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Let's go back to '96...

You ripped CDs with Christoph Schmelnik's Digital Audio Copy (DAC) for DOS because well, ripping under Windows 95 just didn't work.

You probably had a Pentium class machine at the time, because if you didn't, the MP3s would skip while you played them. While you probably had realtime playback if you were lucky, encoding MP3s with L3enc took forever.

Chances are, you still had some computers running Windows 3.1 (hey, Windows 95 wasn't used by everyone back in '96) so you used WinPlay3 to listen to your MP3s.

You probably did not have broadband back then, so you had to pick and choose your MP3s carefully. alt.binaries.sounds.music and search engines like oth.net (amazingly, still around!) were places to find MP3s. If you happened to have access to AOL back then, you could use AOL's "download later" feature with FTP sites so that the file would first download through AOL's fat pipe and be temporarally stored on AOL's server, so your download would continue even if the FTP site went down. Of course, if you had an ISP that gave you shitloads of shell space, you were lucky too.

Now my history is a little fuzzy, but I seem to remember CD burners EXISTING back in '96 but costing an incredible fortune. No one had them. So what to do with all these damn MP3s? Well, you kept them on your hard drive, or put them on Zip disks. Want to listen to songs you downloaded away from your computer? You recorded them via an analog connection from your soundcard to minidisc or cassette tape. Hi-Bias (chrome/metal) tapes really didn't sound that bad. I think I still have some cassettes with some oldschool MP3s on them.

I still remember the day I brought over my external Zip drive to a friend's house to show him MP3s. Yup, in true geek fashion he got really excited about being able to listen to near-CD quality audio that took forever to rip, forever to download and forever to record to tape. His father, wasn't impressed and shrugged it off as pointless. I wonder what he thinks about it today.

I still have the first MP3s I downloaded... Leeched it from the alt.binaries.sounds.music group and I'm sorry to say, it was the Macarena by Los Del Rio. I think I can forgive the 16-year-old version of me for that one.

For really weird or rare stuff, I check out oth.net. It's a search engine for ratio FTP sites. Some of them are scams. Ignore these. Also good for music videos.

--grendel drago

Oth is the FTP media search site. Most sites indexed on AG's FTP search are also indexed there, as well as sites garnered from IRC and ratio traders. Highly recommended, its what I mostly use now.

And do you know what? This will flop. Terribly. Why? Because the same people who have been shouting that they'll pay for music will, in the end, not pay for music.

In my case, it'll flop because I don't even have a Windows partition, and I don't see any Liquid Audio players out there. When I first read the /. summary, I thought: GREAT! Finally high-quality mp3s of entire albums! This is what I've been waiting for! Then I read the article. So much for whipping out the ole plastic-o-matic credit card.

...

Of course, I probably would've made the whole collection of albums available through FTP or Gnutella, but that doesn't mean *I* wouldn't pay.

Back to AudioGalaxy's FTP Search. It doesn't even need Satellite. However, it might be RIAA's next target, right after other FTP search sites.

Hey, in my day we used mp3 search engines and FTP,like Oth.net

> ... Napster is now only of historical interest

distributed systems like gnutella and its clones don't scale and are too slow to be of any use on the Internet. FTP has gone down the tubes in the last few years. Even though such sites as oth still exist, getting music is still very difficult on FTP. I don't see how newsgroups / IRC will help much, since they are not automated.

I think most people that have used napster and FTP and gnuetlla can tell you that napster really was the best method of obtaining mp3s at one point in time. I am hoping that Napigator / opennap takes off though.

As some above have said, (and I'm not trying to be redundant) there are many other places to get MP3s, most of which existed before Napster.
Oth.net used to be an amazing source for them by listing searchable FTP sites full with albums and singles. There's always other less dependable websites like AudioGalaxy.com and LycosMP3. There are all BIG, well-known WWW sites, which, although not quite 100% reliable are well established. This does not cover the thousands of pages you can find if you go to Hotbot and search for 'mp3'.
Then, of course, there's IRC. Here again, there are hundreds of communities across dozens of servers all working on one thing: getting/trading MP3s. (My recommendation is to try some of the IRC servers on the Eris Free Network).
Then of course, you've got other Napster-like clients like GNUtella, FreeNet, and Globalscape's CuteMX (most of these share more than MP3 files).
And college students will always have the trusty, reliable LANs where students share their large collections.

Ok, so you knew this already. Bottom line: MP3 is not going away, not now, and especially not at the hands of the RIAA. If they are only half as smart as their lawyers are blockheaded, they would work with some of these companies, as well as organizations like the Frauenhoffer Institute to develop a replacement for the MP3 file format. One that maybe sounds twice as good for half the file size, so you can get 320kbps encoded songs for 3MB or so. New technology is the way to fight MP3. If enough people think it's worth it to pay $0.50 for a song that sounds twice as good and can be downloaded in half the time, guess what? They'll be more likely to get that song as opposed to an .mp3 file. Relatively secure encoding already exists. The band Phish released MP3s that you could listen to for free three times, then a window popped up that reuqired you to enter a credit card number and pay some small amount of money to continue listening to the song (apparently, an executable was appended to the WAV file before it was encoded... You couldn't remove this prompt, or extract a WAV file with WinAmp).

If Lars is reading this, spend money on getting new media developed, not on paying your lawyers. You may win against Napster, but not against MP3.

Sounds reasonable to me. At least you're not having to do an oth.net search for the songs, only to find out you have to upload something to someones ftp directory, search through pages of adbanners for nonexistant passwords, or be forced to watch horrific sex scenes!(sorry couldn't resist).


mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.

Does anyone know how the *nix port of Napster is going? I remember reading that one was underway but haven't been able to find any news on this since they redesigned their site... Would solve most of the Pr0n-War3z-mp3 page problems for me. OTH is a pretty decent ftp search site, BTW...just do a search and it will tell you up front if it is a leech site or a if it is a quota (marked with a ?).


mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.