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?"
Should I answer the truth ? (Score:2)
Snirf
I wasn't even able to play it at full bitrate and in stereo on my poor 386.
Re:Should I answer the truth ? (Score:2)
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!
My First MP3 (Score:2)
Re:My First MP3 (Score:2)
spin doctors - two princes
found it lying around on one (*krhm*) warez ftp 'back in the day' in a
Re:My First MP3 (Score:2, Funny)
See? Even back when he was singing, before he went into politics, he was laying the groundwork to go after Iraq's oil.
Yep, anonymous is good (Score:5, Funny)
Well I think we can all see why you don't want to reveal your identity.
Re:Yep, anonymous is good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yep, anonymous is good (Score:2)
Summer Samba by Astrid Gilberto
The Cat by James Taylor Quartet
Back in '97. All three started downloading at about the same time - I don't remember which one finished first...
Re:Yep, anonymous is good (Score:3, Funny)
and when you're a cher fan, a word like 'openly' has a double-meaning, i suppose.
Me? never downloaded one! (Score:5, Funny)
*shifty eyes*
Daniel
Re:Me? never downloaded one! (Score:5, Funny)
MP3 is a loathable format created by communists in order to disrupt economics. Those evil terrorists usually approach innocent kids with crap speak like "information wants to be free".
DON'T FALL INTO THIS TRAP. Chances are if you ever try one MP3, you'll become addicted and need more and more. Countless downloads, and sleepless nights are to come. Not to talk on spending loads of cash for new HD's, and faster broadband. Even worse, you may fall to the perils of file sharing, in wich a bad hacker will download and destroy all your files.
It's often said that MP3s are a gateway file. Once MP3s are not enough, people usually want stronger files, like
Re:Me? never downloaded one! (Score:2)
I think he means what's the first picture from the 3rd series of Monty Python you downloaded. You know, Monty Python 3rd series pictures are really popular nowadays.
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.
Re:Warren G - Regulate (Score:2)
This was my third mp3.. strange
My first was a punk band called Refused. The song was "Rather Be Dead"... they're still my favorite band.. even though they broke up
If you buy... (Score:3, Funny)
Ironically, the song went something like "If you buy this record your life will be better..." and I wasn't among the buyers. Must be the reason why higschool sucked so much.
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.
Re:Sash! (Score:2)
Re:Sash! (Score:2)
Re:Sash! (Score:2)
No, they weren't. The second computer I ever built was a Cyrix PR200+. At the time, I didn't know much about PR part or it. I knew it meant "Performance Rating", but I didn't understand the full meaning. Then one day I figure out that it was really an IBM 150Mhz chip that "performed like a Pentium 200". BULLSHIT! That thing gave me more trouble then it was worth. I swore I would never buy into that whole "Per
Can't remember (Score:2)
The hardest to find was "1970's Dictator Chic - Jacknife Lee" which is used in a rather good advert by out local phone monopoly. I wasn't going to buy a CD for just one song (assuming I could have found it for sale) and it wasn't in the library. So I waited probably more than a year, and eventually it turned up. Took me several tries before I could finally download it because the one person who had it kept lo
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 Time... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, so many years down the road, and surprisingly most of my music collection is legal. I think that's more a function of being employed as opposed to a poor college student, but it could be due to other factors as well.
Here's an interesting perspective for you, though... When you look at the technology we were using in 1997 (I got my first MP3 in September of '97, I think... maybe October), I for one had a 3G hard drive. It was huge, and I was so proud. Now, in 2004, my laptop has 10 times that, and my desktop 30 times that. Also, DVD+/-Rs are becoming more popular, and they have about 10x the space of an old CD-R (I'm talking 640megs). Furthermore, these days I'm typically wired to a 100baseT network instead of a 10baseT, not to mention I'm on DSL as opposed to dialup when I'm at home. What am I getting at? Today, if you wanted to share and store uncompressed 44kHz stereo wave files, at least relative to the technology available now they are SMALLER than MP3s were back then. I can fit more wave files on my computer now than I could fit mp3s then, and I can download waves faster now than I could download mp3s then... It's all about perspective.
Tell me that's not amusing, I dare ya.
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.
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:Sun .au files! The Letter "U" and the Numeral " (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Audiogalaxy (Score:4, Insightful)
My band [powersymphony.com] is an official contributor to Audiogalaxy, you can still get 3 songs for free [audiogalaxy.com]! Sorry for the shameless plug (do I smell karma burning? =)
Re:Audiogalaxy (Score:4, Insightful)
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
I think it's strange... (Score:2, Funny)
looking at the timestamps... (Score:2)
Doug Anthony AllStars - I want to spill the blood of a hippy.
Pink Floyd - Wish you were here
Jeff Buckly - Hallelujah
Around 1996 (Score:2)
It's still a great song, reminiscent of early Violent Femmes.
Of couse, I had been making MODs and tracking various stuff long before the
Rammstein - Du Hast (Score:2)
Re:Rammstein - Du Hast (Score:2)
I'm only a high schooler, so... (Score:3, Funny)
"My name is Lihnus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux Lihnuhks"
Re:I'm only a high schooler, so... (Score:2)
On the SPARCStation, you could play it with
cat linus.au >
I also had the sound of a cow mooing as a
I don't remember (Score:2)
At lea
Re:I don't remember (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you after you trashed your MP3s, but SoundAPP PPC was released April 1, 1996 [spies.com]. It would've been able to play the songs (if you had at least a PowerPC) :-).
Grils Just Wanna Have Fun (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I have never downloaded music and anyone that says so is lying!
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
mp3? Tsk... tsk... What about mp1 or mp2? (Score:2)
I think mine was the X-files Theme (the extended version). Actually I don't think I had another mp2. I only remember it sounded pretty bad, and was pretty large, but I could play it on my 486 without too much stuttering. They didn't require as much CPU power to decode as those godly mp3's, although the 486 still had problems keeping up in decoding it in real-time.
Did mp1's exist too for a while? Maybe som
Re:mp3? Tsk... tsk... What about mp1 or mp2? (Score:4, Informative)
MPEG (as in the video file standard) and VideoCDs use MPEG-1 Layer I audio, SVCD uses MPEG-1 Layer II Audio, and MPEG-2 files or DVD uses MPEG-1 Layer III Audio.
So they were in common use.. Just the audio stream was not common though.
Don't deny it ... you are a nerd!! (Score:2, Funny)
Don't deny it, like everyone else here you are a nerd. Of course downloading your first mp3 on p2p was as important as your first kiss. Back in Dec 1999 when "Believe" came out only us cool people even new what p2p and mp3 were. Being able to "listen to mp3s we had leached from p2p on our RH5.1 boxen running the experimental gnome-0.3 that came on the cd-iso" was what set us ahead of the rest that christmas.
On another a
Not particularly memorable... (Score:2)
Of course, I was downloading MODs well before then. Can't imagine what the first one was. Something starting with a number probably since I'm guessing I found an FTP archive and typed mget *.
1994 (Score:2)
It was definately not something that was pirated off a CD. Rather, the sysop of one of the local Amiga BBSs introduced a number of mp3s as an alternative to the
Children by Robert Miles... (Score:2)
That song was the first one we could get to.
Europe - Carrie (Score:2)
That's when I discovered that my 16-bit Sound Blaster Pro 2 card was really only 8-bit sound, because I noticed that my laptop (which had a true 16-bit card) sounded FAR better than my desktop machine. I hadn't used my desktop's sound card for anything of value before, so I never noticed how bad it sounded.
(This was 1999. Being in college and grad school, I didn't hav
I remember... (Score:2)
It was funny because my suitemate showed it to me and I thought "This is cool, but why would anybody want to do this for CDs that they own already?", what with my brand new 2 gig Maxtor drive (on sale for the low low price of $299), I couldn't really imagine storing much music.
Several hundr
The beatles (Score:2)
downloaded from a website. The file was called 04,mp3 and loopedhalfway through, wow that was a long time ago, i still have that file on my harddisk having transcended about 6 harddisks happy days
Metllica's entire collection (Score:2, Funny)
(I'm kidding of course)
well it was (Score:2)
Re:well it was (Score:2)
This was back in 97. I think I found it using Scour (back when scour was just a list of spidered SMB shares) or some kind of web-based search (*). I used the Fraunhofer MP3 player because Winamp was too slow on my p-133 with Win95.
(*) Anyone else remember ducttape.deeznuts.com?
Hmmmmmmmmm.... (Score:2)
Can't remember first MP3 (Score:2)
I found that there were no programs that automated CD-ripping->mp3 - so I compiled the first program ever to do this automatically. It was called CD2MP3, and it wasn't GUI.
I spent hundreds of hours on the bulletin bo
I don't remember my first mp3... (Score:2)
The mp2 was: I Mother Earth-One More Astronaut.
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here...IIRC (Score:2)
Vertical
Abba: Dancing Queen (Score:2)
the first time I heard about mp3 was from a coworker in 1996 who was always going on about random new tech -- like firewire and this new tech to compress CDs to 1/10th the size.
the first file i downloaded was abba's dancing queen. i've lost my mp3 collection twice since then, and i've redownloaded it both times just for nostaligia's sake. i had heard some people complaining about the quality, but i thought it was very good (and still do...).
i've gone through a couple different players (and OSes) since
first MP3 (Score:2)
Played with YAMP on a P200 MMX Win95 in December 1998.
Up till then I only had Midis and Mods and a few Wavs recorded off the radio at 8bit 22khz.
It was legal whatever it was... (Score:2)
I don't recall what it was. I do recall however skipping several songs I wanted because I could not be sure it was legal. Eventially I found demos from the artist's web page, and I downloaded those.
I prefer music from small artists, and I try to support them whenever I can. I suspect several of my CDs had a production run of under 10000, and I know for a fact that some it was much less. They aren't making much money, but I like to encourage them to make more real music and money always helps.
If I recall correctly (Score:2)
Nowadays, I have about 2500 tunes on my main Mac in the house that I sync to an iPod. I've probably downloaded no more than a dozen or so from P2P services, tops. Most of them are ripped from my old CD's, and I've probably bought about 4-5 singles and 5+ albums from iTMS since it ope
Fruheads unite (Score:2)
Nick Cave (Score:2)
Hrm. (Score:2)
I remember downloading .mp2 files from various Animes in the mid 90s.
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.
mr bungle (Score:2)
Rage Against the Coffee Machine (Score:2)
One Week (Score:2)
The first MP3 I had, I encoded from MTV using SoundJam MP and an RCA->1/8" jack converter on my Revision A iMac. Can't remember what it was though.
Noam Chomsky lecture (Score:2)
I don't download MP3s because the sound isn't all that great. My kids have, and I've listened. It's isn't better than FM, and for some complicated music (including hard rock), this isn't enough.
Re:Noam Chomsky lecture (Score:3, Insightful)
First MP3 (Score:2)
Homer Simpson,
He's the greatest guy in history.
From the
Town of Springfield,
He's about to hit a chestnut tree.
D'oh!
It was the only 22mhz MP3 I could find, the only one that would run on my computer at the time.
For the love of... (Score:2)
I too used WS-FTP and Winamp 1.0 to download- of all things- Cotton Eye Joe.
(No, this isn't a troll)
first mp3 (Score:2, Interesting)
I joined late (Score:2)
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.
My first MP3 downloads (Score:2)
So take that RIAA - I downloaded 4 songs, and it led to two CD sales.
MP3 trading in BBS systems (Score:2)
First MP3 upload (Score:2)
My favorite band hand a long-anticipated album coming out, and I had gotten a review copy about a month before it hit the shelves. What's a geek to do, except review it? I put together a little webpage and recorded 30-second snippits of each song, and then uploaded at 28.8k... ta da, people could hear the new direction the band was going in. This was a few years before Amazon started having samples, so it was kindof unique.
Although it used an MP3 codec, it
BG (Score:2)
Some Chinese classical thing (Score:2)
Hurt. NIN. (Score:2)
not MP3... au.. (Score:2)
Mine... (Score:2)
Mission Impossible Theme (Score:2)
domo arigato (Score:2)
Stairway to Heaven (Score:2)
Incidently, the first copy I got wasn't very good quality especially right in the middle. I've downloaded it twice since then and I either get the same crappy copy that's been swapped around like a cheap whore or that's how the original was recorded.
--D
p.s. Second song I downloaded was "Vid
1996.. (Score:2)
I also burned the two windows mp3 players that were available at the time, musearc-4_0_beta.zip and winplay3.zip. This was way before winamp.
-molo
i'm more old school than you- mp2 (Score:2)
The first mp2 I downloaded was a remix of David Bowie's "Heart's Fifthy Lesson" from the truly incredible "1. Outside" album. I don't know anyone else whose first downloaded song was an mp2, but I'm sure there are some of you out there. I believe the year was 1996.
David Bowie, unlike most artists, is very forward thinking. One could write a long essay about this, but even back then he saw the value, the way it cou
"Winamp, Winamp..It really kicks the llama's ass." (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Winamp, Winamp..It really kicks the llama's as (Score:3, Informative)
Billy Preston (Score:2)
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 ?
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:The good ole' Napster days (Score:2)
Am I the only one who can no longer hear this song without seeing Will Farrell' belly flopping around as he wails on a cowbell?
"I got a FEVA! And the only PRESCRIPTION....is MORE COWBELL [geekspeakweekly.com]!"
Re:Never downloaded any! (Score:2)
Re:My Very First MP3 (Score:2)
Re:Sir Mix Alot (Score:2)
When a girl walks in
with an itty bitty waist
and a round thing in your face,
you get sprung...
geez... I can't believe I know the words to that song...
Re:Scour! (Score:4, Insightful)
52-21
47-22
I suggest you delete that mp3 and start singing this song:
Fight On for 'ol SC
Our men Fight On to victory.
Our Alma Mater dear, looks up to you
Fight On and win For 'ol SC
Fight On to victory Fight On!
Re:LAN downloads (Score:3, Funny)