I still have songs from the early piracy days that were obviously not the artist I was trying to download. I’ve not identified a couple of them, even to this day.
Does it say Weird Al?
I remember every parody saying Weird Al, and online campaigns to have people label things “Not Weird Al” so it would still come up in searches but people would know it wasn’t actually Weird Al.
if you give it to AI you’ll get an answer that’s also incorrect.
Worth running them through musicbrainz Picard scanner. I think most from that era will have a signature added to he db. (Assuming you’ve not tried this.)
Metallicock! 🤟
I would give anything to go back to listening to music on limewire. Download times be damned. It was a simpler time.
Soulseek is the current best alternative for music downloading. No viruses disguised as music, afaik
No viruses disguised as music, afaik
How would that work? For games or software in general, something executable, I get it, but content beside mind blowing proof of concept, I have a hard time codecs can be hijacked so that such a payload gets to do anything via e.g. VLC or mpv.
Back in kazaa/limewire times, search for any music would always return a bunch of .exe files, like
Metallica - Fade to Black.exe. A lot of people learned the difference between file extensions the hard way
nicotine+ is fantastic
Exactly. If you want to go back to pirating songs, just pirate songs wth.
You can by opting out of the current machinery of music.
I buy CDs and digital music on Qobuz and Bandcamp, and immediately archive it. Instant high quality lossless FLAC. Upload it to my own server and I can stream it on the go if I want. But for now, I also duplicate the effort by syncing the local files to my smart phone. I have complete and total authority over my music purchases. The simple time is now.
On another note, I’ve been thinking about resurrecting my iPod Classic or possibly my iPod nano. The rectangular yellow one. Loved that thing.
Refurb IPods with upgraded batteries, Wolfson DAC, and 512GB SSDs are a thing.
Qobuz and Bandcamp
Also hdtracks
There is a whole cottage industry of replacement iPod parts now. I have seen some pretty cool ones with flash storage and clear cases.
Unfortunately the Minis and Nanos are a pain in the ass to open.
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I would actually use Audio-Galaxy Satellite P2P again to find new music.
Had one of the best artist recommendation algorithms ever.
For your local music library tastes, it would first crossmatch to find other users who had the most similarity to your collection, then recommend you the artists that they had, that you didn’t.
Simple and elegant.
* As mentioned elsewhere, Nicotine/Soulseek is the modern leader for recommendations.
I remember using their website to search for songs, select them for download and having their satellite client download them for me by the time i came home.
Bear Share ftw
Only 8 viruses for 1102 songs?
That’s definitely fake
Yeah, the banner ads on MySpace alone would give you more viruses than that from a single page.
Most the XP machines I had to wipe back then probably had more lines of malware code than OS.
Feels like 8 viruses were standard with any Limewire / Kazaa install! Lol
Or you tried to download any movie and it was - surprise - Fight Club, again!
I still have the vcd of my copy of fight club. it’s such a shitty copy but it adds to the dirt and grime of the actual movie.
I remember I had a Slipknot song that had a weird audio glitch you could only hear with headphones on. Like a sudden very loud sucking sound. Scared the shit outta me several times.
Bodies_hit_the_floor_teenage_wasteland.mp3
Bodies_hit_the_floor_teenage_wasteland.mp3.exe
You also downloaded 5 offensively funny songs wrongly attributed to Weird Al.
Dr. Demento - Windows 95 sucks (Bob Rivers)
and
R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders - My Girl’s Pussy“I’m the Only Gay Eskimo”, by Tenacious D (Kevin swears it’s them)
Or that one “System of a Down” Zelda song
Link! He come to town…
That wasn’t SOAD? What about the Metallica Imperial Stormtrooper march?
That wasn’t SOAD?
Nope! It’s hilarious how many people came across it through file sharing though. That’s so cool to have this weird culture connection haha.
https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-song-but-thi-5885558
[Cross-eyed Bear Award]
You mistyped the lyrics 194 times.
Why do I miss that program so much?
I don’t. Those were some rough times, when you didn’t know whether or not you’d get the actual MP3, or a recording of a Bill Clinton impersonator selling something. These days it’s a lot easier to find direct downloads to the exact track you want, in a guaranteed 320Kbps MP3 or even a lossless format like FLAC.
Does that mean FLAC is the best file format for archiving?
FLAC or WAV are lossless so yes.
MP3 or Ogg Vorbis are lossy so better for listening on the go.As a rule of thumb, yes. Then you have purists who only listen to ripped vinyl records in 24 bits, 192kHz WAV format or people who don’t give a fuck about quality and live happily with millions of 128kbps MP3s.
It’s what I archive all my music in, so I’d say so. You get WAV quality without WAV file sizes.
When a FLAC (or any lossless) file is not available, I settle for 320Kbps MP3 (and not a single bit less). The quality is decent enough to be used in a live setting (I’m a DJ). Anything less than 320kbps, and you’re hurting treble output, which will be noticeable on high-end speakers to anyone under the age of 30.
Thank you for the detailed answer
Now that i know i can stop archiving all the available file types (i mainly was too lazy to research…)
Yooooo, I had the bill clinton ones too lol
no vpns, no antivirus software, just downloading pirated music that may or may not take 217846127841 days to download.
And a 50/50 chance of it being a virus.
Or the audio clip of Bill Clinton saying he did not have sexual relations
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This frikkin keygen is broken and I can’t find the bloody exe I need to use to overwrite the original
No… Things literally were simpler back then as information moved a lot slower and the internet was far less privatised, if at all.
Your chat logs were saved to your own local drive, not a cloud, and you could delete them. Social media was just your web page you made for free on Geocities or Angelfire. Email spam was mostly chain mail. There were no bots whatsoever cluttering the internet. And so on.
And, FWIW, there were no such things as apps. Just programs. Apps started with the smart phone.
There were no bots whatsoever cluttering the internet.
Ahem IRC…
Oh, true. Those bots were not clutter though, IMO.
Haha this thread is bringing back memories.
there were no such things as apps
FWIW, people were talking about “killer apps” for various platforms back in the 1980s.
I don’t know what to tell you. It certainly wasn’t a word I or any one I spoke to used to describe programs.
No one you knew read PC Magazine? There was an article from 1989 (and quite a few more in the early to mid 90s).
OTOH, I do agree that “program” was more common than “application”.
Mostly – your comment about “no apps” dredged up the phrase “killer apps” in my brain somehow.
Nope. I was a kid around the 80s/90s and we had no dedicated computer teachers; although universities probably had access to those types of publications. That information was pretty niche in Australia for regular people, especially kids, and we were always at least 2 years behind the US on everything.
It was just so much simpler then. Aside from the viruses.
Even our viruses were simpler. If you just learned not to click on .exe files from Limewire, you basically had the perfect antivirus.
Back when I actually used Windows I never used an anti-virus and I never got a virus.
Reminds me of a time where you could download YouTube videos by finding the link to the .avi file in the HTML source code of the page. Kid version of me felt like such a hacker.
yt-dlpftw
Fun fact: soulseek is still running, and you can use nicotine plus today. Still one of the best places for music sharing.
Thanks for the rabbit hole.
Use Lidarr with Usenet
Soulseek is more than enough when it comes to music in my experience.
But with Nicotine+ client.
Soulseek is fantastic.
Lidarr is heavily lacking for my artists, missing a significant amount of information as their database relies on cache atm, or something. Still, it occasionally downloads some stuff from Slskd. Speaking of Soulseek I find it weird that edited searching for Lady Gaga never returns results. Only for her song or album names.
I had the same issue with Lady Gaga. So weird
Bonus stat: Your dad picked up the phone 7 times while you were doing the internet.
In 2007? Damn I feel sorry for you
I didn’t get Internet until 2011 or so in the home. Then it was dial up for another few years. There was no other options where we lived since it was in the country.
Edit: we did have a second line because landlines were so cheap
yeah…I had to earn by gigabit fiber.
Oh I got my fiber last year. But in the meantime I at least had ADSL starting 2004 or 2005. In a post-soviet nation at that
I’ve been using a cable modem or better since the end of the 90’s.
I had dial up when using the music sharing software napster/limewire but I think it was like 2002. I had moved on to just torrenting albums by 2007. 2007 seems like a meme for late adopters.
My grandparents still had dial-up in 2016.
What made them decide to quit dial up?
They died
The company that provided service finally had a DSL option at their location. Though 2mbps/.5mbps wasn’t much of an upgrade over duplexed 56k in modern Internet terms especially since they were the furthest house from the node.
No one wants a phone without a keyboard. My dad is sticking with his blackberry.
I genuinely miss typing on a physical phone keyboard. Not because it was faster, but because if I mistyped I could blame myself and not my phone changing the sizes of the touch keys based on predictive word suggestions. Makes me want to yeet my phone which I can‘t do bc it‘s expensive.
Somehow it was actually my dad downloading the things and then making me burn CDs of what he got, in 2007 (Yay Nero!) To be fair, he was always downloading a bunch of stuff from our local BBSs in the early 90s, too.
Thankfully we had a second phone line just for that… my folks couldn’t get DSL until 2012, and only last year was able to move from DSL to gigabit fiber. (Both because of legislative attempts to bring better internet to rural areas, the local cable monopoly still won’t lay cable out there)
When I commented, I completely missed the 2007 part. Was thinking back to Napster / Kazaa days.
I had 128k DSL in 2007 (I think it was called iDSL or something because it was the same line rate as ISDN but could reach further than regular DSL – I lived out in the boonies).
Between then and 2019, I struggled with various connection methods: worsening DSL, satellite, and 3G). Best I managed was a cell phone signal booster and an old phone with semi-unlimited data where I got a steady ~5 Mbps at a reasonable latency on 3G.
In 2020, right before COVID hit, I finally moved to civilization and had decent cable until I got fiber 2-3 years ago.
Oh, and yeah, we had very similar broadband grants to nowhere. The fiber I got in 2022 was likely what we paid for in 2015.
Sounds like you had a rougher go of it than me, I’m glad it’s better for you now! How was the satellite, I hear the upstream and latency were no fun?
I moved out of my parents around 2003, and generally lived the city life with some kind of cable most places I went. I moved back in with my mom a few years ago though, and it was pretty rough working remotely on that 6Mbps connection. So thankful for the gigabit now.
How was the satellite
This was pre-Starlink, so kind of crappy. Bandwidth was decent for the time at 12 Mbps (I think upstream was 3?) and the latency was what it was (~900ms round trip). The draconian 10 GB data caps were what got you, though.
You could RDP in a pinch to put out a fire, but you would not want to be working remotely over it on a daily basis.
Back when it took 12 hours to download a 5MB song.
Or
PamAnderson.exewhich was indeed a self-contained jpeg, like really.PamAnderson.jpeg.exe
I have been deseperately trying to find a techno song from this era made with sounds of Super Mario bros. It used lots of samples from the water stage song. The song’s melody didn’t sound like a Mario song at all. It was trippy and energetic and almost hypnotic. I loved it so much.
I’m taking my chances and leaving this here. Maybe it rings a bell to someone in here.
Do they make a wrapped for downloading music from YT and fixing the metadata with Picard?
