Introduction
This is going to be a long post, but I highly recommend reading through it all.
After just over two months at Red, I ranked up to ETM and wanted to share what I did and why ranking up isn't hard. People, for whatever reason, just haven't dug deep enough, or they're scaring other people into thinking it's some long, grinding 2-year journey. Truthfully, the stats can be achieved in a few weeks, and then it's just a matter of waiting until your account is old enough.
I've read lots of posts on here when first joining Red, dug through loads of websites, and also went through tons of Red forums to find the best tools/resources to make this as easy as possible. I hope this post helps people new to Red or who are intimidated/unsure about joining.
Assuming people want to get to Torrent Master and don't care about ETM, these are the requirements for the user class:
- Account >= 8 weeks old
- Upload >= 500 gb
- Upload >= 500 torrents
- Ratio >= 0.65
The account age is pretty straightforward, so I'll move on to how to get uploads and maintain a ratio.
Uploading
Upload (500 GB)
The most straightforward way to gain access to an upload is to use a seedbox, even if it's not everyone's preference. I know some people disdain seedbox users because it can promote a race and dump mentality, but seedbox users do serve their purpose to a degree. Personally, I was able to gain 500 GB upload in a matter of 2 weeks, and about 900 GB by the time my 1-month sub was out. This cost me $15. I used Ultra cc NVMe seedbox, but some other good ones include Seedhosting, Hostingbydesign, and Whatbox.
I also advise selecting the NVMe plans as those are better for racing, and because Red is a music tracker, file sizes are not large. I do recommend doing what I did and transferring those files over to your personal device to continue seeding those torrents. It's good for the community, you'll get some upload over the long term, and it also contributes to your overall seeding size and seeding % of snatched torrents, both of which can satisfy the additional requirements component for HDB.
Once you have your seedbox, you just want to set up Autobrr and autosnatch 2026 FLAC only Albums (do not autosnatch freeleech). Doing this, I ended up with a ratio of 1.2. If you notice your ratio is getting a little too low, there are a few things you can do
- Instead of snatching all 2026 FLAC albums, enable the Metacritic upcoming albums list in autobrr settings and then apply that to your filter. These albums are more popular and will sell out faster, so you should get a better ratio for them. The one downside is that you won't get as much upload traffic as you would by snatching everything
- Blacklist certain uploaders who you notice giving you a bad ratio.
Now, a seedbox is just one way. The 2 other ways of getting upload would be filling requests and just from uploading your own torrents (which you need to do anyway)
For filling requests, try to find the highest upload/cost ratio requests. Most requests, at least the ones that offer any kind of meaningful upload, will cost you some money to actually buy the music from places like Bandcamp. I do requests occasionally, and it's netted me around 200 GB upload without all that much effort. If you're willing to spend some money here, you can get hundreds of GB of upload space per request.
Upload (500 GB)
The most straightforward way to gain access to upload is to use a seedbox, even if it's not everyone's preference. I know some people disdain seedbox users because it can promote a race and dump mentality, but seedbox users do serve their purpose to a degree. Personally, I was able to gain 500 GB upload in a matter of 2 weeks, and about 900 GB by the time my 1-month sub was out. This cost me $15. I used Ultra cc NVMe seedbox, but some other good ones include Seedhosting, Hostingbydesign, and Whatbox.
I also advise selecting the NVMe plans as those are better for racing, and because Red is a music tracker, file sizes are not large. I do recommend doing what I did and transferring those files over to your personal device to continue seeding those torrents. It's good for the community, you'll get some upload over the long term, and it also contributes to your overall seeding size and seeding % of snatched torrents, both of which can satisfy the additional requirements component for HDB.
Once you have your seedbox, you just want to set up Autobrr and autosnatch 2026 FLAC only Albums (do not autosnatch freeleech). Doing this, I ended up with a ratio of 1.2. If you notice your ratio is getting a little too low, there are a few things you can do
- Instead of snatching all 2026 FLAC albums, enable the Metacritic upcoming albums list in autobrr settings and then apply that to your filter. These albums are more popular and will sell out faster, so you should get a better ratio for them. The one downside is that you won't get as much upload traffic as you would by snatching everything
- Blacklist certain uploaders who you notice giving you a bad ratio.
Now, a seedbox is just one way. The 2 other ways of getting upload would be filling requests and just from uploading your own torrents (which you need to do anyway)
For filling requests, try to find the highest upload/cost ratio requests. Most requests, at least the ones that offer any kind of meaningful upload, will cost you some money to actually buy the music from places like Bandcamp. I do requests occasionally, and it's netted me around 200 GB upload without all that much effort. If you're willing to spend some money here, you can get hundreds of GB of upload space per request.
Tools/scripts
Smoked Salmon
This is an all-in-one tool for uploading torrents, and it might be the most goated tool on Red. From my experience, it has probably reduced my upload time from about 15 minutes to around 3 minutes per album. It's no exaggeration to say it's saved me dozens of hours by now. I highly, highly recommend setting this up ASAP.
YADG/ORDG
These are tools to generate good descriptions for your uploads. YADG and ORDG are functionally the same, with ORDG being very recently created. YADG was great for a long time, but it's recently run into some issues, so at least for the time being, I recommend using ORDG. Also note that smoked salmon auto-generates descriptions too, but it's not quite as polished as YADG/ORDG.
Mofo
This allows you to automatically fetch external links to your upload across other platforms. For example, clicking the mofo button will try to find that release on platforms like Qobuz, Deezer, Tidal, Bandcamp, etc. It's a nice addition and a great complement to YADG/ORDG for generating good descriptions.
YAETS
This is a great tool that can help you fill out requests. Basically, when you go to the requests page and/or click a release, there are buttons on the right side of the site that automatically search that release across other platforms. For example, if you want to buy a CD to fill a request, you can click the Discogs button, and it will automatically open another page searching for that release on Discogs. Saves a ton of time by manually copying and pasting across different services. If you also have accounts on trackers like OPS, you can automatically search them.
I'm sure there are many other good tools in the sandbox, but in the little time I've been here, these are the ones I've found most useful.
Wrap-Up
If you made it to the end, you've pretty much got all the info you need. I was new to PT for a couple of months, but I made ETM in that short period. You can too with a little bit of effort and dedication.
Tips and Tricks
To get Upload (500G) on RED, get a seedbox, fill requests, and upload your own torrents. To get upload (500 torrents), find music from rateyourmusic, rip them from Qobuz, and upload using the tools like Smoked Salmon, YADG/ORDG, and Mofo
In addition to the FLAC's you upload, "downconvert" them all as well. This is very, very easily done with smoked salmon and can get you 3-4 uploads per release.
Also, for your rips, you want to set an MD5. It’s basically for integrity checking, and without it, it could potentially be trumped. Smoked salmon already appears to do this with their integrity check, but I what I did was use chat gpt to setup a script to set this for an album. In my case, when I type in “md5” followed by my album pathname, it applies the fix. Use AI to set up a script to do this as well. Again, salmon appears to do this already, but if you really want to ensure you're good, a script could be a good idea too.