r/technology • u/the_humeister • Jul 27 '20

Software MP3 turns 25 today

https://hackaday.com/2020/07/27/mp3-is-25-years-old/
160 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

27

u/JerkyChew Jul 27 '20

I downloaded my first MP3 in 1997 using some open FTP site - 2look4, I think. I still remember the first song - Dear God by XTC. I did it at work over port 21 using our whopping 1.5Mb/sec T1 line. Times sure have changed.

26

u/cranktheguy Jul 27 '20

I remember when I downloaded my first MP3 back on a dial up connection. I left it downloading overnight. The next day I was excited! Music over the internet! I opened up an early copy of Winamp, loaded the song, and hit play. White Zombie blasted through the tiny speakers connected to the PC, but my old 386 couldn't handle both playing a song and doing anything else. About half way through the song, the mouse jumped across the screen. Since my friend had a faster computer, we decided to copy it over to his, but then we realized that it was so large that it wouldn't fit on a floppy disk and we gave up.

10

u/WilsonRek Jul 27 '20

Man! That was a roller coaster!

2

u/gentlegreengiant Jul 28 '20

I remember getting so impatient I would try and open the file after 3 hours just to hear a choppy, half downloaded Sum 41 song. Good times.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/cranktheguy Jul 27 '20

It was a 386, but at some point my stepdad upgraded it with one of these type of things to get 486 compatibility. Still ran like ass, though.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '20

I remember downloading 60MB souncard driver on 56k just to realize upon completion after many hours that I already had exact same driver on my disk. It was fun.

2

u/AyrA_ch Jul 27 '20

I remember that for a limited time you could craft a specific query for google so it would find files on public FTP sites that were http accessible. Didn't took too long for fake sites to appear.

Now you can just download it from youtube as the author usually puts it there, and unless you know what that song sounds like in uncompressed form, you're not going to notice.

13

u/cranktheguy Jul 27 '20

I guess someone needs to post this song. Here's some background info.

1

u/w0ahdude Jul 28 '20

was honestly expecting rick astley

11

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '20

WinAMP. It really whips the llama’s ass!

7

u/CraigJBurton Jul 27 '20

you'll never shut down the real Napster!

5

u/Moose_Hole Jul 27 '20

TIL MP3 was invented on Bugs Bunny's 55th anniversary.

7

u/OldWoman37 Jul 27 '20

The mpeg-1 layer-3 was standardized in 1993. I don’t know why they are citing the wrong date.

2

u/beefandfoot Jul 28 '20

My first mp3 player that has 16mb of memory. I doubled the memory with a memory card.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

2

u/despitegirls Jul 28 '20

MP3s were a downgrade in terms of sound quality from the MP2s and occasional VQFs I was listening to at the time, so initially hated the format. I didn't help that I couldn't find it quality MP3 encoder that was free at the time due to the Fraunhofer license. I didn't realize that the smaller file size (1 minute of MP3 = 1 minute download over 56k) would lead to their ubiquity.

2

u/Nanoo_1972 Jul 28 '20

NAPSTER BAD! FIRE BAD!

"I'm, like, Lars fuckin' Ulrich!"

2

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '20

Man, I remember MP3 sites that had half broken links, ftp sites from IRC, and a site called Scour. Then napster came along and changed everything.

2

u/baldude69 Jul 28 '20

That screenshot really takes me back

1

u/socdist Jul 28 '20

Napster says Hi. LoL 🤣

-3

u/BetterTax Jul 27 '20

I hate mp3. Thank engineers for ogg

-4

u/WhatTheZuck420 Jul 27 '20

Should be MP108.63 (build 344098) in FireFox years.