No, not THAT first time.

The first time you downloaded an MP3. Can anyone remember what song (or album) it was?

I know not everyone here got into the MP3 craze early, but I thought it'd be interesting to see if anyone can remember what their first MP3 was.

Mine was "Naked Eye" by Luscious Jackson from 1996. I was on IRC and an XDCC bot was offering that song, along with six or seven MP3's. The record had just come out and the single was just getting airplay on the radio stations near my school. It probably took me a half hour to download it (along with WinPlay3 from the same bot) on my dialup modem.

I have to admit that at first I didn't really see the big deal until the players got better (WinPlay3 sucked up all my system's resources to the point where if I ran anything else it would stutter.) Little did I know what it would bring about!

The first MP3 I ever heard was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It by Will Smith. Please note, I am not the type of person that would ever actively listen to such a song. It was being played in Winamp 0.7something I think. I still have Winamp 0.92 somewhere (single executable).

I think the first MP3s I made was Fantastic Planet by Failure. I used Easy CD Creator 2 or 3 (I think 2) to make WAVs from the CD. Then I encoded them one by one using blade on a command line. No ID3 tags (were they even invented yet?). I remember I filled a CD-R (2x recording ) with MP3s and played it at work with Winamp. I labeled it "The Sh*t" because that's exactly what it was.... The Sh*t.

Bon Jovi - Living on a Prayer. Downloaded in 2000.

I seem to recall that the first MP3 I ever played wasn't a song at all. It was a sound bite of some kind. And I remember being stumped by the file format, and needing to go hunt for WinPlay3 to play the thing.

I think I made an MP3 before ever having downloaded one. Probably in fall 1997. Or late summer. I remember because soon aterwards Duran Duran released a couple of singles on the net in Liquid Audio format and I was searching around for ways to convert the file format or find an MP3 version.

The encoding was done on some lowly computer at work and it took a long (REALLY) long time.

I didn't bother too much with MP3s at all - didn't continue to encode nor collect, until 2001 when I bought the empeg. I still don't play MP3s on my computer, though I keep WinAmp (2.9x of course) installed for preview purposes when checking my latest encodings.

Bruno

Me, too. I was working in a hosting facility (note: not for a hosting facility) and discovered that trying to change CDs was a huge pain. Up until that point, I'd never really considered the need for mp3s, though I'd certainly heard of them. But I encoded a few CDs (I think the first was a best-of Fishbone) using Real Jukebox; the first version had just come out. I used it because it would allow me to listen to the CD while it ripped and encoded it. A big plus since it took so long. Then I realized that I could stream music from my home server to work. Then I realized I could get an empeg.

Here is what I could find in my WhereIsIt Database
Alanis Morissette - Hand In My Pocket 10/1/1996
l3enc 5/1/96

Does anyone remember what the first dos program was that did digital extraction from cdrom drives. Was it l3enc? I want to search for this extraction program in my WhereIsIt db

I remember a friend doing digital extraction well before I'd ever heard of MP3. Could not have been any later than 1994. And I'm pretty sure it was probably closer to a year before that. I remember that it was definitely not something you'd ever find anyone talking about in casual conversation. Not even geek casual conversation. It was work-related for him though.

Bruno

Hmm, I heard about mp3s and pretty much dismissed the concept outright. I couldn't fathom only listening to music from my PC, and I never felt it was right to download them without paying for them. So really the technology never made sense. Well not until a coworker opened up his empeg. Then there was a sudden epiphany and the rest is history. I still haven't downloaded any mp3's except for BuyMusic.com, and even then a handful at that. The first CD I ripped was . . . was . . . hmmm I have no idea, actually.

Prince.....1999. I have no idea why that song came to mind when I decided to try downloading an mp3. I'm not sure I've listened to it since then.

The Beautiful People - Marilyn Manson from a prerelease (i think, i could be wrong) of Antichrist Superstar

My first mp3 was White Town - Your Woman, downloaded by a friend of mine at work from a webpage when we were talking about it. Must have been mid 1998. Thank you Mr Guiyani Narvis, I had no idea at the time it would change my life.

My first rip: Radiohead - Pablo Honey on 12/20/1998 at 1:43pm...I ripped quite a few cds that day, I must have just discovered Audiograbber or something.

A bunch of less than jake songs im guessing 1996ish, the actual band had them for download on the site.

I had heard a handful of sample mp3s from Amazon - which I basically used to help decide whether I wanted to buy the album - but had never collected mp3s until the empeg came along. Until then I had never even been a fan of CDs, as I far prefer the sound of vinyl through a good system.

Now I have 7000 tracks on my empeg, my home dock is hooked up through my stereo system in the living room, and via ethernet to all the workstations and servers in the house. (hmm thinks - The one thing I may need to do is set something up so they can all be synched)

And now, I accept the sound of an mp3 as fairly good for most purposes, and the handiness of all my music in the car is a winner!

Okay since I kind of started this thread:

The first mp3 i ever made was a rip of Catatonia's album Equally Cursed and Blessed, I used a knocked off copy of AudioGrabber and the Radium-fiddled Fraunhofer codec. Didn't sound too bad, although it took an absolute age to encode on my old P200.

dont remember the first song..but definatly the firt time i logged onto the website that started it all! figured i saved $,000s ....dates back to 1999ish

My first was Are you Gonna Go My Way by Lenny Kravitz. Got it off a newsgroup about 4 years ago now. A good sounding one (even if it is only 128) that is still on my empeg. Every time it comes on I always remember it as my first.

First Album ever bought: Topographical Oceans - Yes
First Cassette Tape Bought: The Game - Queen
First CD Bought: Back in the High Life - Steve Winwood
First Mp3 Song Downloaded: Shine on you Crazy Diamond - Pink Floyd
First Mp3 Album Purchased: Blue Green Orange - I Mother Earth

Sean in NC

First Mp3 Album Purchased: Blue Green Orange - I Mother Earth

Is that the one with the new lead singer? I have Dig and Scenery and Fish but kinda stopped paying attention to them once that dude left. Is this album (and other newer ones) as good as the old ones?

Alright, so what was everyone's first ogg?

Surf Rider - Lively Ones-Pulp Fiction Soundtrack
Hate to say it but I discovered MP3's late 98 while surfing at work.
I stared downloading songs from Audiofind.com which at the time had free downloads.
<He he he>
I remember hooking up my portable Mini disc to the sound cards output and recording a bunch of songs from various artist using NAD as the mp3 player.
My first portable MP3 player was a Rio mp300 (green) which i still have stored away somewhere.
Ahh...the memories.........

I have three of the I Mother Earth albums and think that the Blue Green Orange album is a little better than the "Dig" album... The new singer brings a little more to the music, i think.
Sean in NC

I also did not know there was a third album.
If you say it's as good as Dig or better, I'll have to check it out!

(Favorite song from Dig= The Universe In You)

Does anyone remember what the first dos program was that did digital extraction from cdrom drives. Was it l3enc?

L3enc is not a digital extractor. L3enc is the Fraunhofer encoder software. Odds are a different program was used to extract the digital audio, and then it was passed as individual WAV files to the Fraunhofer command-line encoder in your case.

I don't recall there ever being a DOS program that did DAE. At least not a common/popular one. By the time MP3 came around, there was already lots of Windows software to perform DAE for the purpose of audio CD copying (for instance, Adaptec Ez CD Creator did this just fine). What most people did was a two-stage thing, pulling the CD audio tracks with one piece of software, and then encoding with another.

I don't recall there ever being a DOS program that did DAE. At least not a common/popular one.

I used a DOS program called CDDA way back, and finding my friend's caddy loading drive was the only one that it worked with. I just searched my drive and I have version 1.91 from Feb '97.

Gareth

Not .mp3's strictly, but I had a ton of movie sound clips on my Mac Plus (purchased fall of '89). You know, the one with the whopping 512K RAM and external 20MB hard drive the size of a lunchbox.

-Zeke

the one with the whopping 512K RAM and external 20MB hard drive the size of a lunchbox.

Yup, we had three at school, then along came one with a 40 meg drive. I remember my old IT teacher saying 'Wow, how could we possibly fill 40megs it's crazy!'

I used a DOS program called CDDA way back

Me too. CDDA and l3enc on a P120 is a slow way to make mp3s.

Prodigy - Voodoo People

I don't remeber which 'song' but the day I installed winamp (1.0x) I discovered alt.binaries.music.*... while checking the news groups. I pulled about a gig down (I was working @ an isp at the time)

Most of the songs sucked, but it was a great experience. I could actually LISTEN to music before buying it.

Jeez, people are going to be disgusted ...

don't remember which, but one of two ---

Papa Loves Mambo - Perry Como
Mambo Italiano - Rosemary Clooney

Greg

I actually had some wav file which I decided to use to test l3enc. I was using DOS or probably OS/2. No idea how to rip from a cd, I simply knew it was possible somehow. I never found out until years later because l3enc just took so long, and that mp3 looked so BIG in my 340Mb drive (and was so useless since I had my stereo right there...) that it took me 1 second to look at my cd collection and think:" forget it. Maybe in few years". Had no idea a mp3 car player could ever be created, also because a 1Gb hdd was just a dream!

It was around 1994/1995/1996... Who remembers? When was l3enc released? I remember it was something very new at that time. Quite pioneeristic to use...

Then when I purchased my first cdr (2x) a friend of mine gave me a cd full of mp3 to copy. 1998. Winamp was already good enough to play them, even though it would take too much cpu, definitely. I had my BBS on that PC, could not afford to slow everything down to listen to anything. But I made some tapes for my old car .

Then a new car, and the Empeg. 2001.

Then car stolen, and new car again. 2003. The empeg still is the best you can have in it.

Thank you, cdda was the program we used. The oldest version number I can find is 1.7.2c but I am unsure of the date because that disk has 1980 set as the record date, I guess my clock was off when I burned the cd.

I know it was in 95 or 96 because the high school computer tech / teacher ordered a "Pinnacle RCD-1000" in 95' for $1900.00 while I was still in school so it would have been before June. (He paid for it not the school) Once he got it in he told me to make it work and I had the thing for 9 months before I gave it back to him. This drive was the best drive we found at the time to use CDDA on, since it didn't have a lot of jitter that would cause CDDA to fail ripping.

I have Dig and Scenery and Fish but kinda stopped paying attention to them once that dude left.

By "that dude", I presume you mean Edwin, who went solo with Another Spin Around The Sun. As an aside, if you see the video for hang-ten off that album (I think -- the one with the tattoos jumping over people, and stuff), and you see the shots of him up on stage singing, with his shirt blowing in the wind? I'm on the operating the fan that's making his shirt blow around.

Oh, and IME has another album out, called The Quicksilver Meat Dream.

My first was actually "Stairway to Heaven." I got it off a high school friend's FTP server in around 1997. My dad, familiar with the size of audio files in WAV format, didn't believe me at first. 1/10th the size?!?

I was never much into downloading. My first attempt to store music on my computer was with "Brazil" performed by Geoff Muldaur from the movie soundtrack...

I was extracting the CD audio to wave on my work computer as a personal motivational tool. One of the programmers there said, "you really should try and convert that to MP3." This was in 1996 in believe.

It took me about two years to figure out how to do it...

Come on Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners

Aquired using CuteFTP, summer of 1999

Still have that file on my parents computer!!

Couldn't tell you about the first MP3, but I do recall that the first tape I copied from a friend was the Footloose soundtrack.

Ah, my burden feels lighter now.

Cool. Never seen the video however...

Sean in NC