A whole generation of a potentially interested audience who was not yet aware of Nullsoft in 2004.

A generation who can't imagine the novelty of performing a first search on Napster or Direct Connect. Magic!

Downloads on the campus direct connect network in '02 are still the fastest I've achieved real world then or since, with a selection probably at least comparable to any torrent site. They've just never seen real file sharing.

Or is file sharing just now obsolete now? A bit out of the loop :/

One of the campuses I was on had fiber to every dorm room. I remember the banners on DC++ servers exhorting users not to play movies directly across the network. The idea of streaming a movie off someone else's hard drive certainly seemed like witchcraft.

Whippersnapper. Back in my day, we searched for MP3s on anonymous FTP sites via oth.net!

Audiogalaxy. Was always impressed how easy it was to find 320kbit versions or even some extremely rare songs...

Audiogalaxy was insanely effective at finding related music, due to, basically, human curation. I will always be grateful of having discovered lamb and goldfrapp through it.

Up-voted for dragging Lamb into an HN thread. ;)

Somehow appropriate for a decade old article about 90's vintage desktop MP3 software.

Now go and try to locate rips of episodes of AMP from MTV and complete your electronica collection.

(OT) I discovered goldfrapp by watching Hard Candy. Awesome movie.

I remember audiogalaxy being the first web interface I saw that made use of ajax--clicking on the download buttons next to songs, not having the page refresh, and immediately viewing source to try to discover what wizardry this was.

Will we ever see something as good as it again? It would be tricky, but surely not impossible.

SoulSeek

I still use slsk and it's great :)