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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?"
Well I think we can all see why you don't want to reveal your identity.
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
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 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.
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
honestly, not trying to get +5 Funny here, but
"My name is Lihnus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux Lihnuhks"
MPEG (as in the video file standard) and VideoCDs use MPEG-1 Layer I audio, SVCD uses MPEG-1 Layer II Audio, and MPEG-2 files or DVD uses MPEG-1 Layer III Audio.
So they were in common use.. Just the audio stream was not common though.
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!
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.
27-0
52-21
47-22
I suggest you delete that mp3 and start singing this song:
Fight On for 'ol SC
Our men Fight On to victory.
Our Alma Mater dear, looks up to you
Fight On and win For 'ol SC
Fight On to victory Fight On!
Yeah.. my first mp3 has to be the one that came with winamp.
I was working at an ISP, in late 1996. A friend ushered me into a backroom where he had set up a computer with winamp, and showed me what he had just downloaded -- Alice in Chains' Man in the Box.
I really didn't comprehend what I was seeing. It didn't make much sense to me. I owned the CD, and I could easily listen to it on a computer, and four megabytes was a huge amount of space back then. The drive I had in my computer could have held maybe a hundred MP3s before being filled. I couldn't put it on a floppy, and CD burners weren't common yet. The only way to transfer these things was with a fast connection, like the one the office had and I didn't. Files were hard to find. To say I was underwhelmed was putting it mildly.
All that changed within a year. I ran several web based MP3 sites, and I even got a letter from the RIAA for one of my sites because it was hosting nearly two gigs of Tori Amos mp3s, came up first in altavista for "MP3 AND Tori Amos", and was doing about 10 GB in traffic a day. The letter is almost comical today, because they really didn't know the legality then and didn't know how big MP3s would become. I was lucky. Had I done it just a year later, I probably would have been sued.
If anyone ever downloaded mp3s from oubliette.org or oubliette.ml.org, just wanted to say thanks for the memories!
-------------------------------------------------
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.