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According to SonicSpot, "WinPlay3 was the first real-time MPEG Layer-3 Audio Player for PCs running Windows." That's for Windows 3.11, people. Forget the power required to run shockwave movies, most computers were barely able to decode 44.1KHz, 16 bit stereo files at the time (Pentium was a expensive luxury).

Here's WAV: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/422/projects/Wav eFormat/

See this for some other formats: http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/fileformatlist.html

An example of "rawer" would have been files in which the headers were assumed (because all snippets were the same format) - kind of like WAV without the header. 1990-ish Amiga junkies (OK, me) frequently ripped these kind of files out of game executables and then slapped headers on them to make them edible to the general population.

I hope that helps - out.

I'm as much in favor of competition in markets as anyone else, but the particular complaint you make is pretty silly.

...if you remember using WinPlay3 back in the day!

If you don't, well, maybe you were too young back then. ;-)

This seems to cover not only iTunes but WinAMP, FooBar2000, and just about any other player that can organize music and play only selected artists, albums, or genre's.

Except that WinAMP was released in 1997 and the patent was filed in 1999. Not to mention the original MP3 Player, WinPlay3, which had been released several years prior. There's nothing wrong with the current patent system, just that the existing rules need to be better enforced. The attempts to invalidate patents through a review process are the most promising to date.

Funny, I could swear I was using Cubase for real-time multi-track audio editing 5 years ago on my x86 without any problems.

Unless that 'x' in x86 was a 4, you can hardly qualify your experience as using legacy hardware. I don't know jack about Cubase, but a quick search turns up this version, which states a Pentium requirement that was mid- to low-range at the time, not horribly outdated. And if that bare minimum is what you used, yes, I imagine you were swearing quite a bit.

I like Macs and all, but sometimes you rabid fan-boys really do over-exaggerate the situation.

Exactly where was I being a fan-boy; when I suspected he might actually have a legitimate reason to dislike the Mac? Exactly where was I exaggerating; when I said that running current software on ancient hardware is a bad move? It undermines your position when you try to make a personal slam about statements I never made.

But about the other part... I am still using latest WA 2.x on my 90 MHz Pentium laptop vith 40 megabytes of memory and Windows 98 in it. I don't think it as bloated or dog slow.

And I just had to check:
the Winamp Browser (as it apparently was known back then; later known as Winamp Mini-browser) came with the second 2.x version, 2.10 released on 3/24/99. (http://www.sonicspot.com/winamp/history.html)
AOL bought Nullsoft a few months after this, on 4th of June 1999. (http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/1999/0 6/07/story2.html) I know you didn't say AOL brought the stupid browser, but I really wanted to say it did not :-)

Anyway, this truly is bad news for many Windows and Winamp users around the world.

Did you force the makers of Streambox Ripper to remove RealAudio conversion, when using this application is the only way I can burn perfectly legal RealAudio lectures to CD, or listen to them on my MP3 player? What makes you think I only want to listen to these files while sitting in front of a computer? What makes you think I'm interested in finding an MP3 player that will (ever) play RealAudio? Why did you even bother suing them in the first place, presumably knowing apps like Wiretap and Audio Hijack would do the same job, just in real-time?

I advise anyone with audio content to avoid Real if they actually want the end-user to be able to listen to it on a device or medium other than a Real encoded file on a PC. Have an interesting lecture you recorded? Publish it as a low-quality MP3 instead; at least 99% of the players on the market will be able to decode it. Hmm, wait -- isn't this closed mindedness what you scorned Apple for? I guess reverse engineering someone else's technology for wider support is okay when it meets your bottom line.

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.

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.

It would be three more years till Napster came around. I remember telling everyone (family, friends) about how this new MP3 thing would revolutionize music. I was mainly thinking streaming music, since at only 56k, the thought of downloading full albums (even compressed to 50-60MB) seemed a little far off. At that time the best there was for streaming was RealAudio, which sounded like crap (and still does IMO).

But even a few years before that... (~1994)

Ok, technically I didn't download it, and it wasn't an MP3. My Pro Audio Spectrum 16 (PAS16) came with a demo 44.1khz 16bit wav clip of the song "I need you tonight" by INXS. What I do remember is that is the first time I heard "CD quality" sound come out of my computer. Later on I tried compressing it with l3dec and noticed it performed at aroun 5x real time ;-).

On page 2 there, there is a link to "Download".

That page has a Description and a tab labeled "Download" but no link to download.

The page for the author's home page is out of business.

Looks like the RIAA beat us to it.