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What Was the Very First MP3 You Downloaded?
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?"
Very first MP3 I had : Village People - YMCA.
... but why ???
Snirf
I wasn't even able to play it at full bitrate and in stereo on my poor 386.
#include "coucou.h"
Was Chemicals Between Us from Bush. I was all of 14 years old, just discovering napster.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Well I think we can all see why you don't want to reveal your identity.
UCLA fight song baby! Long live Scour!
No sir! I didn't! Never! I don't even know what they are! What's an mp3 anyway? Huh? Why you bringing the subject up? Maybe YOU have something to hide, huh? huh? huh?
*shifty eyes*
Daniel
Carpe Diem
But I don't download that much, most of what I listen to I ripped from my own CDs.
Karma: none (due to not believing in reincarnation)
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Switched from WinAmp to iTunes
I still choke my chicken to windows media player tho
I remember driving home and hearing a song on the radio. I just got a dial-up account a couple of days before that and as far as I can remember, there weren't any p2p networks back then. So, after searching the web for hours (using HotBot), I finally managed to find the file.
;)
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.
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.
For me, it was Sash - Encore Un Fios!
:)
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.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I Like Big Butts. o/~ and I cannot lie o/~
The first MP3 I downloaded was Don't Fear (The Reaper) by Blue Oyster Cult. I remember just how excruciatingly slow it was on the 56k modem I had at the time, but it all seemed worth it to be able to play the song whenever I wanted, at first through the Napster play but through Winamp shortly thereafter.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
I totally can't remember, because I don't download many MP3's. I prefer to rip them from CD myself.
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 logging off!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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 MP3? The last one I remember is of Aphex twin from their promotional site, and then again today from amazon.com: Garmarna.
%-)
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.
I think I lost my MP3 virginity to EMF - Unbelievable. Nothing special about it, just the first download that succeeded. The file was full of those skips and bleep-blip sounds that plagued the early days of MP3s. And yes, after some testing of different players for about an hour or two, I settled on Winamp. Still use Winamp now, though I'm also enjoying iTunes.
:)
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.
-- That tickles!
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.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
I can't remember which MP3 I downloaded first, but I do remember having a great time with Audiogalaxy. It was the best MP3 download system ever, since it let me queue up MP3s (many legal ones too!) via a Web interface, and the application would fetch this list and get it for me. In simple words, choose at home and have it done in the morning at work. At those times I only had V90 at home, but Fiber at work... :-)
My band is an official contributor to Audiogalaxy, you can still get 3 songs for free! Sorry for the shameless plug (do I smell karma burning? =)
My Stack Overflow user
...that you'd admit to downloading a Cher MP3.
... it was probably one of these three:
Doug Anthony AllStars - I want to spill the blood of a hippy.
Pink Floyd - Wish you were here
Jeff Buckly - Hallelujah
They like to hear these sort of stories.
Don't let the RIAA be your first kiss though - they use a whole lot of tongue and have bad breath.
Bring Da Ruckus - Wu tang clan
Off a AOL "private room" via a blasing 28.8.
Those were the days, white 14yr old on the families first pc blasting "Bring da motherfuckin ruckus" in the living room.
Personally, I have never downloaded a MP3. This may have something to do with the lack of soundcards in my machines at home.
On the other hand, I have written code for a MP3 player at work, as a demo for a test chip.
Ah yes, I indeed remember my first MP3 ever.
It was Dune - Million Miles From Home, 112kbps, propably encoded with Fraunhofer's L3ENC. I spent around an hour to download that with a 28.8kbps modem, from a friend with Bimodem, Telemate or Telix. Back then there was no Windows 95 available, so the Fraunhofer's MP3 player just barely decoded it on my 486DX4/100MHz in Windows 3.11 on a Gravis Ultrasound card.
Oh the days.. Even nostalgy today is not what it used to be..
It's still a great song, reminiscent of early Violent Femmes.
Of couse, I had been making MODs and tracking various stuff long before then, and even had some screechy 1 bit audio for my Apple ][+ that dated back a decade before "Hat". Hearing a case-rattling Peter Gunn or Star Trek theme (original, as that was all there was!) was cool. The best sound of that era (although it was in a game) had to be the Star Dance theme... nothing beats a high decible (you can't change the volume, and the entire case is a sounding board) scratchy 1-bit yet polyphonic rendition of the Dr. Who theme.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
My first was the opening theme from The Record of The Lodoss Wars. (Y solo prisionero, or something to that effect.) Second was Amish Paradise by wierd Al.
I Worked at a nature camp the summer before I first entered college, Lived in tents with power, was interesting, but before I Went there I didn't really listen to music much. Someone though had a tape from Family Values tour, which we watched alot for lack of much else to do there in our spare time. When I got back I found that my folks bought me a little Compaq Presario with a 333 Cyrix I belive it was, and 3 years of AOHell. Went online, reconnected to Dal.Net for the first time in months, joined #CableMP3s or something like that, downloaded Rammstein Duhast for lack of being able to think of anything better.
(Score:0, Interesting)
I used ftp at my college and transferred it to my home PC using floppies :) I bought the CD next week as I had been a Tool fan since Undertow, so I *had* to get the new album as soon as it was available, regardless of the medium.
I was using Fraunhofer's player at the time as it was the fastest and didn't skip with my 133 Pentium.
honestly, not trying to get +5 Funny here, but
"My name is Lihnus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux Lihnuhks"
the first song i ever dl'ed.....nirvana smells like teen spirit, still my fazv song of all time
world's biggest red bull drinker
Very off-topic but after my last post I surfed to Tooldiscography.com and noticed the following:
"SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE... Doom 3 game (PC) (1 original song) Mar 01, 2004"
The reason that I don't remember is that I couldn't listen to it. This was very early on in '96 or '97, and there still weren't any mp3 decoders for the Mac at the time. Thus, into the trash went the file (which surely would've come down via Hotline). Not too much later there were non-realtime decoders that could be used to convert mp3s into something easier to handle, like mp2. And eventually real mp3 players began to show up, and these files that were rapidly becoming popular finally became useful.
At least storage wasn't a problem back then, as I had probably a 2GB hard disk at the time. (Just moved my music from an 80GB drive to a 120GB drive, but then I'm mostly ripping to lossless codecs now)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The earliest I can recall was about 3gb worth of Pink Floyd stuff off of a private FTP site where everyone traded warez and full album MP3s back in 1996/1997. It was far superior to Napster and the various incarnations of p2p systems where you can't trust that the file you think you're downloading is really the one it says it is, that it's squality, that it will complete without dying, etc.
Miss those days.
Eskimos in Eygpt Mix by Headless Chickens. The CD was so hard to find and the single was long gone, so I asked my sister how to download from Audio Galaxy. This was back early 2002. The following month, The Headless Chickens released what they call their "ChickensHits" with that particular track.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
My first was 'Girld Just Wanna Have Fun' by Cyndi Lauper, again back in '98. It was my first year at Uni, large amounts of bandwidth and, back then at least, loads of FTP sites with MP3s -- I still have a gFTP setup with a mp3:mp3 user from those days.
Disclaimer: I have never downloaded music and anyone that says so is lying!
Rich
Wasn't even music. I was trying to find Abbot & Costello's Who's on First routine. I was into collecting MIDI and WAV files at the time, and saw something about a new WAV compression format called MP3. The article had a sample of a 300 second audio file which was only 600kb, drastically better than any wav file I had at the time. The quality was pretty good too, so from that moment on, I was hooked.
Sometime after that, I heard of a program called Napster that let you download mp3's of songs, and the rest is history.
If you can read this then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
...back when I was 10 or 11..:D..
:D
I remember reading about this snazzy new app that let me get "any song I wanted"..I HAD to have this wonder-software!..Immediately Napster was on my P1-200 with 32MB of RAM..I think the first song I downloaded was by Kidrock: Cowboy...I think it was...don't ask, I was 10 or 11 and very impressionable by my high school friends..:P
I remember asking my friends at my elementary scool if they knew what it was and it turns out I was the first 5th grader in town to get any song for free! heh.. (small rural town, mind you)
Illegal? Sure. Immoral? Iffy. Fun? Definatly
Wel, hey, that's my submission..
nothing.can.stop.me.now
I had the same CPU in my first computer as well. I was kinda bummed when I found that it was only 150MHz, but I had a friend with a Pentium 166MHz, and there didn't seem to be much of a speed difference. I loved that old computer, it worked great for years, well after we got our first P2 and P3. I think it finally ended up getting sold in a garage sale when we moved into a smaller house without enough room for extra computers.
If you can read this then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously"
What was the first mp1 or mp2 you downloaded? :-)
:-) Multitasking with anything else was unthinkable.
:-)
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 someone here even had some of those?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Peaches - The Presidents of the United States...
July 1998
how long until
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 alarming note I vaguely remember that "Believe" might of been my first mp3 I downloaded. (should I post this anonymously?)
Elivs
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 *.
I'm quite sure it was 1994, but it could have been 93 or 95 too (my most active BBS days)
.mod format which was dominating the Amiga music scene. This essentially means they contained music someone had produced on his Amiga and distributed in much the same way demos were distributed - primarily to show off that they were cool :)
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
May we live long and die out
I downloaded my first mp3s over a college LAN. If I remember correctly, I download three albums from a friends machine. Red Hot Chili Peppers, No Doubt, and Pink Floyd. We would rip CDs we owned and share them across the network. Aaah , 1998!
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
I was at college, and happened upon a thread discussing MP3s, where to get them, etc.
That song was the first one we could get to.
I downloaded it to try out mp3s (I was really looking for "Piano In The Dark" by Brenda Russell and Joe Esposito, but I couldn't find it).
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 have a lot of money to spend on upgrading my computer - at that point, I had a K6-2 333 machine that my brother gave me. The laptop is a Pentium 133.)
--RJ
1996 or 1997, it was "Ready to Go" by Republica... and yes, I had the CD already, thank you very much. By summer I had an entire CD-R of MP3s. Can you believe it? (aside: that CD-R cost me $5 in a lot of 25... ouch)
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 hundred gigs of storage later (at $1 a gig), I can see reasons for it now.
1. Submit to Slashdot
2. Subpoena IP addresses
3. File lawsuits
4. ????
5. Profit!
The beatles - she loves you :-)
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
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Years ago (1995-1997) when internet access was still expensive in my country, I did not really download MP3s because it takes a long time to download MP3s. But I think the 1st one I downloaded was Hell March from Red Alert (the RTS). Hell March was the theme song for Red Alert back then. Defintely not my first MP3. My first MP3 was ripped from a CD a borrowed but couldn't afford a CD burner those days so I ripped it. Man, it took a whole day to encode a CD on a 486! ;)
Take-off every
From a quick sort on date, it seems to be... James_taylor fire_and_rain. Using crapster. Which is strange because I do not recall this. Aha, it was 2:23am that may be why.
Fnord Fnord Fnord
I had never heard of mp3s until Lars Ulrich from Metallica made me aware that I could download their studio albums for free.
(I'm kidding of course)
There\'s no place like ~
Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails to prove to my girlfriend everything existed on the net, tried out this new fanglked thing called napster and got it as it was an unavailable song at the time.
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
And regretted it ever since :)
This song was in my head for the whole summer - frightening!
"Low Rider" by War.. the good old days...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
I downloaded 'Son a Preacher' the song form Pulp Fiction.
Okay so it wasn't a 286, it was a P120 with 4megs.
Did it through a lazy 28k dial-up too...
The Awful Truth
Ironically my first mp3 was sent to me from my very non-geek g/f from college about 6 years ago, it was a band called Church of Rythm, the song was Not Perfect. I ran it in Sonique on a compaq P60 I got off ebay at the time for $50. My sister now uses the compaq (poor thing) and I still use Sonique.
A friend of mine, being a huge U2 fan, found a link to a pre-release, radio-recorded version of Discoteque. I'd never heard of MP3 and at a file-size of 4MB I figured it just must be a clip or something. Most of my music listening at that point (this was early 97 or late 96 I guess) were MODs or derivatives from the demo music scene. Can't even remember what I used to listen to it! Maybe an early version of WinAmp? It was all downhill from there.
Cher ... "Believe" ... first kiss - sounds like a crush to me.
I can't remember my first MP3. I was first year uni (1996) and read an article in a news paper about it. I download an antiquated version of WinAmp and Fraunhofer's l3enc. The number of times I downloaded MP3s at Melbourne University, and "pkzip -& -ex" onto multiple floppy disks... ;-)
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 boards at www.mp3shoppingmall.com (later mp3.com). In the time since, I have spent far more time on Slashdot though.
Oh, my miss spent youth... where has my free time gone?
But I DO remember my first mp2, yes, that's right. The standard before mp3 was indeed mp2 and while it didn't have such as high a compression ratio it was still impressive and I was blown away. Of course the only player that played mp2's at the time was Xing's MPEG Player.
The mp2 was: I Mother Earth-One More Astronaut.
Found a site that gave an address with the mp3/mp3 username and password. Using my brand-new Super Hi-speed USR 28.8k I got the album via FTP LE and played it with Winamp. All on a second-hand Gateway P-90 running Windows 95a. Played great until I tried to play it and run Tomb Raider 2 at the same time.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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 then. i never liked winamp, so i started with apollo (freeware windows mp3 player whose license only requires you to not be a bigot or homophobe). i switched to linux fulltime around then and used xmms and alsaplayer for a while. now i'm on to macosx and itunes.
but i've still got dancing queen...
-esme
The first compressed MPEG audio file I ever created/downloaded was an MP2. Yeah, thats right, .MP2 I got the compression software from ZIP, it was designed to put CDs on ZIP disks. I don't think I ever used it for that. Some time later MP3 was born. I remember the days of downloading MP3s from websites, and IRC. Those were the days. I remember when I first got my cable connection, I was having fun with my 100K/sec uploads to others on IRC. I don't think MMCable liked my 1/gig up and 1/gig down each day...
-Daniel
KD5UZZ
www.w5yj.org
Mariah Carey - Always Be My Baby
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.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
it's probably not the fist one i downloaded, but 'tis the first i remember. i was using hotline to download software, eh, shareware & freeware software, and found some jello biafra spoken word files on a server. oh joy!
just like with any entry-level drug, i have since moved on to chomsky, zinn, parenti & malcom x, but jello still resides in a secret chamber of my heart.
on a side note, i've moved from using to pushing, and run a dedicated anarchist kdx server [tiny socialist server], so that others might follow the path of rightiousness and good clean fun that is anarchy. who said mp3's aren't good for society?
f64 : dishing out justice with two fists!
It was Long Way Down by the Goo Goo Dolls.. It was 95/96ish.. Saw somebody talking about it in a channel on irc (don't recall the channel but it was efnet) and they dcced me the song.. This was pre napster/winamp days so we used wplayer3 or something like that.. It was pretty crappy but hey it beat .mods
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.
cd /music
ls -laht | tail
3.7M Dec 1 1999 Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls.mp3
5.0M Dec 1 1999 Culture Club - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me.mp3
boy that was lame!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Wow... I have all of you beat. :)
... 1997 I believe.
"Lets go hand in hand, into lovely land, side by side,..." something about stuff so bright...
Ya, by today's standards, horrible horrible rip. I still have it burned on CD from
German pop at its worst!
The first MP3 I downloaded was "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia. Until then, I really didn't put much music on my computers at all. I was an early SoundJam buyer before Apple bought the product and turned it into iTunes, though.
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 opened.
Then thing for me isn't so much how much I've downloaded as it is how quickly I took my music habits digital once I started the process. It's been literally a couple of years since I used my ancient stereo - I've used my DVD player's MP3 playback capability a few times, and other than that all the music in the house is either on my iPod or streamed off one of the computers.
All the actual CD's in the house are stashed away in a drawer down in the basement, because they've all just become bits.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I grabbed Tom Waits 'All Stripped Down' from a newsgroup out of curiosity and it was a few months later until I got around to looking at what this strange 'mp3' file was. Turned out to be two surprises at once. Tom Waits became one of my favorite artist and mp3 quickly became my favorite format to archive and listen to my music collection. That had to be '98 I think.
Spiderman by Moxy Fruvous followed shortly by King of Spain.
The first mp3 I ever grabbed was a THX trailer back in 96. It had grandpa simpson in the background yelling "turn it up!". I was instantly hooked.
Choose you future. Choose to sysadmin.
Yep, my first mp3 was a crappy recording off of KRock encoded to mp3.
Thomas Dolby - Video Killed the Radio Star, in late 97. Interesting that it was the first video ever played on mtv.
...encoded at 32kbps.
To this day though, its the longest playing-time music file I have.
I forget the exact age, but I know it was 1993 or earlier.
"The Mercy Seat" I was so happy.
NAS if I rule the world. But, the oldest mp3 I have is from 1996!!! it's a Dave mathews band song.
I am almost positive my first was from Megaman 5. I'm not sure which one, though...
I love NetHack.
I remember downloading .mp2 files from various Animes in the mid 90s.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I remember having all of 20 mp3s on my tiny hard drive and how much space they took up, they were a pain to go find too, and meet ratios. I don't remember which was the first one I downloaded, but the first I encoded was a bad rip/encode that Cardigan's song (the video had them all in a submarine, maybe) that had a recurring tick. I had to learn all about l3enc and l3dnc to get it fixed. That and Quake II or Command & Conquer networked games in class, only the ROTC profs would let you get away with it, they really didn't care.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The video of MTV fame was actually done by the Buggles, which did not include Dolby as a member.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
Since the first thing I needed was an mp3 player, my first downloaded mp3 would be the 'Winamp. It really kicks the lama's ass' mp3 that comes with Winamp. :)
I had just installed our new cable modem the previous day, over my wifes mild objections. She just wasn't convinced that we needed all that speed.
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.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
...actually wasn't from Napster, but about 2 months before the whole Napster thing caught on at my campus. I used Lycos' mp3 search to find a bunch of Beatles songs, and I think the first one I ended up downloading was a cover of "I am the Walrus" by none other than Jim Carey.
A very interesting experience indeed...it is actually close to the original, and includes Jim Carey proclaiming, "Yes, I've finally done it! I've ruined a timeless piece of art!"
Good times.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
back in 1996/97 I downloaded some faith no more and mr bungle live/b-sides from the Caca Volante FTP server. (Think it was a live version of "Everyone I went to high school with is dead").
FreeBSD for the impatient.
I believe that the first MP3 I downloaded was Metallica - Breadfan. I was just so stoked that I could find rare Metallica tunes, since the singles that they were B-sides on were long out of print, and Garage Days was impossible to find. I remember spending about an hour figuring out how to create a self-extracting, floppy spanning zip file so I could package a pre-1.0 WinAmp and the Metallica song onto about 5 floppies and give it to another Metallica fan where I worked.
It was my brother who showed me in 1998 that you could grab music from the internet. He downloaded
"Celine Dion - My heart will go on" from some box.sk site (Titanic being the blockbuster at that time). It took us about 20 minutes to do so on a 28k modem connection, so I was still convinced that it was better to buy the CD for that money.
Ironically, If I remember correctly, it was Nine Inch Nail's 'Something I can never have'. --pete
In August 1998, just before my senior year of high school, my brother (already in college) showed me how to find and download mp3s using irc. He downloaded Moon Cradle by Loreena McKennitt for me, making it my first mp3. Ironically, it was actually not the song I was looking for. I had wanted The Mummers' Dance (which was popular at the time), but I wasn't sure of the title.
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.
It was probably fall of 1997. I heard about MP3 and wanted to check it out. I did a web search, probably on Excite or WebCrawler. One of the first hits was for Rage Against the Coffee Machine, although it probably looked more like this. (Sorry, 1999 is the oldest archived page.)
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Barenaked Ladies - One Week. I listened to that song so many times...
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.
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Which I downloaded as proof of concept, heard a few seconds of to confirm that it was, in fact, a music file with an Erasure remix, then never listened all the way through. (I have since downloaded a few others.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
First MP3 i ever downloaded was Sisters of Mercy - Lucretia My Reflection.
I remember searching every website I could find trying to find a single SOM song for download. It took a while to download and was on my Pentium 133 running M$ Windows 95. Think it was in 1998 or so.
I never really paid much attention to the whole MP3 thing for a while though. It was a year after Napster came out before I even knew what it was.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
(posting anonymously because I am ashamed of the answer)
I'd like to believe that my first mp3 was something by Ace Of Base, unfortunately I am pretty sure it wasn't. I'm pretty sure that the truthful answer is something much much worse than even that.
"Britney Spears - Oops I did it again"
Simpson,
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.
The ______ Agenda
How much things have changed.
I too used WS-FTP and Winamp 1.0 to download- of all things- Cotton Eye Joe.
(No, this isn't a troll)
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Or was it Kaze No Fantasia?
a parody of that horrible Aqua song...Barbie Girl...the parody was titled "Ugly Girl" and it was exactly 1MB, I distributed it around school on a floppy disk
My first MP3 came with a couple of gig of other ones, when I leeched someone's music collection at a LAN party... and I've never looked back - I believe I still have the original ones I leeched as well.
My first MP3 was "Low Rider" by War, in late 1996 or early 1997..
:o)
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.
Space Invaders are Smoking Grass by I-F
wierd cult electro song.
My first MP3 was White Christmas by Bing Crosby, way back in 1942. It played without jitter when I upgraded from my old Zuse II to a UNIVAC.
Somebody told me that I'd probably like these two bands, so I downloaded two songs each from them. I decided I didn't like one, but the other, The Pogues, I liked a lot. Because of those downloads, I've since bought "Rum Sodomy and the Lash" and "The Best of the Pogues", and I'm probably going to buy a few more.
So take that RIAA - I downloaded 4 songs, and it led to two CD sales.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
It was my first year of university and Learn to Fly by the Foo Fighters was in daily rotation on MuchMusic. Searched high and low on the web itself, but I found a copy using our school's computer labs. Had to span it across as a .zip file on 3 floppies to bring it to my room. Did the same thing with Billy Gun's intro music from wrestling, which was at the time: "I'm an Assman".
I can't spell ripburger
Anyway, I used Macamp and found my mp3s on Hotline in the good old days before they released Windoze clients and banner servers took over. It was so tough finding bootleg, unreleased and OOP stuff on Hotline, though, and I've never really liked to DL commercially available material except to review for possible purchase. Early stuff included indie stuff I couldn't sample elsewhere (Amazing Grace by Ani Difranco was an early DL - she's profited nicely from my illicit mp3 use; Rodan; crazy japanese stuff) and just about any bootleg in which I had the slightest interest (early 80s REM, Replacements, etc) because they were free and it was all I could find that wasn't a commercial release.
Back when Decent II was still current and we were waiting for D3 to come out,
along with the trailers and things, Parallax (or was it Interplay?) released
some MP3s of some music for the game. That was my first introduction to the
MP3 format; prior to that all the music I'd downloaded was either MIDI or WAV.
I still *hugely* prefer MIDI for instrumental music; assuming your sound card
is decent (not some onboard junk with no advanced wavetable), it sounds *much*
more like real music. With a *good* sound card, it sounds like it was played
by an orchestra and recorded, i.e., CD quality. MP3 on the other hand sounds
approximately like JPEG looks -- ugly.
For vocal music, I use WAV format pretty much exclusively. (This makes
downloading fairly impractical, but I get the CDs and rip the songs I want
and store them on a hard drive. It's amazing how much music you can fit
on a 30GB filesystem in full-quality WAV format if you only rip the songs
you actually like.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Does anybody remember ::Blex's Page of Good MP3:: ? Before Audiogalaxy came along and supplanted everything with its Remote Queueing Goodness I always hit the FTPs listed there. Updated everyday like clockwork.
For that matter, does anybody remember hassling with ratio FTP sites? Am I the only one who actually used something along the lines of XFree86.src.tar.mp3 to get a big ratio credit?
i remember it now, i was 12 years old and i downloaded days of the new - touch peel and stand. even though i had a pc unable to play more than a few seconds at a time without rebuffering (486 33mhz?) it was still really cool and the best sounding audio i'd heard on my pc, aside from cd's.
I remember it was pure crap and I don't talk to the person who DCC'd it to me anymore.
.mod and .xm were superior. Even MIDI.
I remember that I thought MP3s were stupid, and that
Why would you waste 3 whole megabytes on something that you could get for a couple a KB? I hated those wasteful assholes.
Now that hard drives and download speeds are actually fast enough/big enough for the size of MP3s, I complain instead about people who encode fansubs at 300MB for 20 minutes- when 75MB will do just fine! I hate you wasteful assholes!
I'm sure that in time, I'll be complaining about people who encode 3-terabyte realities, when a 500-gigabyte Half-Life 4 map will do.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Aside from maybe noodling around with a few sound effects, the first one of note was part of the radio drama of Douglas Adam's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Sadly a dead hard drive before I bought a burner relieved me of a fairly neat mp3 collection :( I don't have time or energy to muck with file sharing these days. I miss Napster :(
BW
I think the first one I created was Catatonia - Road Rage on a P90 which was about 3-4 real time. First downloaded was Mark Morrision - Return of the Mac. I also did my first network with a serial cable between a P90 and P450 and it wasn't fast enough to keep up with the playing :)
rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
In 1996, 1997 just before the BBS scene died in my area many systems accepted MP3's. So I traded mostly TOP40 of the time. MP3's with 8.3 filenames were weird... I can't remember which album was the 1st one I downloaded but I remember listening to No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom in '96 a lot with my P120 and DosAmp. Later when I discovered the net in '97 converted to Linux (I tried with DOS at first, there was a DOS port of pppd and some weird TCP/IP stack and even a graphical WWW browser and I did manage to get it all working with my ISP but for some reason, it just wasn't enough so I went with Slackware 2.x :) and switched to mpg123 which I still mostly use, along with iTunes.
was Frank Zappa's "The Illinois Enema Bandit," all thirteen minutes of it. Agonisingly slow on a 28.8k modem, but worth the wait. I still have it. And like the guy who said he downloads movies then buys the DVDs, I do the same with music. It's unfair to expect music for free.
Software, however, is another matter entirely >=D
Which begs the question, what was the first warez you ever downloaded?
Actually, I uploaded MP3s way before I downloaded.
.WAV format... I wonder if this has kept me from being contacted by overzealous RIAA robots who don't any fair use could be possible.
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 was still in a
It's a cool band. They left their label and started their own, using their website to better connect with fans (tour diary, exclusive cds, etc.) and touring a lot... so far so good, it seems.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Blind Guardian - Into The Storm.mp3 RAWR!
no text, :D
Last year. After I got the Palm Zire 71 that will play them. Some Chinese classical music, but don't remember what.
I don't remember that far back. Probably Limp Bizkit - Nookie :eek:
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
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. 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 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 in a wide variety of formats, including (of course) MP3 for several years now.
Not sure if this is the first one I downloaded, but the first MP3 I burned on to a cd was Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt".
I'd better post this as AC since it was a Metallica song! I downloaded "One" at college in late 1997/early 1998. I just went and did a web search and actually just found a place on the web where someone had it for download. The download over broadband still took hours and hours because it was evidentally a dog slow connection.
I still have that file! *snif*
Blur's Song 2, from a page on Starship Troopers the movie. (It was used in the ads.)
the very first one i got was Elton John - Candle in the Wind '97, so my mom could listen to it on my fancy pentium 150, which was fully capable of playing it back full bitrate and all, however, encoding one mp3 took about 14 hours.
"possession"
downloaded a MOD/S3M of it first, no less.
Yeah, for me it was the beginning of a new musical era (goodbye pop ;)
One downloaded MP3 with a tremendous effect: until today I purchased over 10 original Nine Inch Nails albums.
Music Industry, think about it.
Those who are possessed by nothing, possess everything. Morihei Uyeshiba
Anyhow, the funny thing is I dug out the CD-R a few months back and it still works flawlessly, so I loaded up Cool Edit Pro and set about cleaning up, remixing and remastering the entire collection. I ended up with a 2-CD set, complete with cover art, spray-painted CD-label and liner notes - quite a limited edition :). I mailed a copy out to my old bandmates for a surprise Christmas gift - they shit their pants when they opened it.
Sure enough, the CD-Rs were mostly unplayable - they just don't make them like they used to and they didn't hold up to sitting in a cold mailbag for a few days, I guess. I ended up re-ripping the CDs and recreating the album as a web-site just so they could hear the end result of all my work.
Fortunately, I just took the web server down yesterday after I found that one of my buddies was spending too much time trying to hack into it. Good thing - I would have been temped to post the URL here and would be setting myself up for one hell of a slashdotting :)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I'm not sure of which file was the first one I downloaded, but one of them was Offspring - Pretty Fly (For a white guy). I downloaded it from some guys fserve on DALnet, and this was the way I got many of my first MP3:s.
One problem was, that the computer I used at the time was kinda old, so I could only play the songs in mono. But I thought it was cool anyway.
The player was ofcourse Winamp :-)
I'd heard it while watching the WWF (don't gag, I'm so over it) and spent the rest of the next week figuring out mp3's in general and downloading and burning in particular, plus it took me all the next work day to find it. I remember it as clearly as most people remember where they were when it was announced that Kennedy was dead. Strange the things that affect each generation... almost sad/scary in a way.
The english language is in beta. It's evolving but has not yet reached a level of usability.
It wasn't my first MP3, but the first one I downloaded was the Superbowl Shuffle from the 1985 Bears!
I wanted to taunt some of my Packer friends when I was living in the UW-Madison dorms.
Da Bears should definatly stick to football and not songs. But they do a good job at drowning out the pounding on my door from all those rabid Packers fans! They have no taste in music. :)
but papa's got a brand new pig bag, by pig bag, stands out as being in the most memorable first few.
it was at work on a p-133, and it was a collective effort between a few friends to find it on some undernet IRC channels.
for the uneducated, it was the theme to the new music on city tv in toronto. also shown on much music.
was Mustang Sally from a Web site I believe. It was only a sampler (30 seconds) to compare WAVE, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ick.
My first mp3 download was actually a lot of downloads. Back before I trimmed my MP3 collection down to only legal tracks. I found out about Napster. Downloaded everything I could get my hands on. For weeks I saturated my dial-up connection while I was at work.
Pretty Pictures!
Back in 1997, I found a website that had the Mission Impossible Theme in mp3 and I downloaded that and Winamp 0.5 or something on a high school computer. I used to run the comp labs so it was a computer in a teacher's office that had speakers. Next was That Thing You Do from that Tom Hanks movie followed by the first 8 seconds of Robert Miles - Children. The problem of course was i started playing Children as it downloaded and just minimized the window, turned off the monitor - Winamp was on repeat. I came back to find an annoyed head of computer's dept teacher (with a headache) yelling "how the hell do you turn it off?". At least I was right in saying that mp3 technology would revolutionize music on computers.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Embarrassed that I remember it. Early 1994, Primus's "Hello Skinny/Constantinople" MP2, from the IUMA when it was an FTP site, downloaded on a 14.4kbps modem to a 386/25. And then split into a multi-file ZIP on floppies.
Mr. Roboto!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Mine was the Foo Fighters Ever long on winamp 1.x (1.62 comes to mind as the version) running on my P1-133 with 64 Meg running NT4. I gotten the file off of my buddies net. I got it for more of "wow this is cool shit" than "oooooh foo fighters". I can still rembr my screen with Winamp playing it back and the title scrolling across the screen. Kinda funny to see this on slashdot, since on weds night, i was driving home after along day, and sure enough that song was on the radio when i turned the tunes on. It brought back alot of memories
I'd never heard the song and don't like the band, but obviously had heard the Wayne's World references. I wasn't about to buy a whole album, either of them or a rock compilation, and none of my friends had it...
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 "Video Killed the Radio Star"... I felt it was somehow ironic. Somebody should remake it as "Digital Audio Killed the Music Biz"
:)
iTunes
java guy, tech blog...
Back in 1996 on the college dorm connection, it took me and a couple friends about 2 months to download enough mp3s to make a cd-rom. We found someone with a brand-spankin-new 2x cd-rom burner (but it really only worked reliably at 1x) and off we went.
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
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
anyone else here start their electronic music collection before mp3s, rather with mp2 files?
:)
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 could change the music industry. These mp2s were legit, legal downloads, offered on his website.
But if you're going to be a stickler, the first mp3 file I downloaded was a Wumpscut album. Dont' remember which one. But unlike the mp2, which was bigger in size and lower in soudn quality, I couldn't play it on the 486sx/25 that was the family computer.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Yeah.. my first mp3 has to be the one that came with winamp.
An old and rare Billy Preston track called "I wrote a simple song". It's ironic that the song is about the greed of the music industry. I only had it on the b-side of a 45 from until that point.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
hear it here.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
On a side note, the oldest usenet post mentioning MP3 seems to be this one : 1995/07/24. Does any archaeologist have older references ?
Back in '95 (or was it '96?) a friend in my high school class said he downloaded this new cool thing (he didn't really know what it was, but its .nfo said it was hellof cool) from some pirate BBS. .nfo detailed how to rip and encode mp3s with it. :)
It turned out it was an early mp3-encoder. The
So I ripped away, "Iron Maiden - Somewhere In Time" was my first subject. So my first mp3s where actually legal since I owned the CD
I was baffled by being able to get the size of the soundfiles down by about 90% but still being only barely able to tell the difference from them quality wise.
Funny that Anonymous Coward says, "WS FTP LE is a distant memory but Winamp is still my player of choice." I will never stop using WSFTP_LE! Why mess with perfect simplicity? As for Winamp, I still use v2.87 because it's absolutely free and it works perfectly.
As for my first MP3 download, I'd have to say it was 1999 (yeah, I was a late one!) when I was working at www.tteam.com and I used my WSFTP_LE to log onto my friend's WAR_FTP server and brought down album upon album of import metal albums that he talked endlessly about.
These days though, I'm over it. I download an album from that same friend every now and then to burn a copy, but I stopped using any P2P program because of spyware, adware, and fear of RIAA subpeonas.
All the RIAA has accomplished by their legal mess is alienate consumers of all ages, bankrupt some poor kids and families, and force MP3 swapping back into the underground of FTP, IM, and even snail-mail!
Through my very small network of online friends, I can get a copy of just about any album I'm interested in hearing, and many Slashdot readers probably feel the same way!
Obscure but true. The first time I dared use a Uni account to find an MP3 was for the title song from an Indian / Bollywood movie called Haathi Me-re Saathi (meaning approximately Elephant Along With Me, or [My] Elephant Alongside Me) {actual speakers of Gujrati will note that I inserted "My" in there} which I remembered seeing as a youngster in India. Hadn't heard the song in >30 years. Certainly can't find a CD of it in the states. Certainly haven't found a video (cassete, VCD, DVD) of it ever. It was funny for my brain to hear a song it hadn't heard in >30 years and recognize the portions as so familiar.
Smashing Pumpkins - 03 - Today.mp3.
Third track off of Siamese Dream. I had the album, and wanted to compare the CD quality to compressed quality. I had a 14.4 modem and a 100 Mhz machine, and downloaded it using mirc. Played the song with winamp.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
I remember my first song being a Porno For Pyro's song. I remember the 486DX66 sitting beside my bed would barley play it using winplay 3 or whatever that stupid thing was called. So then someone on undernet suggested I install linux. From there I got my sound card working and managed to get mpg123 to play it using a bit of downsampling. After that I had to build a decent download manager to grab mp3's while I slept (anyone remeber ncftp 2?) It's safe to say that mp3's where one of the major reasons I switched over to linux.
It wasn't much later that I was taking stacks of zip disks to school and grabbing mp3's off hotline servers at about 500k/sec. The challenge was getting hfs drivers for linux. Seeing something scream across the network in about 5 minutes made me want a server of my own. Hence I started to investigate colocation and other options. Before I knew it I was working installing linux machines for various places. Mp3's took a back burner and now I'm using iTunes for all my music. All my CD's are encoded in high bitrate AAC's and I buy the songs I want using akami's great network.
So it's safe to say that MP3's actually did fuel invocation and growth in this nerds life. The funny part was in the beginning it was mainly about building a collection that supplemented your music CDs. The Piracy of the thing wasn't really an issue. Heck most people hosted mp3's off ftp servers that you could log into freely. Now there are groups dedicated to releasing mp3s onto SuperNova and such. I know several people who started on linux because there where no good ftp servers for windows that would handle incoming directories properly.
Oh well, now there are simply more and more people doing it so it's no longer in the shadows as much.
which happened to also be on my first CD.
I afraid I only got into the mp3 downloads late in Napsters life cycle. But I do remember the first song I downloaded. I choose a metalica song (the god that failed, I thought it was rather appropriate). Even though I own the CD, I wanted to stick it to them; you know, juvenile retaliation for their juvenile behavior.
I thought it was very appropos.
We, the unwilling,led by the unknowing,are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.--Author Unknown
Honest. The first MP3 I ever downloaded was purchased from BLEEP (mentioned on Slashdot 2 days ago). I actually bought over $15 worth of tracks and I bought another $9 last night. I am going to wait for the credit card statement to make sure the charge is correct before I buy any more.
.99 shows up I would probably abandon BLEEP immediately).
No DRM + previews + knowledge that the download will really be what you want: made it easily worth it (though if a similar non-DRM site for
I first downloaded the Smashing Pumkins album, Meloncoly and the Infinate Sadess back in June of 1997. Made me go out an buy the album a few months later. I would of never bought the double set if I had not heard all the songs and knew how good they were. }:-)
Adam Sandler - Ode to my Car
Found it on some shady mp3 website back in '97 or so.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
I had just pushed it to the server that my friends and I had set up for sharing. I turned around and downloaded it in order to test.
;-)
Samba Pa Ti
Still don't(never did) share publicly via napster, kazaa, or whatever, but the number of folks authorized to use our private server has grown. Our little co-op is actually making a "profit" with membership dues.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Long long time ago (circa '95), in some lonely dark corner of faraway India, in a dingy college dorm that I can't believe I lived in, I had this notion of opening up my 386 and wiring the speaker terminals to a pair of headphones, jack snipped off. No sound card, just replaced crappy PC speakers by regular headphones. .MOD file for the Ghostbusters theme (mod is basically a MIDI plus sounds of instruments/ short spoken phrases thrown into the header).
People put on the headphones, their eyes *shone* in wonder, and they said one word: "F**k". It was incredible.
MP3s? The first true music-swapping service was sounds.sdsu.edu, wayyyyy back in '92 or so...
I remember the first machine I played MP3's on, back around 1998, or 1999 at the latest, was my wife's NEC Versa 4080H laptop - Pentium 120 (with F00F bug, I think) with about 40 megs of RAM. Running Linux, of course. I had to scrounge around for low-bit-rate stuff since there was no way it could handle decoding and playback at 160kbps or higher. Even 128kbps might have made it get a little bogged down.
I think that was the year it was released. That seems right anyway. I downloaded a ZIP of the entire soundtrack off of IRC. My 486 couldn't even play it back without stuttering. :)
I don't remember what song my first MP3 was but it was sometime in 1998. But I do remember thinking, man this sounds like somebody threw a wet towel over the speakers.
/. posted a link to FurthurNET and I discovered lossless compression that things started sounding good. I downloaded the exact same David Byrne show in shorten(.shn) format and it blew the other one away. There was simply no comparison. (FYI There is a shorten plugin for Winamps 3 and earlier.)
.shn to .mp3. The likeness was amazing.
So I thought it must be lousy PC speakers.. tried a few different speakers, and many different downloads, some studio, some live, but nothing sounded right. And I don't mean 'right' as in 'decent', I mean right as in I don't want it to sound like I have a head cold. 2 years later I finally burned a small David Byrne concert to CD and listened in my car. STILL had the "wet towel over the speakers" effect. Or maybe more like "speakers in the bottom of a plastic bucket" effect.
It wasn't until someone here at
Now, after having countless MP3's played for me, I have no interest at all in them. When I read this Ask Slashdot I wanted to post this without being trollish. So here's an honest non-troll question set:
Did most people give up on lossless? Do you try to find a lossless recording before resorting to MP3?
Now that we can carry days worth of MP3's in our breast pocket does anyone think a popular mainstream lossless compression format is on the horizon?
I know as soon as they come out with a portable lossless player and start pumping out lossless downloads to go with it, I'll own one. The shorten format sure gets my vote. I'm not a nitpicky person, or anything close to an 'audiophile', but listening to an MP3 version of a terrific piece of music [to me] is like cooking sushi, or putting cheap BBQ sauce on a filet mignon. Just for kicks awhile back I wrapped my pc speakers up in plastic wrap and turned the volume up to compensate for the wrap. Whoala! Instant real-time conversion from
The worrisome part to me is that the lossy MP3 format is a relatively old stepping-stone technology. Built for a time when space and bandwidth were more limited. The problem is, as technology improves, I don't see many folks asking for a better format. Instead they want 9 thousand hours of downloads in a square inch. Quantity is great. But what about quality? Seriously?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
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 ;-).
Was telling a guy at work about it, and he went and grabbed it immediately.
"He hated Mexicans, and he was half Mexican. AND he hated irony!"
My first one was Ben Folds Five's Brick. It was on Napster 2.05b, and it was completely legal! I've owned Whatever and Ever Amen since the day it came out. That song is still my favorite song ever.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Beware slashdotters, this may be nothing more than an attempt by the RIAA to get slashdotters to confess in a public forum!
PS. It Was *****o by the ****h ***s
I had to span a .zip across 3 floppys to store it.
I hate sigs.
the Punk/Ska Bumblebee Tuna song (I don't know who performed it)..
:reminisce:
or it was Moog Cookbook - Smells like teen spirit... I forget now
it was in 96 or 97 tho.. good ole college years
Negativland was my first download as well. Took me quite a while to find something to play MP3 files on my Mac after I found it, however.
It had to be late 1997... I was in the library of my school with a bunch of friends.. one of them was on a PC and all of a sudden, Will Smith's "Men In Black" started playing from the speakers! I asked him what CD he was listening to... my surprise when the answer turned out to be that it was an MP3. And not only that, he also had this really funky-looking software called "WinAmp" that was playing it. From then on I was hooked. Back with my 28.8kbps modem I downloaded perhaps a dozen MP3s a day from FTPs. Nowadays, BitTorrent is my app of choice for getting albums.
I actually got it off someone on a newsgroup. Played it with Winamp. One of the best applications for Win32 ever.
Browsing around the windows file-shares at school,
:)
first one I picked up was Jane's Addiction, "Been Caught Stealing"
Appropriate, I suppose
Men Without Hats, couldn't find it anywhere. Countless gigabytes of 80s music followed.
I used to listen to NPR and PRI-BBC radio dramas as a teen. As I grew older I found it to be more convient to just download the radio drama's from public radio websites and listen at my leisure.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Mine was some Japanese song about fast cars that I grabbed from a warez list that had mp3 servers on it. I had no idea what mp3s were so I decided to grab one and download it on a blazing fast 14.4 modem. I logged into the FTP server and it said I could have any file I wanted as long as I removed it after 24 hours had passed. I was intrigued. I looked up what the filetype was on the internet and discovered that this strange little file was a song! I don't remember what player it was but I do remember the funny little tune.. it was probably mid 90's..the rest is history - since then I have consumed countless MBs of bandwidth and countless hours searching/downloading mp3s/oggs
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
"Radio First Termer" was the name of a pirate radio station run by an anonymous DJ in South Vietnam during the war. "David Rabbit" was pretty raw and raunchy but he did quite a few public service announcements, things like there's some bad heroin going around and the MPs are going to bust such and such bar.
I came across it in '96, on the venerable ibiblio.org (then sunsite). Its one of the best things I've found on the 'net and its still there.
It was actually mp2's but who's counting.
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 remember both very clearly.
First Kiss June 1992. Tammy FXXXXX, ugly girl with short hair and a bad smelling vagina.
First MP3 not sure of date, I think it was sometime in 1996 or 1997. Sheryl Crow, Strong Enough. Someone emailed it to me. I remember posting on a usenet newsgroup asking if anyone could email me a WAV or an AIFF of the file. I had no idea that MP3 existed. I got an email a couple of days later that has a huge (in those days) attachment. I was using a Macintosh at the time so I didn't really get the whole file extension business. I held on to the files long enough to email them back to myself and download them on my PC(before I had a LAN in my bedroom). It was FANTASTIC! I've been hooked ever since. Most of what I listen to is stuff that I own on CD and have ripped and encoded myself.
I still have the Zip file that contains the player that I used back then. By checking the creation/modification dates on the Zip it looks like it was in March 1997 that I downloaded my first MP3.
I haven't seen Tammy in years, but Cheryl still spends a little time in my WinAmp playlist.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's actually "_whips_ the llama's ass," unless they changed it at some point. :)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
i think my first mp3 was back in 1997, a live version of metallica's devil's dance. back then, the player was winplay3 and there were tons of fan websites with mp3s. I think one major general mp3 sites was 'boss' something. mp3boss?
I'm not really sure what I first downloaded, either, but the mp3 that made the biggest impact on me was from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. My friend played "Crazy Motorcycle Chase" for me, and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. This was just a few months after I had finished the game, and before I started importing lots of soundtrack and anime CDs. Kind of an important moment in my geek evolution, I suppose.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Late 1996 or so, I found a FTP site with some songs from Faith Hill's then-most-recent "It Matters to Me" album. Unfortunately, the 486 I was still using couldn't seem to decode MP3's fast enough to play them back without skipping. I uncompressed the songs to WAVs, but my hard drive wasn't much more uber than my CPU, so I recorded the stuff onto a audiocasette tape to listen to. I've since bought that CD as well as the three follow-ups, proving early on that the RIAA are idiots and downloads lead to sales instead of hurting them.
I'm pretty sure it was a Metallica song...
it was a Chemical Brothers track back in 1996, I only downloaded it because it was the easiest one to find and I wanted to see if this mp3 thing really worked after all.
Once I heard it was pissing them off, I had to make sure I got as many as possible and share them with as many people as possible.
F.O.Dobbs
Pavement bootlegs from the now long-dead Pavement online archive.
The middle mind speaks!
I think you mean first OGG, right. This is slashdot after all.
SAILING MISHAP
I'm fairly certain it was called Unknown Artist - Track 2. That song is bad-ass.
In all seriousness, it was probably some Metallica song from the Black Album (Cliche and litigatable, I know). It made me buy the album, though - which turned out to be both good and bad.
"Bullet with Butterfly Wings", at 112kbps, played with fraunhofer's winplay3 player on my 486.
:)
I figure that was back in '95.
(and yes, I own all their albums
I think it was Higher, but it may have been With Arms Wide Open. In defense of P2P networks: I had heard Creed was a good band but because I rarely listened to the radio I had never heard any of their stuff. After downloading a few of their songs off Napster I went out and bought Human Clay. I now own a copy of every CD they've released.
Hangin' Tough, oh yeah!
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
first mp3 i had was one i encoded myself. i remember being on efnet and someone told me some new music encoder was out and a music group on efnet was being started. I found out they were calling themselves an mp3 group forget their name though. i got sent the frahhoffen mp3 encoder beta and told not to give it to anyone. they had taken all the text out of the binary and written instructions how to use it so noone know where it had come from. i decided mp3 format was pretty cool so whois'ed mp3.com and found it was available. unfortunately i was broke at the time and i couldnt see any of my friends helping me pay for my domain buying addiction (as internic had only just started to make you pay for domains to register them rather than a freebie for 3 months) so i didnt buy it after much wondering who would give me the money and coming up with noone, and just whoised it for two weeks until i saw someone else had registered it....
meridian at tha.net
Hi, Pot, my name's Kettle. Wanna chat?
But it was an MP2, not MP3. I still have it on a backup CD somewhere.
I found it on a directory listing on some university server in Europe, IIRC. Over a 14.4 modem.
I had a DOS program that played the things. It also played MOD (tracker) files, which I was into at the time. Couldn't run it on Win95, had to boot to DOS. The sound was fantastic coming out of my unpowered $3.99 speakers.
Yay.
My first mp3 was (uh, can't place the name right now. It will come to me especially if I hear it again. I think it was bryan adams. damn electroshock hurt my memory)
but I remember my player was mp3play (by fraunhoffer) because it was the only thing that wouldnt skip on my 486. winamp? blech - looked horrible in 16 colors and who needs song seek support? losers.
yeah, after winamp got better optimized I switched to it. but for a while it was inferior speed wise to mp3play.
it was 1130 at night, my junior year in high school, i was watching conan o' brian, he did a skit where sung dust in the wind, i thought awesome song to get, 125k songs later, still one of my favorite mp3's :)
Tom's Diner by S. Vega. It's the MP3 that MP3 coding was tested against. Remember how many times he listened to it?
See :
"The Voice that Launched a Million MP3s"
I don't remember my first MP3, but I remember downloading Napster way back when it first came out because of some article in PC WORLD or something. I ran it once, didn't know what the hell it was for, and uninstalled it until I became enlightened a couple years later.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
I cannot exactly remember THE first mp3 i downloaded, i do know it was in January 1998 in my dorm room at University of Ottawa, on my then brand new P133 laptop. It was either Eric Clapton - If I Could Change the World, or some other halfway hit at that time. Napster wasn't out yet (by a few months, i beleive) so i was stuck to finding websites that offerend links to ftp mp3 repositories.
:)
:)
But what i do romanitcize about those days is the fact that all my mp3 downloading went through my 33.6K modem, taking at least 15 minutes for a 4 minute 128kpbs song. But that didnt stop me from collecting a 100 songs in a month! This was done by staying up too late and skipping a lecture now and then
the wait made it worth it for me....back then we actually had to put in effort to find the song, and time to download it! Don't we all miss that??
In 1997, I had inherited a previous coworker's laptop, and went about the laborious process of removing programs off of it (Win95) that were slowing it down. In "My Documents," I found a handful of Beatles songs. I was amazed at how clear they were for just about 3mb each.
:)
:( I'm a control freak. I want hard copies, original format.
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.
Probably the theme to the movie Mortal Kombat :-)
uuh ?
:)
mp3 = More Porn ch3r ?
uuuh... wow!!! I have files from years and never figure it.
Now I need the correct viewer to see her nake and real age o what ?
when I finish to order my catalog CDs maybe I will see ch3r naked at age of 30 something
where I can find this viewer ? for MPCh3r
I wonder why the internet is full of naked cher. (mp3)...
maybe she is beauty or is her pics are used to a alternative to test age of chips on PCs ?
LOL! sorry for this lame post. I was bored tonight
Mine was nTrance: Stayin Alive. I rarely download music as I work at a radio station. I really enjoy some of the internet radio out there as well, live 365 is really a great idea. the problem is that nobody has found out a way to wrap a good business model around our p2p systems. charge me 50-100 bucks a month and let me stream any song avalable on any p2p network. I'll gladly pay. Like netflix. Why buy movies when i can rent any movie i want for 30 bucks a month(i like the 5 movie package). If i want to see a movie again, i rent it again. I save tons on buying movies that i will watch once mabye twice. There has to be some way to wrap this around the p2p systems, or the idea of it anyway. I am a Mac users and I do like the itunes music store, but I don't see it ass the save all solution to the problem at hand.
Pretty sure it was The Trees, but it could've just as well been Freewill or A Passage to Bangkok. Sometime in my very last days of high school (1999) over a 14.4 modem (1996). Indeed, it took my parents 3 years to get around to getting online.
I don't have it anymore, as my system wasn't purchased until a year and a half later, and the 1GB drive in the old box got overcrowded in the meantime.
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
The Subgenius Hour of Slack weekly radio show.
http://www.subgenius.com/ts/hos.html
Why do you think it was called Slackware?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I'd probably post as "Anonymous Coward" too, if my first song downloaded was "Belive - By Cher". I can't see any self-respecting man/nerd, posting that.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
BAHAHAHaHaHahaha...
but the first music mp3 I ever downloaded was aerosmith-pink. and I still have my copy of winamp like 1.0 somewhere..
The first one I downloaded was a live version of The Cure's Friday I'm In Love back in the days when you could still download MP3s off the web (circa 1996 or so). It's probably been passed throuh about 6 or 7 hard drives or so, but I've still got that same file. Out of control.
If you know what that expands to, then you probably spent way too much time on IRC in the 90s. That was my first band heard through MP3s.
Don't forget about (tek|wopr).dorms.tamu.edu. Before they were shut down, you could get just about anything there, assuming you could get in. Once it got popular, the site was almost impossible to reach.
My first mp3 was a legal one. This artist had just released a 45min live act as an mp3 ... He followed shortly by releasing the first ever mp3 lp I've know of, Kobn-Tich-Ey
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...
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
But I do remember that it was from hotline. Long live the old days
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
my first mp3 was "i hate myself and i want to die" by nirvana, i had downloaded it about 3 days prior and forgotten (because it had taken so long to download) and i was blown away by how good the quality was
I didn't have a CD-ROM drive at the time. So I had a friend rip five or so of my CDs and I got them from him at the next LAN party we both attended. It was 97-98ish. CDs were Neurosis, Souls at Zero; The Butthole Surfers, Independent Worm Saloon; The Rollins Band, Weight; and I think Faith No More, Angel Dust.
Long before Winamp, which was based off of Amp the command line player, there was Winplay3. It was the most abnoxious program to get to work and keep working. Back in 95/96 though, thats all you had. Nothin like 0-day ftp sites, wsftp, and a kickin 14.4 modem to get one song in a half hour. Everything was 112 or 128k, NEVER higher, and if you found a site that let you in, you were practically screaming with delight. Those were the days.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
1995: Yes, fellows. Had long hair, Pearl Jam shirts, leather trousers and boots and spent every weekend and any single dime I had on festivals. Was drunk and stoned, times were great.
NOW: consultant job, hair cut, owning 11 suits, no festivals, no chicks, but a nice car with a nice gf.
GIMME THOSE GREAT TIMES BACK!!!!
Well the first MP3 I got was some Limp Bizkit CD i ripped... When i got the internet in 2000 The first thing i DL was Metalica - Unforgiven 2
Banzai!
And it wasn't mp3. It was a .au file on a Sun workstation. I didn't learn about mp3 until years later.
I already had the cd - I was amazed that I could download a song. This was also at that same time, my home machine (not a Sun workstation) was still using a 14,400 baud modem.
My first was Celine Dion - To Love You More.
I got it on DALnet.
And I still have it.
I am not proud.
if i remember correctly it wasn't *.mp3 music ...
...
...
...
files i started hording first. first it was
*.mid files then if i remember correctly it was
*.mod files. and the first one i downloaded
was from a BBS (2400 baud) and it was i think
axel_f.mod
what luck the op was on-line and educated me that
z-modem is better then x-modem
ran okay with 80386 and soundblaster
the program needed to play this was wow2.exe
*big grin*
http://www.portal5.co.uk/music/music.htm
The very first mp3 I downloaded was an Alanis Morisette mp3 (I don't remember which one) around 1995. It was from a fan site that posted a new mp3 each month (or was it each week?). I remember I was looking for Alanis Morisette's "Ironic" single, and until that time the best I could do was a sample 30 second wav clip.
I used to find my songs through mp3 web search engines. Then I would use wsftp to connect to the ftp sites! The first one I used was at a site at arrowhead.com or something similar.
Those were the days....
The Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats
My fisrt MP3 would have to be Million Miles From Home by Dune. I remember it well... 64kbps, mono, downloaded over a 33.6kbps modem.. Probably within two months of buying our Pentium 133. I was disappointed it was mono. I had grown used to mods by then. It was very important for music to have a small disk space footprint on a 3.2GB hard drive. \/\/\/
The day Tammy died; April 1998.
AltaVista'd the file and then had to find software to play it on my Windows machine at work.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
I think it was... Divine Limit - by Kryptonic, off of mp3.com. In the first days I found that site, I grabbed a lot of electronic music. :)
;)
December 3, 1999... a date I remember well
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
that WS FTP is, and always will be the WORST ftp program ever created. It is total shit. I can not understand why people like it.
My first downloaded MP3, and off of Hotline!
I was big into the website warez and serialz for a while, (and porn passwords) and I kept seeing this mp3 stuff.
I eventualy gave it a try and by the end of the week I was teaching my highschool teachers how to install winamp and find music on their own.
Those were the days
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
and the correct name of THAT song is Bloodhound Gang - The Bad Touch.
It's not because 'discovery channel' are the only words you understood of the lyrics, that that is really the title.
"Hell hath no fury like a hippo with a machine gun."
favorite internet radio stream.
No cash for royalties, no music.
Fortuneately I have plenty saved from that time
period.
Kate Bush - Wow (Album Version)
Sigh... happy days, 1999 brought 56k, a new fangled Mac and a neat little program called Napster
Now I'm saturated in Air albums and enough spam to win the war
WinAmp's demo mp3.
All I've had are MP3's I've burned or gotten burned on CD's by others.
It was "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" by David Bowie. One night, alone in the house for a change, I suddenly got the urge to listen to it. That happens to me sometimes - I'll get a snatch of a song stuck in my head, and it jsut won't quit until I've heard it properly.
Anyway, I know it from the closing credits of Se7en, which at the time I had on video (and now have on DVD). I didn't fancy sitting in front of the TV, fastforwarding and rewinding the video just to hear the song, so I hit my PC to find some way of buying an electronic copy. CD would be no good - I needed to hear it *now*.
After an hour or so searching, I couldn't find a single site even willing to sell me music in mp3 (in the UK, at least), let alone that track. (This was after Napster had been sued into oblivion - I was a late comer to this party).
So, remembering what I'd read about p2p apps, I installed and fired up Kazaa. Within about 20 minutes I had the song, and was able to scratch that particular itch.
That was about 18 months ago, I'd guess, and I'm *still* not aware of an online, electronic music store that is willing to sell to the UK. There's a Coke run/sponsorsed one that's supposed to be starting tomorrow, so I'll give it a whirl, but I don't hold out much hope. For one thing, my tastes aren't really mainstream enough; for another, I've heard that it'll be 99p/track, making it roughly 75% more expensive than the much-touted 99c/track that most US services charge. Somehow, that just doesn't seem fair...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Heard it in a local computer store. Was amazed by it, to say the least. Rushed home and found Winamp and "Men in Black" instantly. Having a P75, though, meant that I could not do anything else while listening.
Gee I'd like to say I first downloaded EVERYTHING by Metallica just because MP3s seem to piss them off the most but that would be just taking advantage.
That being said I'm not really sure - may have been some funny answering machine messages or a sound sample or a piece of classical music.
Prior to that though I has a very large collection of MOD music files - still have them somewhere burned to CD... was playing those on a Mac LC575 using software called MOD Tracker I think it was called - so far as I know it's now no longer being developed by its author.
I kid you not. I decided that my first download should be memorable, and it certainly was.
My first mp3 was Buffalo Tom's excellent Late at Night, after I heard it on My So-Called Life. The computer was a new all-in-one Mac (before the iMac), the OS System 7.5, and the programme MacAMP. It was August 97. Actually not much changed since then before iTunes came along.
Hanson - Mmm Bop
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
burned with my 2X burner on my K6/233... 90% of them are 128k and probably have pops because they were encoded so early...
Thank you college.
"Peer to Peer Killed the CD Store" ;-)
Seeing as how I use Linux and there is no WinAmp for Linux, I wouldn't exactly call Winamp my player of choice - XMMS all the way.
I can't remember what my first mp3 i downloaded was. I never was into it much because it took so long and i guess I wasn't geeky enough as a kid. I remember all my friends had more than a couple files. I would go to their houses and see their lists ... pretty cool, but whatever. I liked to read books.
... poor guy, think he's still using it.
... pshh, who needs it?), it was pretty cool.
But do I remember the first d/l I made once I got cable internet? Do I ever! I was in high school and me and my friend had just gotten back from the gym when the cable guy came by and threw it together. I had just built my own 800MHz amd thunderbird with 256MB RAM and a juicy 45GB IBM hard drive. He stayed until the guy finished, did a speed test and showed me the results >T1 line download. Once he left my buddy immediately went to work downloading Napster and we fetched 'lil troy - wanna be a baller.' I already had the CD, but now it was on my computer. My friend was entranced by the whole thing. Heh, his computer was a paltry pentium pro if even
I spent the rest of the night enjoying the speed (sleep
Don't know the artist, but the first MP2 I got was "Koi da! panikku!"
.AU files though...
Had to play it in Xingsound... the sideways scrollbar showed position, but it couldn't seek, and much of the time the stop button would crash it... the player was an alpha or beta with only the simplest controls. >;
Still sounded 100x better than low-sample-rate
When MP3 came out, I didn't really get into it for a while since the 486 couldn't play them smoothly, so I don't remember the first.
Especially because around 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was being debated, Cher was an outspoken advocate of copyright term extension, being firmly in the "forever less a day" camp.
But usually, only European DVD Video players can play back MP2 audio tracks. DVD Video discs designed for Region 1 must have a Dolby Digital (AC3) audio track (be it 2ch or 5.1ch or anything in between), a PCM audio track, or both. I live in Region 1, and pretty much every DVD Video title I've seen uses AC3. Discs designed for Region 2 may have MPEG-1 layer 2 audio instead of AC3.
It was 1997...Butthole Surfers "Pepper." Yup, I was allabout top 40- radio back then. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.....
My first MP3, I did happen to already have it on CD though. (A Used CD)
My Parents didn't retire their P166+ until a month and a half ago. The machine works just fine, even if the co-processor is a load of crap. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking of putting a linux distro on the computer in black-box mode. After all, It's lasted more than 7 years so far...
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
But I seem to remember it being Greenday's "Time of Your Life". Either that or Dennis Leary's "Asshole".
wow, you are a major league retard.
I've had a few 1st mp3s because i was apt to dump the contents of my HD from time to time because i a) fucked up windows 98 or b) felt like it. c) got a new system or a large upgrade...
one of those times it was Styx's Dr Roboto.
I think the first before those times was either Creep by radio head or Jump right in by the urge.
I remember using scour to find mp3s long befor napster or audio galxey. I was among the last of my friends to hop on the 1st napster bandwagon and it was on its way out soon after I jumped on.
Guess it must've been in 1994. And my poor Amiga only managed to play it in mono.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
In 1995-1996 I got my MP3's via #mp3central on dal.net.
In 1997 I wrote software for my final year at high school that was essentially Napster! It used a simple cryptographic hash challenge/response system to turn an IRC channel into a broadcast channel used to search the MP3 collections of other users. Search results were sent back to the requestor via private messages and DCC file transfers were used to send actual music. The whole system worked extremely well!!
About 12 months after I'd finished, a friend directed me to napster.com!
Spice Girls - Spice Up Your Life!!
Had never seen MP3 before, had just downloaded Winamp (been using it ever since) - this was back in something like 1998.
Downloaded the MP3 off an FTP server when I was at college, and took the file home to my Pentium P90 zip compressed and spanned across a few floppy disks.
I didn't know it would explode into what it has become now though..
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
..by Monty Python's Flying Circus, from "The Meaning of Life". Followed closely by Pink Floyd's "Lucy Leave" and "Du Hast" by Rammstein. An install of Winamp 2.04 and a program called Uncook95 is in this earliest direectory in my archive with MP3 files. IIRC Uncook95 removed the warbles from MP3s encountered when they were downloaded using primitive browsers back in the day (November 1998).
It was off a BBS back in '97,
:)
It was "Weird Al Yanonavich - The Night Santa Went Crazy".
I think I used zModem.
Those were the days
I did buy that CD, (which is mainly crap except for the single) I usually only stay on gnutella or limewire while I'm downloading songs.
Most of my CDs have been ripped, I just need to add my dad's collection.
The only thing that irritates me is the fact that my brother keeps deleting songs that he doesn't like even though there is 35 gig free.
Now all I need to do is figure out how to set my mp3 folder to be available from my website, I got to read the apache manual...
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
it was a damn good song.
I Remember that day [seriously]. Sept. 2000.
A 14 year old eight-grader, I heard a program called Napster [56K- ao hell connection at the time, ick!] when i was browsing the internet one day after school, like many of us do on a daily basis. I downloaded it...wow. A revolution became a reality. Right after, i told my friends @ school, about it [i was the 1st to use p2p there] then it came annoying when all the non-teck kids were pestering me how the hell to use that 'napster' program. I used the napster program to listen to my songs. Since that 3+ years, i've moved onto bigger and better things. [kceasy\gtk-gnutella\gift\winamp\xmms]
[How do I know or not that a RIAA Rep might use this information against me in the court of law !??!?!}
[p.s. does slashdot have to give out my personal info if some legal authority happens to subpoena them ?]
So, I stopped.
The very first MP3 I ever downloaded was the theme song from the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. (Apparently, the lyrics were written by Stan Lee.) I have a fairly extensive CD collection -- basically every CD I ever wanted -- so the only value of Napster to me was something I couldn't buy.
I would love to see someone do a decent cover of the theme song. The Ramones version is awful. My ideal choice would be to have The Shuffle Demons cover it.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
my first was peter gabriel's In your eyes
The first mp3 I downloaded was Portishead's - "Cowboys." This must have been in the WInter of 1997. I was on dial up in my little studio apartment so I had the computer in the kitchen. It took about 5 minutes to download the song, but once I started playing it I couldn't get enough. I think I spent the rest of the night downloading mp3s. As if I didn't get out enough before. :)
I remember wayyyyy back in the day I'd encode CD audio to WAV's in realtime (1x) and store them on a 6GB hard drive (back before any real well-known audio compression was out there and 6GB was a large hard drive). Of coure I thought to myself wouldn't it be great be able to make smaller files then you could play these things over the network remotely? Then came RealAudio (back before it liked to hide spyware in its software - I think anyways) and I got hooked on that. Transitioning over to MP3 I remember encoding my first song on my Pentium 166 system (and waiting a few hours for it to complete). I can't remember the exact song but it had this horrible high-pitch whine in the background through the whole track. How depressing! Then I swore I'd stick with RealAudio forever. Of course that ended up being a lie. Oh well, a nice flashback to the good ol days.
The first digital recording on a computer I remember was a disk I downloaded from the Dune BBS (Orange County California) circa 1985. It was called "Florida Jam" and included clips of songs like Tom Petty's "You Got Lucky", and Rush "Spirit of the Radio".
Man, that was the coolest thing on the planet when I heard it -- even if it was mostly static and scratch. I was just in awe that my little apple could play real audio!
I think the first MP3 I ever downloaded was Hole's "Celebrity Skin" around '98.
Google isn't coughing up any insight
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
It was early 1997. Grabbed an MP3 for Enigma's 'Beyond the Invisible'.
I forget what player I used, but I had to downsample the playing to 8khz mono in order to make it play on my 486-75. Yep, way back when horsepower was still an obstacle to MP3 playback for most people.
That was my first MP3 I played. The favorites that I've come across? Tracks by the late Bill Hicks. Man, that's some funny stuff. It's easy to see why Denis Leary stole from him.
I was still in highschool, but I remember it fairly well. I do believe that the first MP3 was Metallica's Enter Sandman; and I think I got it off oth.net (before it was linked to all the crappy ratio ftp's); then a friend introduced me to napster, then audiogalaxy, then kazaa/morpheus... but in between all of those and even today I can still find that one song that i've been dying to hear off of IRC with no problems at all.
I would never be able to remember the exact mp3, but
Phish is the first band that I traded - primarily
because it was/is legal to share most of their
audience-recorded concerts.
This is the exact same link that is in the parent post, at the end.
Rhiannon by Fleedwood Mac!
My first MP3 was a recording of "Une barque sur l'ocean" by Maurice Ravel. That was 1997, and was literally the only classical piece I could find on the internet. It sounded acceptable on computer speakers but not so good on my stereo. I devoted a considerable period of time thereafter trying to tell others about my music and trying to ensure that there would always be classical music available on the internet.
Presently that means around 200GB of files shared through FastTrack.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Metallica - One
from #mp3 on DALnet back in the day
what irony that it was Metallica...
Then 94% of the people here would said they had yet to download one. The remaining 6% would have made some natale portman references and then gotten into an argument over flac and the ipod.
But back to mp3s, mine was probably a metallica song I downloaded in 96 off a web server when you had to work to find mp3s. Back then, even napster was years away.
While looking for some U2 info in the Fall of 1996 I found an MP3 of U2's Discotheque several months before POP was released (was bootlegged of a studio tape). I didn't know what an MP3 was or what to play it with. I searched for MP3 Players forever and came up empty -- was Winamp around yet? I ended up finding an MP3 -> WAV conversion program that chewed away for over an hour on my old P200 MMX. Pure Gold! =P
For me it was some Fuel song that I dont even remember that I got off a geocities site, just looking around to see what I could find. As for the player, its always been winamp. Of course it had no skins (hardly even and interface) at the time, but Ive stuck with it...
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
Was the first one I attempted to download.
It was an incomplete download.
The first mp3 I successfully downloaded was Blur - Song 2
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts