I do And I thought it might be funny to share stories…
For me, the year was 1997 and I had just gotten my first job as an intern in the IT department at a local university. One of the first things I did was download a bunch of mod’s on the laptop that they gave me. As I was downloading mods, one of my coworkers and had a conversation where I told him about mods, and he told me about this thing called mp3s. He had never heard of mods, and was impressed because of their small size. Of course I was impressed by mp3s because you could download mainstream songs!
So I don’t remember where I downloaded it, maybe on irc or something, but my first mp3 was:
Jann Arden - Insensitive
I’m not even really sure why, I wasn’t really a big fan of hers or anything. It took me a long time to remember her name actually.
It was probably in some awful bitrate like 96 or 112, certainly no higher than 128. And some crap encoder like Xing that sounded terrible.
Other early mp3s I got while working at that job were the DJ Hype Yaman Studio mix from 1993, which is the first time I ever heard drum&bass, and I downloaded a bunch of happy hardcore songs too. I still have a lot of that stuff somewhere.
And finally I just wanted to relay a story a friend of mine told me of one of his first mp3 experiences… His brother had tried to download Sarah Mclachlan - Building a Mystery, but the download failed partway through… But his brother still listened to the first 40 seconds or so of that song over and over and over, and drove my friend crazy! Haha.
Back in 1998 at Towson University during the first week when I just moved back into the dorms after summer was over. I still have that very “same” MP3 in my music library. Think I got it via Napster.
The first MP3 I ever heard, though, was Basket Case - Green Day on my Amiga 1200. It had to blank the screen to be able to play the MP3 at all. The quality was… eh… not good even for being back then.
Wow, the memories… simpler times with so much new fun stuff coming out all the time.
I can’t recall if this was the first ever MP3 that I heard, but it’s definitely the one that sticks out most strongly in my memory.
It was 1995 (maybe early 1996?) and I had just started community college in my small-ish home town. I was relaxing between classes and taking advantage of the college’s “high speed” ISDN (!) connection, just chilling on IRC and leeching random files from someone’s DCC fserve, when I spotted something like “terminator.mp3” in the list and immediately had to grab it.
Terminator 2 Theme, 22kHz, 64kbps, Stereo.
That lofi over-compressed piece of crap sounded crystal clear to my young (dumb) untrained ears, and it blew my mind that an entire recorded song could fit in a few hundred kilobytes on a floppy disk. It was a permanent fixture in my Winamp WinPlay3 (?) playlist for quite a while!
I am not entirely sure of the first mp3, though I imagine it was mid to late nineties and I was living across the road from a university. I used to pretend I was a student, back pack with a few books in it and I would go into the computer/I.T. building, sit a desk and pretend to be looking at my books until I noticed another student hadn’t logged out of the computer and jump on and begin surfing. It got a little trickier later on and I would have to wait at the doors, pretending I was just “hangin out” until a student buzzed in and I snuck in behind them.
Eventually i got to know the teachers and even sat in on some lectures. Come to think of it, I also did something similar in the art department. got to know the teachers real well, sat in on their lectures, even did life drawing and joined a guided tour of Italy and went overseas with them.
I spent way too much time watching visualisations. AVS and G-Force were my favourites.
El-vis made the best presets for AVS. You can still find his presets here. They are still awesome, though don’t run nearly as well on modern computers as I though they would.
Sadly, I can’t remember the first MP3 I downloaded. I thought it was a soundbite like this, coming from a board like this, but I’m not really sure.
I remember using one later around 2001 on on this used Pentium 100 laptop I got on ebay. It would skip sometimes though
I am not entirely sure of the first mp3, though I imagine it was mid to late nineties and I was living across the road from a university. I used to pretend I was a student, back pack with a few books in it and I would go into the computer/I.T. building, sit a desk and pretend to be looking at my books until I noticed another student hadn’t logged out of the computer and jump on and begin surfing. It got a little trickier later on and I would have to wait at the doors, pretending I was just “hangin out” until a student buzzed in and I snuck in behind them.
Eventually i got to know the teachers and even sat in on some lectures. Come to think of it, I also did something similar in the art department. got to know the teachers real well, sat in on their lectures, even did life drawing and joined a guided tour of Italy and went overseas with them.
That story started off intense, and then it just got more and more… You went on an overseas trip with them!!! Did you ever tell them you weren’t really a student? Sneaking into the computer lab was pretty 1337 though
That story started off intense, and then it just got more and more… You went on an overseas trip with them!!! Did you ever tell them you weren’t really a student? Sneaking into the computer lab was pretty 1337 though
Haha, yeah i just tried it one day and it was easy so I tried it again, and again. Pretty soon I was there every day.
I didn’t tell anyone at first, just kind of bluffed it, but yeah they eventually figured it out. I got to know them so well it didn’t seem to matter to them. They knew I was really interested and they just let it slide. i used their screen printing equipment, art supplies and more. And the overseas thing was on offer to the students only, I guess the teachers/Lecturers thought I was practically a student so I was offered and I took it. I stayed with a lecturer and other students in Italy on farm for two weeks with access to a print studio, we did day trips to galleries and various places around Italy, it was amazing. As far as scamming the computer labs, I didn’t really know that department that well, just enough to wing it, but being that I got on so well with the art department later on, it never became a problem.
Oh man, like dblue said going that far back is pretty fuzzy … it couldn’t have been later than '97, I must have been 15, just upgraded to 28.8kbps, and I’d just found a real audio file of Power-Pill’s ‘Pacman’, and totally flipped my shit (coincidentally, this was also the year I heard my first house mix - Dj Dan’s Loose Caboose, and I was thoroughly and instantly addicted to electronic music and was on the hunt for similar sounds). In my research frenzy in attempting to understand wtf I was hearing, I also stumbled across some super neat jungley violin track (Vanessa Mae maybe??) that just captivated me. In searching for higher quality audio, I discovered mp3.
And I thought it might be funny to share stories…
