cdda2wav seems to have existed by 1996.

the "quantum bigfoot" 1GB-and-up HDDs also in 1996 could hold several albums, especially if you ripped at lower rates like 64kBit/s.

I also recall exchanging MP3s on IRC with /dcc send, and am reasonably confident this was 1998 or earlier.

On the other hand, "On July 14, 1995, Karlheinz Brandenburg sent an e-mail announcing the .mp3 file extension had won a poll and announced that the old .bit file extension should no longer be used."

So while literally 1995 is early for people to have a "collection" MP3s on their home machines, the time before everyone had moved on _from_ Windows 95 sure overlapped with the mp3 era, especially for early adopters.

I used Sonique for a while because it looked amazing - slightly poorer performance, but felt worth it. Later on, Sonique "optimized" for later Pentium releases and it became much too slow on the P100, so I switched back to Winamp.

Also, it still boots. :)

The only way to play mp3s was in linux where I shutdown every possible daemon and ran the decoder at the highest priority.

What's up with the socket? It looks like there aren't enough pins on the CPU, but they're used for the Pentium Overdrive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 was released in 1995 and requires "only" a 66MHz 486, available in 1992.

I compiled it on an SGI Indigo running at 30Mhz and it would play up to 256kbps files using 90 percent of CPU.

But this program called "amp"... I'm very curious to see if it could be compiled to run on a recent machine.

I agree with you, but 30Mhz! That is a very low clock for 256kbps decode.

MIPS did very significantly outperform Intel at that time.

http://www.mp3-tech.org/programmer/sources/amp-0_7_6.tgz

Found it.

An Indigo sat in the office for a time playing tunes from an NFS share we would populate. I eventually took it home to do the same thing. I forget how I parted ways with that old box.

I am not inclined to build it at the moment, though it may well make for a great micro controller project one day.

Edit: Fixed: add "frequency = frequency/2;" after the comment /* Set the output frequency */ in file audioIO_Linux.c

Does it still hold up?

Maybe I will build it just for grins myself. Thanks for the tips.

But yes, it uses very little cpu. Maybe less than dosamp.

Maybe I will play your track after the family activities. Edit: Except access denied, lol. No worries.

Scour was released in November 1997, and it was released to solve the problem of a whole bunch of college students having their MP3 libraries available via Windows shares, but it was hard to find what you were looking for. Scour fixed that.

So maybe not the general public, but in 1997 someone released a search engine specific to finding MP3s, because people already had large collections.

I was the author of MP3 Fiend around this time.

It was a desktop metasearch engine for MP3s that worked in conjunction with multiple download clients.

It was very successful at the time, only for Napster to come along and eat my lunch.

It got ... called out a lot by the press.

https://i.imgur.com/0hnIG5Y.jpg

LOL, I know exactly what song you mean, but it was called I Want You. We did it in my a cappella group in 1997.

I ran my company's (unofficial) MP3 server in '99, and I spent a LOT of time managing files.

I ultimately went back to college in 2002 which was the right time to catch Apple's first attempt at Home Sharing in iTunes (I forget what it was called), where basically every single Mac on the campus network was running an HTTP server advertising all of its music for download.

I think Audiograbber was the first popular program to rip MP3's from your CD collection. Best I can tell, it was first released as v1.41 in Feb 1997. Winamp came out a couple months later.

And then young people were absolutely listening to their CD's as MP3's on their computers by the summer of 1997 -- I know I was, it was just so much more convenient. And you definitely didn't need to wait for Napster if you were on a college campus with dorms -- you'd find tons of "anonymous" network shares filled with thousands and thousands of tracks in the fall of 1997 for sure.

And the Diamond Rio player came out at the end of 1998... I remember that was huge... all of a sudden your MP3's were portable!

Cheap CDRs were the other big breakthrough. Now people had a reason to download music so they could burn it to listen in their car. But that's well after Win95.

Not computer enthusiasts -- just college students.

I remember being pretty surprised, it wasn't the CS students who had all the ripped music. It was the party kids. The "killer app" for MP3's was the ability to put together all-day and all-night music mixes that could be shuffled instantly. For the first time you could DJ effortlessly.

I recall downloading MOD files back in the day from various BBSs. This is probably pre-95 by a few years. MIDI files were good but you needed a good sound card to play them. I recall drooling over ads of the Gravis Ultrasound (I had a SB Pro).

Changing from one window to another allowed me to see widgets been drawn. It wasn't snappy, but it wasn't a crawl. I could still open a dos window and run qbasic or turboC. I had to be careful: drunk pointers risked stability of the system.

At the time I never had the same thrashing problems I have today running linux. That is why I'm so hopeful about systemd-oomd.

I could keep the machine like this for almost a whole day. A windows 9x machine rarely passed 24 hours uptime with heavy usage without a bluescreen.

I later upgraded the machine to 64mb ram, 2 harddisks, 2 floopy drives and both cd drive bay became occupied: one with a cdrom drive and the other with a cd burner. I then replaced the winmodem with a network card. It was a good machine. The only thing that barred me from using linux on it was the soundcard (AZT-R2316) that had no linux driver. It 2mb s3 video card worked better with linux. By the time the sound drivers arrived it was 2007 and I already had a new linux-only 2006 machine.

On "highly compatible", well, you could run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash.

I remember there was one software decoder that was fast enough in 1995, so I plugged in my Pentium/100 laptop to decode music and pass it uncompressed to my desktop Pentium/90 (which was too slow) over 10base-T!

yup, that was me. I had to be very selective about what songs I wanted off a small number of CDs.

I seem to remember doing that before ripping and faster CD drives too - instead capturing audio output. That was painful.

I remember them being like 1.5-3 mb each. Not that bad of a download with a 56k

Now I don't even blink over hitting a webpage with multiple megs of assets.

The hacker news favicon is bigger than most webpages of the time :D

Dang, 1GB back in these days was pretty legit. A 128k MP3 was something like 3-4 megs per song - I'd fit a bunch on a 100 meg Zip disk back in the day and feel like a king.

I also remember waiting a few minutes to download Winamp, ICQ, and the like. (A dial-up modem would get 4 KB/s down on a good day, so 146 KB was not insignificant for an application.)

I do remember being impressed how mod / tracker based music was so much more efficient on our P5 120Mhz. It was something like 10% of cpu vs 50% for mp3.

Ripping CDs and encoding was definitely a different story.

https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI?t=17

It generally isn't doable. My Amiga 600 without the Vampire or a Prisma Megamix cannot play MP3s of decent quality and the Amiga was far more capable than C64.

Sure, the quality is shit by modern standards, but it could easily be played by ordinary computers of the time and took up very little space.