How long are you already into MP3s?

[Aceshigh]

Back in 99 my friend got me into it. First mp3 I downloaded was "Fred Bear" by Ted Nugent.

 

[kami]

About 1 full year before Napster...so 1998?

 

[MistaTastyCakes]

1998 or so, got a ton of stuff off of mIRC

 

[BeauJangles]

Originally posted by: dighn
1997-1998
i'll just vote 1998

it was the theme music from "the rock"
still have it and love it

Best themesong EVAR!!

 

[aphex]

96-97 or so....

I remember when i first switched from listening to .mod/.xm/.s3m to .mp3

WOW

mods/xm/s3m were sweet though

 

[LeStEr]

1997

 

Like 1996. Someone had a NIN bootleg track on IRC I downloaded. I had no idea what MP3 was. 20gigs later...

 

[FiLeZz]

wish I had made better backups in the days of this stuff now my MP3z sit on 5 dvd-r's

 

[BigSmooth]

I think it was '97. I remember being in college and learning about MP3s. It was a little early in the game so hardly anyone had a CD burner, they were so expensive. LOL

I was one of the first 2000 people to ue Audiogalaxy, I remember the original beta test site and the second beta test site. That was a great little proggy, I was definitely sad to see it go.

 

[DumbGuy]

1997-98, I remember going to websites (geocities, fortunecity, etc) to download songs, LOL. Those were the days

First mp3 I ever downloaded was Song 2, from Blur

 

[CraigRT]

I started 97-98ish
and like other people have said, took a LONG time to do 1 mp3.
my PC was a P166 non-MMX. I had a really fast program that took about 30 mins for 1 mp3. (IIRC that was fast at the time)

 

[dolph]

1998, maybe 1996 or 1997... can't really remember. anyone remember oth.net? that was the best.

 

[Vadatajs]

Originally posted by: AvesPKS
Not till I got to college, in 1999.

same here

 

[aolj]

I think it was back in 96. When I first got internet and everything. It was on my Pentium 100 computer. First song I downloaded was Will Smith - Men in Black.

I remember those days, where I'd always hunt for ftp sites. Chatting on Westwood Chat. That was sooo long ago. Anyone here used Westwood Chat? I'd used to play Red Alert on it too.

It took like 45 mins to make mp3s from CD. I remember using command line based programs to encode them.

Memories....

 

[KokomoGST]

I remember messing around with MP3 and the original Fraunhofer beta player way back... I think it was in 95-96. A buncha the guys on the dorm floor got together and started collection and making our own. Yeah, hunting for ftp sites...

I was also on my P100 still while others were getting 133s & 166s... I even have my first MP3 CD from circa 1997 with all the MP3 I had up until then.

 

[CraigRT]

Originally posted by: dolph
1998, maybe 1996 or 1997... can't really remember. anyone remember oth.net? that was the best.

I remember it well... even used it fairly recently (last year)

 

[Indolent]

1996 or 1997 when it was possible to do a simple internet search with www.metacrawler.com (when it was actually good) and find the mp3's on people's webpages. No need for FTP.

 

[Atlantean]

I think its only been 4 years, but there is a chance that its been longer. I seem to remember getting napster and downloading a song that I really wanted.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

I got into MP3s because I could put all my music on $2 worth of CD-r disks (two of them) instead of lugging around a binder with about 30 CDs. In the next two years, I bumped up the bitrate a bit, and got upto about 100 CDs. It'd be more except they started copy protecting the disks so I stopped buying them, and started getting DVDs with my money instead. The only stuff I've DL'ed is the really hard to find stuff that's not in normal record stores (music from games+anime that I own)

 

[royaldank]

I've had mp3s on my computer since '97.

However, I use .shn and .flac for most of my music now. I mainly download full concerts and converting them to mp3 is generally not accepted policy among the folks I trade with (etree.org).

 

[Night201]

Originally posted by: aphex
96-97 or so.... I remember when i first switched from listening to .mod/.xm/.s3m to .mp3 WOW mods/xm/s3m were sweet though

Indeed. Some good songs there.

Also, I remember Winplay3. Remember when you couldn't fast forward or rewind. That sucked!

 

[Night201]

Originally posted by: royaldank
I've had mp3s on my computer since '97. However, I use .shn and .flac for most of my music now. I mainly download full concerts and converting them to mp3 is generally not accepted policy among the folks I trade with (etree.org).

 

[Kaervak]

Ever since they've existed. I remember a friend and I talking about how cool it would be to apply mp3 compression to files. Ahhh, the dial up days. So much fun, boy do I miss them.

 

[McMadman]

Wow, its almost been 5 years already, a friend got me started with mp3s back in 1998, i can remember giving mp3s to a friend, that couldn't play them due to her having only a 486dx4/100
I think at that time I had either a cyrix pr200 or an intel p233, encoding mp3s back at that point was still analog and took forever to rip wavs and then use a command line based encoder (I think I used audiograbber for ripping, and l3enc for encoding)


Wow, I still have a copy of l3enc sitting on my drive, they have a log of versoin history:

23 feb 94 pre beta
first limited release of Layer 3 Shareware for PCs
25 feb 94 ver 0.99 (beta)
first release of beta version

The real question now, is how many people even knew about the format back then.

It's hard to believe the way that the way the basic .mp3 has evolved, and how popular it has become.

 

[DaCurryman]

I remember I started my MP3 craze back in my soph year of HS (1996), when I first got my AOL acct (AOL 2.0), and I waited 30 mins a pop for each song to DL on a 33.6 modem. After I got all the songs I wanted out of AOL Chatrooms, I would pop in my CDs and use progs like AudioGrabber to rip my CDs....memories...