What Was the Very First MP3 You Downloaded? 423
Anonymous Coward asks: "I was wondering whether people remember the very first MP3 file they ever downloaded. For me it was Cher's 1998 single 'Believe.' I was at work and, after reading an article about MP3s on CNET, I figured I'd give it a try. I think it's strange that I remember it so clearly. I mean, it's not like it was a first kiss or anything. I started out using WS FTP LE and Winamp. 1000s of MP3s later, WS FTP LE is a distant memory but Winamp is still my player of choice. What about you?"
Warren G - Regulate (Score:2, Interesting)
But I don't download that much, most of what I listen to I ripped from my own CDs.
Not music at all (Score:5, Interesting)
I probably had a P-133. My roommate had a P2-266 of which I was extremely jealous. Of course, I graduated with a P3-450 and he graduated with a P2-266, so I suppose I had the last laugh.
Sash! (Score:4, Interesting)
I still love the song.
This was back in 1997 i think??. I had a Cyrix P166+ running Windows NT. The poor machine STRUGGLED like hell, using 50 to 60% cpu. (apparently because the cpu had a very bad maths co processor, and decoding an mp3 uses alot of floating point math, so it was killing the cpu).
It also caused it to crash regularly. I found underclocking my cpu to 150mhz fixed the problem.
But i still have that original mp3 that a friend sent me, burnt to CD-R
I don't use winamp anymore, i use itunes. And i use limewire. I think the file was sent to me over irc (dcc) originally.
D.
Downloaded, then purchased. (Score:5, Interesting)
I also began with WS-FTP and Winamp, though I'm not using either anymore. Many many moons ago, I was on an Underworld binge, and downloaded an Underworld mix of a Chemical Brothers song. A week later, I owned the single. I still do this with music, and now, I'm also downloading AVIs and MPEGs of interesting looking movies that I don't particularly relish paying a rental fee just to see if I like them. But if I do, I'll own the DVD shortly. To me, the archive and legitimacy is worth the cash.
Hey! Media industry moguls! Pay attention! I'm your target market. I try. If I like, I buy. Go ahead; sue me for sampling what I like for free via P2P, instead of what you think I should like for free, via the radio. I'll keep "sampling", but this time I'll keep what I download, and purchase no more. It's your call.
My first? (Score:1, Interesting)
%-)
Winamp has never been my player of choice.
F3 in TotalCMD for quick listening,
Xinf for the best media library ever + good X-platform.
iTunes for superior M4A (AAC), CD burning (ala Nero), Fastest/best ripping, Mac/Windows cross-platforms.
Who cares about skins (iTunes is perfect already) and visulization?
winamp just irks me with its browser plugin.
back in 1993... (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember someone in the Sun workstation room of my school playing a crappy version of the Star Wars theme ; we were all wondering where the fun was in that (since we all had that famous sally.au and 007.au) when he said that the file was only a few ko (we had a 2Mo quota then) thanks to a new system he had found on xarchie...yes, mp3 !
Then no mp3s until 1997 when I found a webpage on Dalida with a few songs (at 192 Kbps with excellent encoding !). I still have them since I have the originals.
First MP3 I ever downloaded (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometime after that, I heard of a program called Napster that let you download mp3's of songs, and the rest is history.
Re:My First MP3 (Score:1, Interesting)
I still remember the day as well. I was driving home for lunch and listening to NPR's Morning Edition. (I live in Germany.) They had a feature about mp3's and how it would change the world. I think that this was winter of 1998.
I downloaded Garbage - Stupid Girl. I remember not having anything to play it so then I had to download a player. Might have been winamp, I don't remember exactly. Anyway, once I played it, I remeber thinking that it sounded like crap. (I didn't realize it then, but it was recorded at 56kbps.)
Later in the week I downloaded Jewel - Foolish games. It was recorded at 128kbps. I knew then that it really was the future.
Benefits of Broadband (Score:5, Interesting)
Her best friend was visiting, and they were talking about this new song they'd heard on the drive over - "Sugar" by System of a Down. While they were arguing about whether they should buy the CD just to get that song, I went to my newly-installed Napster, downloaded it, and cranked the speakers.
They spent the next two hours remembering songs and asking me to download them. I went the next day to buy a router so that my wife could share the broadband connection on her computer. She bought the SOAD CD because she loved all their songs. I took her to see them live in Austin a year or so later.
And no more arguments that we didn't need all that bandwidth.
Moon Cradle by Loreena McKennitt (Score:1, Interesting)
At the time, my box had a 133mhz 5x86 AMD cpu (upgraded from a 33mhz 486). If I set Winamp to play mono, closed all other programs, and didn't move my mouse at all, I could play mp3s without skipping. Ah, the good old days.
5.5 years and a few thousand mp3s later, I'm still getting mp3s using the same method on irc he showed me that day.
first mp3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Low Rider by WAR (Score:3, Interesting)
I downloaded it on my Amiga 3000, over ISDN.. yes, I had ISDN in my house (on my Amiga!), with a Motorola Bitsurfr Pro.. I got around internet access and time limit charges (the ISDN was metered, but only for outbound calls) by 'borrowing' half of a BRI at work and using callback..
I can't remember what software I used to play it though..
Sigh, how far we've come.
Sun .au files! The Letter "U" and the Numeral "2" (Score:4, Interesting)
w00t. Sun .au files!
My first introduction "digital music" was also sally.au (and with some fun with xhost and .rhosts, we told Sally to pretend to enjoy herself by jumping to random machines in the lab, whereupon we walked away and watched hilarity ensue through a nearby window), followed up immediately by both parts of Negativland's "U2" parody.
The ironic part is that I got the .au files (and later, the MP3s) of the Negativland tracks because you couldn't buy the U2 parody due to U2's label suing Negativland for copyright infringement [swcp.com]. That's right. RIAA's landsharks were suing people to PREVENT people from BUYING music. (Because, of course, it was music that they didn't control. So it's OK to sue people for producing it.) The only way to obtain the tracks in question was to digitize and pirate them.
Wired [wired.com] also has an article on the mess.
Eventually it all got settled, and the world has been able to download "the forbidden single" directly from the band's own website [negativland.com] in a wide variety of formats, including (of course) MP3 for several years now.
Re:back in 1993... (Score:4, Interesting)
I took advantage of the world-writable
We never saw the man again.
I FTP'd my mp3s back in 92-95. Didn't really start seeing them on web pages until about 96.
Most of the MP3s I downloaded after the September That Never Ended were crappy, so I got rid of them.
Can't remember what but... (Score:3, Interesting)
On a side note, the oldest usenet post mentioning MP3 seems to be this one [google.com] : 1995/07/24. Does any archaeologist have older references ?
Re:Should I answer the truth ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was working at an ISP, in late 1996. A friend ushered me into a backroom where he had set up a computer with winamp, and showed me what he had just downloaded -- Alice in Chains' Man in the Box.
I really didn't comprehend what I was seeing. It didn't make much sense to me. I owned the CD, and I could easily listen to it on a computer, and four megabytes was a huge amount of space back then. The drive I had in my computer could have held maybe a hundred MP3s before being filled. I couldn't put it on a floppy, and CD burners weren't common yet. The only way to transfer these things was with a fast connection, like the one the office had and I didn't. Files were hard to find. To say I was underwhelmed was putting it mildly.
All that changed within a year. I ran several web based MP3 sites, and I even got a letter from the RIAA for one of my sites because it was hosting nearly two gigs of Tori Amos mp3s, came up first in altavista for "MP3 AND Tori Amos", and was doing about 10 GB in traffic a day. The letter is almost comical today, because they really didn't know the legality then and didn't know how big MP3s would become. I was lucky. Had I done it just a year later, I probably would have been sued.
If anyone ever downloaded mp3s from oubliette.org or oubliette.ml.org, just wanted to say thanks for the memories!
Left at work... (Score:4, Interesting)
About a year later, I was on a board when someone linked to a Hong Kong site where this page was dynamically refreshed with this guy's library. That was great for about a month, then it was full of dead links. Then I would some MP3 search engine, and then Napster came along.
Long story short, the MP3's expanded my music libary from a dozen CD's to over 200. I never bought music because I had so many eclectic tatses, that usually one album only had one good song, and I didn't have the kind of money to buy CD's if I didn't know about the music.
When downloading became a big issue, the place that I worked at said if they caught anyone with illegal MP3's, whether burned from home or downloaded at work, zzzzzt! You were fired. They put software on the computers that automatically deleted MP3s found on the system, and reported to the IT people.
I don't work for them anymore, but the whole "piracy" thing kind of turned me off for good to the shared music phenomenon. Sometimes someone will send me an MP3 of some song, and I listen, but now I only use MP3's to store all my music on the network share, and keep all my CD's safe and scratch-free in a box in the closet.
Yeah, no one believes me when I say I don't have illegal MP3's, but if all I had were those, one good hard drive crash and I'd lose all my music. That would so suck.
Re:Audiogalaxy (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as the Napster in it's glory days, I was stuck on dialup at home, and I didn't really have a convenient way of taking advantage of my high school's broadband, so obviously, I couldn't take advantage of those uncapped speeds.
On the other hand, Audiogalaxy had great community features. At the time, I had tons of time to scour for new music, so that was a terrific feature. And the web-based interface let me jump onto a computer at school and have the music finished (or at least on its way) when I got home in the afternoon.
For my downloading these days, I use Soulseek [slsknet.org], or, rather, the Nicotine [thegraveyard.org] client for it. It's home to a lot of dedicated music fans, so you can easily find all kinds of obscure music.
1998, Origami-live, 486 (Score:2, Interesting)
took me a while to download (t'was the biggest file I've ever downloaded) from the university's connection, then even longer to play, as my 486 would not be powerful enough to play the mp3 in realtime..
I basically had to render it as a wave file to play it properly, filling my harddrive in the process with a 500M file.
This was under dos.
Then I tried playing it under linux via mpg123 and it somehow worked realtime if I lowered the proper quality settings.
and I can still find those mp3s [scene.org]...