helps and keeping those pages open at the time of the interview also helps a lot.

This thread got somewhat slow. I do not believe that there is no interest it anymore. That is why I decided to refresh it a little.

My suggestion is this: When you are ready for the interview on What.CD, it is a good idea not to use their irc channel embodied into web browser. For the result use your own irc client (I prefer the mIRC). In that case, after the interview is finished, you will possess the log of the interview, which could be very useful to post on this thread for others to review.

As an example, the irc client mIRC has folder named “logs” containing all logs. Please open that folder, find the appropriate log file, edit it using Notepad, and post valuable info here.

Originally Posted by mozerate

This thread got somewhat slow. I do not believe that there is no interest it anymore. That is why I decided to refresh it a little.

My suggestion is this: When you are ready for the interview on What.CD, it is a good idea not to use their irc channel embodied into web browser. For the result use your own irc client (I prefer the mIRC). In that case, after the interview is finished, you will possess the log of the interview, which could be very useful to post on this thread for others to review.

As an example, the irc client mIRC has folder named “logs” containing all logs. Please open that folder, find the appropriate log file, edit it using Notepad, and post valuable info here.

Yea and that would get you banned really good lol

Originally Posted by ops

Yea and that would get you banned really good lol

Yep, when you pass they specifically ask you not to post any information on particular questions of the interview. If they find out you've posted them then they can ban your what.cd account. And I wouldn't want to ask anyone here to put their account at risk.

The interview isn't difficult. Go over the what.cd interview prep a couple times then go for it. You get multiple tries at the interview if you catch a particularly difficult interviewer.

Originally Posted by ops

Yea and that would get you banned really good lol

Originally Posted by roamer

Yep, when you pass they specifically ask you not to post any information on particular questions of the interview. If they find out you've posted them then they can ban your what.cd account. And I wouldn't want to ask anyone here to put their account at risk.

Sure, you better keep your mouth shut, especially after you have already read these tips. But remember, the world is spinning not because of such reservations. Keep sleeping pals.

To my opinion though, the What.CD will not suffer from ignorance on how to “convert”, “rip” or even “pervert” if you will. Anyway, most of users are just consumers. Let people decide what they want. And if you like, no one will ask you a question why you are studying the “how to”s. For many others, the complete tutorial perhaps would be more desirable than your “clever” suggestions “not to post”.

And one more tip from the What.CD interview: After passing the interview, some of you will surely receive a final question of whether or not you approve this “tough examination”. Be prepped to answer it also.

Suprb share mate.... really got much info ..... Thanks

I looked at this post for like 10 minutes. Read their interview page attentively and got in. It was easy as balls.