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Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single so
by mmh0000 2y ago
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”.
I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.
Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.
What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.
- im3w1l 2y ago3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in an hour.
- mmh0000 2y agoLook. It was 25 years ago. I’m an old man now. My memory of that time is a haze of multiplayer Quake strategy. How about I rephrase it: it FELT like 3+ hours.
- bloopernova 2y agoYou wanna LAN party in the old people's home? Although I was better at Unreal Tournament, I like the weapons more.
- jl6 2y agoIt could still have been 3 hours as you would have been constrained not only by your own download speed, but also the peer’s upload speed, and they might have been on an even crappier dial-up line or sharing their bandwidth with other uploads.
- brabel 2y agoIIRC Napster downloaded from multiple peers if possible. Each peer could restrict bandwidth so that they didn't get overwhelmed with outbound traffic. So speed would depend vastly on the popularity of content... if many people could provide a song, you could download it quickly (for the time: maybe a few minutes per song), but those where you had to rely on a single peer at a time could take hours.
- bawolff 2y agoI'm not sure, but i think it was napster's succesors that introduced that. I dont think napster had that sort of thing.
- brabel 2y agoToo long ago, you could be right, maybe KaZaA?
- bawolff 2y agoI think so. KaZaa was somewhat famous for implementing that feature using the non-cryptographically secure UUHash algorithm (instead of something like sha1) for better performance, which allowed trolls to insert fake file parts into your downloads.
- brabel 2y agoI found a post talking about KaZaA and Napster, and that's right: I forgot but Napster had a central server to provide files, that's why it was so easy to shut down... https://computer.howstuffworks.com/kazaa.htm https://computer.howstuffworks.com/kazaa.htm KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site above: "While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are those who disagree: The free-to-download blue files are controlled by Kazaa users and include copyrighted content." "Later that year, Kazaa was sued again, this time in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPAA). As of February 2005, the decision in that suit is still pending." I remember they started suing individual users at that time... I found an article explaining that: https://www.videoproc.com/resource/what-happened-to-kazaa.htm https://www.videoproc.com/resource/what-happened-to-kazaa.ht... "In September 2003, the RIAA filed lawsuits against over 250 individuals, accusing them of illegally distributing about 1,000 copyright music files each, using P2P networks. RIAA sought an average compensation of $3,000 per case." The result of the first case: "In July 2006, the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. caused Sharman to settle for $100 million, the amount to compensate the loss of four major music labels – EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music. The company also agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the studios in the industry." It's unclear exactly how Kazaa got down, the article concludes with "In August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active."... "the rise of legal streaming services such as iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix further compounded Kazaa's demise.". Looks like the music industry managed to scare people away from pirating instead of actually succeeding in bringing them down directly, which is more or less what I remember.
- Asmod4n 2y agomaybe you are misremembering creating mp3 files from CDs, on a 486 it took quite a while to generate a mp3 from a 4 minute wav file. Pentiums with MMX made it quite alot faster.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- globular-toast 2y agoNah, your memory serves you well. It really did take three hours sometimes.
- rightbyte 2y agoI don't think you had figured out you needed to download from hosts with the lowest ping to get the top modem speed. I remember like 15min for one song on a 56k modem but like 6-7 min at top speed, which was rare.
- nuancebydefault 2y agoIt was more like 4 mins per song on a 56K modem. So you could listen a full song while downloading another. Hence pretty acceptable. The less acceptable part was that nobody could use the phone.
- dv35z 2y agoWhich Quake? Are we talking Q1 E1M1 and the rocket launcher, Q2 Base1 + Quad damage + double-shotty, or Q2CTF and grapple hook-fishing, Action quake or what?? :)
- Vvector 2y agoI remember being queued up to download one song from a specific host. My download with be like 6th in line.
- madduci 2y agoYes it was for me 3+ hours. It all depended on codec and length of song. And also the fact that your phone line was kept busy while using it and loosing the connection when your parents wanted to make a telephone call. It was weird but funny at same time
- nostrademons 2y agoHah, my first MP3 took about 2 weeks to download, over ZModem on a 14.4KBps link. I had to work around my parents' Internet-time restrictions - they'd say "times up", I had to disconnect, then I'd pick up again the next time I was allowed on the computer. Then I needed to convince them to buy a ZIP disk to free up enough hard disk space so I could decompress it (my Centris 660AV wasn't fast enough for real-time MP3 playback), then it took another 2 hours to decompress once I'd freed up the requisite 40 MB of hard disk space. It was 1995 and pretty magical to get CD-quality audio coming out of the computer, though.
- dclowd9901 2y agoWe had rural phone lines with lots of noise. I think I got 3kB a sec max on those things even with 56k.
- skrause 2y agoMost MP3s were 128 kbps back then, so a song would typically be around 3-4 MB. Even at 3 kB per second a download would only take around 20 minutes.
- napierzaza 2y ago[dead]
- nvarsj 2y ago> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
- eisa01 2y agoIn addition, quite a lot of the backlog has never been released on iTunes I wanted to complete a set of DJ mixes, and had to purchase them on Discogs to as there were no digital copies, one cost me EUR50 for one CD...
- bratwurst3000 2y agoHahahaha I had the same problem. Had to buy a vinyl for 80€ and digitilize it. Did upload it then. Now the artist has a bandcamp with the collection for free so sharing is caring
- exe34 2y agoalready, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords. there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too offensive now.
- cyanwave 2y agoMy hope is human nature will prevail. SOME are that sensitive but I think there’s a growing amount of people maybe even a majority that don’t want censorship and nannie’s in media / comedy etc.
- 2y ago
- steve1977 2y ago> And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version How so, when most of these products are digital to begin with? If you have the quality of the studio master, then there’s nothing to improve.
- everyone 2y agoIn the case of software removing DRM and shitware either bundled with the product or necessary to use it. In the case of music it's less clear but I would suggest curation and completeness.
- miah_ 2y agoThere isn't always a studio behind a videos release. Sometimes the only remaining copy of a show is found in somebodies VHS collection and its filled with static and audio pops. These often get a standard 'as-is' release and then somebody in the community will clean it up, upscale the video, and fix the audio for a 'proper' release. Same goes for audio, sometimes its a old bootleg tape of a show that gets digitized and cleaned up. This is before even getting into 'fan edits' where people will re-add cut scenes, or do other edits to films. For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel'.
- steve1977 2y agoBut in most of those cases I wouldn’t really speak of „official“ versions.
- rightbyte 2y ago> For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel' A funny detail in The Obi Wan series are the prequel lookbacks that, if you don't remember how bad they are, make them seem like mediocre movies instead.
- Fezzik 2y agoFor a great example of fan edits, compare Harmey’s Despecialized Editions of Episodes 4, 5, and 6 to the butchered final copies that George tried to make be the only available versions; the Despecialized versions are astonishingly superior in content and audio/video quality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edit...
- issafram 2y agoQuality? I can rarely find FLAC files.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoGosh this is such a throwback... One of my first experiences with Napster was trying to download Britney Spears' Oops I Did It Again and getting a shitty remix. The worst part was that I didn't check the song, so I ended up burning it to a CD only to find out after the fact that the song wasn't what I was looking for. And every song took so long to download because it was dial-up... It's crazy how much things have changed in a mere 20 years.
- anal_reactor 2y agoA friend of mine downloaded a bunch of videos "funny hidden camera" and then burned them on a CD and one turned out to be porn. Like, even back then it boggled my mind why he wouldn't have checked.
- squeaky-clean 2y agoI had plenty of experiences like that, but also a happy one once. There was some Slipknot song I had downloaded that was edited to repeat the final chorus 2x. When I head the real song on CD I was disappointed, it was actually a lot better with that one more run through the chorus.
- throw0101c 2y ago> Ah 56k internet, what fun. Unless you were young and on a college/university campus where your dorm room probably had Ethernet jacks.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago>> Ah 56k internet, what fun. > your dorm room probably had Ethernet jacks. One 64k T1 channel, so 14% more fun. Okay to be fair the modem was probably averaging closer to 32k so double the fun.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago> One 64k T1 channel, so 14% more fun. A ton less latency, though. T1 connectivity still felt snappy for web browsing long after cable modems pushed up average available bandwidth because the latency was so much better.
- throw0101c 2y ago> One 64k T1 channel, so 14% more fun. Except if you were sharing between all the students in the dorm and on campus.
- supafastcoder 2y agoI remember burning CD's full of 1 minute songs that never completed because someone was always calling our house line, disrupting the internet connection (and there were no resumable downloads). Good times ;)
- asveikau 2y agoWhere did you get those from? By the p2p era (which napster was) they absolutely needed to do resumable downloads because a peer could suddenly go offline. Before that I remember getting mp3s from ftp and irc fserves... Ftp definitely had resume, though not all clients and servers did it.
- jakupovic 2y agoI also remember having cable modems and parties with Napster station where people would find download and then play the song of choice. No sign-ups no artificial borders just music. This is still not possible...
- wavewrangler 2y ago[flagged]
- shepherdjerred 2y ago> How can it be better than the OFFICIAL version!? How nexactly is that possible? Some content, e.g. Netlfix, has DRM that limits the quality that you can view in certain browsers/operating systems. As another example, a DVD/blu-ray sources are often significantly higher quality than what streaming services offer, so if you have a choice to watch some movie on Netflix or a pirated blu-ray copy, the pirated copy will often be higher quality than Netlify while being more convenient than blu-ray. It in unclear though how you could possibly get higher quality than the best quality that the source offers.
- buildsjets 2y agoAlso, stolen/leaked masters and stems are a thing. Even in the old analog scene, people trade master tapes that are higher quality than commercial available sources.
- a1o 2y agoAbout quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch it in the best quality from start to end without any degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at the same quality as the pirates?
- belthesar 2y agoThey can. You know they can, others (ie: the pirate versions you mention) do. Larger files consume more bandwidth and storage on the CDN, which makes it more expensive. And while there are indeed some issues with lower quality (especially in dark scenes, I'm reminded of the muddy mess in the final episodes of Game of Thrones), most folks are "fine" with the quality we get today. Fine enough, anyway, that they keep paying for the status quo. That's not to say that they're not interested in providing more quality. There's heavy investment in per-video, and sometimes per-video-section encoding and next generation codecs like AV1. The goal for them though is to get more quality with the same or less storage and bandwidth budget.
- deadbunny 2y agoBecause higher bitrates cost more to store and transmit.if they can drop the size of every file they have by 40% that's 40% savings every time someone streams something even if it looks like dogshit.
- yard2010 2y agoI could hear the modem connecting while you're yelling "DO NOT PICK UP THE PHONE" peeeee duuuuu denu denu denudenu
- dtx1 2y agoMy personal feeling is that Spotify and youtube et. al. killed music piracy. I'd rather pay a small monthly fee and have access to an always up to date music library then torrent everything artist by artist. But that only applies because spotify has basically all the artists i like and want.
- noman-land 2y ago"Always up to date" doesn't tell the whole story. Spotify is cool but I have playlists where half the songs are missing because some invisible licensing deal expired and the songs disappeared from reality. With Spotify you are renting art. The moment you stop paying rent, your library disappears. Sometimes even before that.
- teleforce 2y agoNapster is p2p done right, it's a game changer that the music industry was only saved by listening to Apple (read Steve) and doing that catapulted Apple to the first Trillion dollar company in history. It's so good that Metalica members were loosing their sleeps over it. For personally one of the best software I have used of more than 30 years using computer and it's fit for purpose metric was second to none. Mate, it only takes a few minutes downloading mp3 song that's only a few MBytes, unless you are using dial-up or ADSL connection further down the road from the residential switch.
- nullsmack 2y agoOnly people in major cities had fast internet back then. The vast vast majority of people had 56k dialup or slower.
- brevhtff 2y agoIt’s the only place to find classic hardcore and punk.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoI remember getting transfer rates of around 10kbps and giving a solid nod of approval as I watched it go. Nice! I’ll get to listen to my song in… 80 minutes! Aw shit, it dropped to 3kbps.
- nullsmack 2y agoNapster wasn't a huge improvement at all. More people could use it sure, but it was awful on a technical level compared to anything else. You couldn't resume transfers. It automatically shared your library with everyone else. You could cancel any active transfers.. all this meant that most things I tried to download via Napster were from people who weren't intentionally sharing their mp3s, and would cancel any transfers they saw going. I had so many that I waited 10-15 minutes to download only to end up with an incomplete file that I had to throw away because I couldn't just resume it. Downloading via IRC was objectively better in every way.