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> It was the time when almost everybody had a collection of MP3 files on the hard disk drive, and Winamp was one of the most downloadable Windows applications.
by derefr 6y ago
> It was the time when almost everybody had a collection of MP3 files on the hard disk drive, and Winamp was one of the most downloadable Windows applications.
Objection: nobody had a collection of MP3s in 1995. The computers of 1995 didn't have the power to decompress an audio encoding like MP3 in real-time without an accelerator card. People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs, and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files (where it then took up half their 1GB hard disk, so this was mostly a novelty—unless you were the proud owner of a $2000 1x CD burner to burn the PCM audio back onto.)
MP3s became a big thing around 1999, with better computers and the release of Napster.
WinAmp itself was released in 1997, but wasn't immediately popular because people didn't have music on their computers to play using it. It took off around 1999 as well (which is why everyone remembers Winamp 2, rather than Winamp 1.)
- chrisabrams 6y agoThank you for clarifying that essentially it was Win 98 (maybe Second Edition) when those applications took off.
- frompdx 6y agoIndeed. But I definitely had a collection of MP3s on my Win95 machine as soon as Napster hit the scene. I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. By the time my mom gave me her Pentium 2 Win95 machine when she upgraded Napster had already came and went. Kazaa was the next big thing for a while, but it was never as good. CD-R/W drives were a game changer for a while though. I was amazed by the ability to load multiple CDs to make a play list and then be prompted to load the each CD into the drive to burn the tracks I wanted.
- adrianpike 6y ago> I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. 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.
- frompdx 6y agoYep, it was an aftermarket HD. The original was about half the size.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- marcodiego 6y agoI have to disagree. A pentium at 100mhz was enough to run winamp and play 128kbps mp3 without any hiccups. Doing more than that at once was complicated, but not impossible.
- HappyJoy 6y agoBeing possible != being practical
- marcodiego 6y agoIt was possible, practical and happened. Collections were smaller because drives were smaller. MP3 became more popular by the end of the 90's, but a good 1995 machine, 100mhz pentium with 8mb of ram and 512mb harddisk, was 100% practical for playing mp3.
- herf 6y agoWinamp was 1997. 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!
- gh-throw 6y agoI used a 100mhz Pentium with 64MB or memory and, later, a 166mhz Pentium with 128MB. Win98 (people are correct that midis were way more common in the ‘95 days, as even a 2MB mp3 would take forever to download on dial-up and hard drives were small) and my experience was than any OS was fine if you were only playing mp3s, but on anything but BeOS or QNX you’d get bad pops and UI lag if you did anything else while a song way playing. Linux was actually worse about this than Windows, in fact, but both were bad.
- ddingus 6y agoAt that time I was running IRIX. Had none of those problems.
- marcodiego 6y ago
- crazygringo 6y ago> 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!
- grayfaced 6y agoThat'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.
- rangibaby 6y agoI 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
- InvertedRhodium 6y agoI seem to recall a MP3 player that worked directly from DOS during that era. My computer couldn't play them in Windows, but could using the DOS based player around that time.
- jghn 6y agoFWIW, F97/S98 was when MP3s started to take off on my college campus at the time.
- jepler 6y agoI'm relatively confident I had MP3 decoding software running on a 486 circa 1994/5. Even today, mpg123's website states "Plays Layer 3 in stereo on an AMD-486-120Mhz or (of course) a faster machine." and of course 48MHz ARM M4 microcontrollers can also play back MP3s. 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.
- ChickeNES 6y agoHere's a modern demonstration of decoding MP3's on various 486-class machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zZpzxHSeM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zZpzxHSeM
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoEarly mp3 decoders depended on floating point. Using modern fixed point code will let you run on less capable hardware.
- abrowne 6y agoI remember our family's Mac, with a 68LC040 CPU, which was a 68040 without a dedicated floating point unit, could only play back mp2 files in realtime.
- ddingus 6y agoThere was a program called "amp" that used fast integer math. I compiled it on an SGI Indigo running at 30Mhz and it would play up to 256kbps files using 90 percent of CPU.
- jedberg 6y agoI entered college in 1995. I downloaded my first MP3 in summer of 1996 (Savage Garden -- Chicken Cherry Cola). By the end of 1997 (which is when the OP is talking about, when Winamp dropped) I had hundreds of MP3. 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.
- EMM_386 6y ago> 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 https://i.imgur.com/0hnIG5Y.jpg
- jedberg 6y agoHey it's not your fault! It's like trying to complain that UPS aids drug dealers.
- incanus77 6y ago> I downloaded my first MP3 in summer of 1996 (Savage Garden -- Chicken Cherry Cola). 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.
- everdrive 6y agoThank you sir. My windows 95 machine could not play an MP3, and I could hardly download one in my dialup connection. My entire hard drive was 500mb, and I couldn’t have saved many MP3s even if I’d wanted. I did have about 1000 MIDI files, though.
- virtue3 6y agoThey were compressed to shit back then. Like 96kbps bitrate or something. (way before variable bitrate was a thing). I remember them being like 1.5-3 mb each. Not that bad of a download with a 56k
- cogman10 6y agoAh yes, I remember when a 1MB download took 30 minutes to 1 hour to complete. 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
- everdrive 6y agoI had a 56k modem, but in practice, I could seldom get 3kbps. Just a bit too rural. 2 - 2.5 was usually what I got.
- Edman274 6y agoI have a hunch that you're mixing up bits and bytes in that memory, because I very distinctly remember seeing the internet explorer 4 download progress indicator telling me that I was getting 4.5 "KBPS" down on a 48K link, which makes sense when you convert kilobits per second to kilobytes per second. Internet Explorer would give download speeds in kilobytes per second. If you were getting 3 kilobytes per second, then that's equivalent to ~28.8 kilobits per second, which my buddy who lived out in the middle of nowhere would get. He would come to my house in town so he could get better performance in Runescape. This was in 2003. I am not joking.
- everdrive 6y ago
- unixhero 6y agoYes they did. Straight otta Fraunhofer! We used Winplay3 and mpg123 to get mp3playback. Winamp was a godsend when it came, due to many quality of life improvements.
- cbhl 6y agoI do remember using my 1997-era computer (Pentium II, 233 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 3 GB disk) to listen to audio even though I didn't have a collection of MP3s. Many computers at that time shipped with a CD-ROM (if not a CD-R or CD-RW) drive, and so could play back audio off of CDs. 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.)
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI love nerd-peen measuring contests threads like this.
- Spooky23 6y agoI graduated from high school in 1996, and everyone in college dorms were exchanging music files with point to point sharing in the dorms. It was early adopter era, but the computers could handle it. Ripping CDs and encoding was definitely a different story.
- bentcorner 6y ago> People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs 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).
- cma 6y agoIn I think Winplay 3 there were options to play them in mono for weaker CPUs (386 or at least 486).
- amyjess 6y agoAlso, some of us had sizeable RealAudio collections. 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.
- thangalin 6y agoThe Commodore 64 was introduced in January, 1982. Here's the C64 decoding and playing an MP3 in real-time: https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI?t=17 https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI?t=17
- max1984_2 6y agoSomeone always pulls out a C64 demo. This is using a bunch of tricks to do it and it is massively compressed. 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.
- antod 6y ago> and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files 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.
- anthk 6y agoPeople were still using Windows 95 in 1999.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoYou are mistaken. It took a lot of cpu but definitely worked. I can't remember the name of it, but I used some quirky mp3 player for a couple years before winamp came out. 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.