mp3

[cosmolinguist]

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday, dear mp3s
Happy birthday to you

They're ten today. How quickly they grow up!

I didn't meet mp3 until it was five and I was in college, learning about this amazing new thing called ethernet that we all got in our dorm rooms.

I was just barely quick enough to hear about Napster before it went down in flames, waiting to be reborn ... and so instead I remember Scour. Ah, the good old days! Or something like that.

The first mp3 I downloaded was Maynard Ferguson's version of "Birdland." What was yours?

Comments

[xianrex.livejournal.com]

I'm going to backtrack and now claim that "Barnyard" by the Beach Boys was my first. I'd wager that that's the track that got me to figure out how to make these things play.

I remember back in the day, the encoding was less than reliable, so you'd get these BURSTS of noise if the quality was low. I noticed a while back that you really don't get that any more. That's nice.

I also remember that there was a program you could run if your mp3 was all garbled because of some incorrect setting or something. It was called "unfuck.exe". My favorite file name ever.

[cosmolinguist]

I haven't been around computers or networks nearly long enough to remember the bad old days, so I always think stories like these are really cool. And "unfuck" is definitely a great filename.

[strangeidea.livejournal.com]

I can't recall the first MP3 I downloaded, but when Amanda told me that she (with her functioning computer; I was on our school's T3 line, but with my little 486 processor, couldn't exactly do much with it) could magically pull music off of the internet, I asked her from Bugs' "About You," a moderately obscure song that I'd liked when I was younger, and was so impressed when she came back with the whole album that today I have a hard drive that's over 25,000 times the size of the one I had then, and it's positively packed with music.

[cosmolinguist]

Being a relative latecomer I think I lack the appreciation for how drastically things have changed, and how fast. I've noticed some of it (I remember when we first got a new hard drive for our computer, and it held one gigabyte, and I scoffed and said we'll never find that much stuff to put on it), but I'm only intellectually aware of the rest. I do remember how great it was to first learn that you could magically pull music off the Intenet, and you could find even quite obscure stuff that way.

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

Ahh napster. Fun, too bad they went corporate.

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

I think my first mp3 was the opening track from Sadistik Exekution (http://www.xs4all.nl/~fgsc/sadex/main.htm)'s 'KAOS' album.

[elrestodemivida.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, though i don't usually remember these things, i think the first one i downloaded was probably If you go away by Scott Walker. Man, that song still makes me go dewy-eyed. It's amazing.

mp3's are cool

[lollypop-lane.livejournal.com]

My first was Don't Fear the Reaper. Then I continued to fill my computer until it almost crashed. Stupid Dell!

Re: mp3's are cool

[cosmolinguist]

Another friend of mine is currently mad at Dell, too; her laptop just died. It's almost enough to make me happy that my computers have all been random concoctions of old bits assembled by geeks.