Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> but wasn't immediately popular because people didn't have music on their computers to play using it

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!

That's the gap between a computer enthusiast and average population. Most people weren't on a campus with a LAN. Many people were relying on 33.6K dial-up with metered a metered ISP, often on their phone line they needed to receive calls. For most people MP3s were just too hard to transfer.

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.

I downloaded plenty of music on shitty dialup. It’s not like there were any other options. The hard part was finding them until Napster etc

Audiogalaxy stands out more in my mind for some reason. I never used Napster much.

I was a big fan of Soulseek back in the day. Everyone else I knew used Limewire

> between a computer enthusiast and average population

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 think Audiograbber was the first downloadable software I ever paid for that did not come in a box.

I still have my Diamond Rio player just need to find a paralell port to see if I can get it wroking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com