When did your own digital music revolution begin?

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
With the number of posters who've said that the iPod nano will be their first, I started thinking about how I got started with digital music.



It was my freshman year of college, '97-'98. This guy named Chad who lived in our dorm was eating with us in the cafeteria and kept talking about these "mp3s." I asked what he was talking about and he explained that it's high quality digital music in a fairly small file size. He gave me the info to access the mp3 SERVER that he was hosting on the school's network. We're talking hundreds of songs, folks. I ended up downloading a bunch of it to my IBM minitower (with 3GB HD) and played them all using Winamp.



I was a heavy user of the original, very illegal Napster. Illegal downloading is bad, kids. It messes with your brain. The best way to quit is to never start in the first place.



When I switched back to a Mac in September 2000, I didn't even migrate to iTunes when it was released in early 2001. I also was none too interested in having to actually set up correct info tags for all my songs so I would know what I was playing. To go from a file-based library to a catalog-based library is a bit of a stretch on one's thinking.



The iPod was released in 2001 and I honestly didn't know what to think of it. Why on earth would Apple build an mp3 player? What other gadgets were they going to release? Eventually, though, I wanted one. Because of this I (reluctantly) switched over to iTunes in 2002 and bought a 10GB 2nd gen. iPod that December.



Now I own a 40GB iPod photo and have no problems with iTunes. About 8 years after first being introduced to mp3s, it's interesting to see how far we have come with digital music. I personally feel like I was one of the "early adopters," and that's kind of cool.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 17
    I started when I first "met" with AudioGalaxy. Ah, the good ol' days of downloading music fo' free!



    alas, then I found WinAmp, and then...
  • Reply 2 of 17
    m1cm1c Posts: 47member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Gene Clean

    I started when I first "met" with AudioGalaxy. Ah, the good ol' days of downloading music fo' free!



    alas, then I found WinAmp, and then...




    Me too audio galaxy was amazing for its day. Winamp as well.
  • Reply 3 of 17
    bergzbergz Posts: 1,045member
    Anyone remember scour.net?



    --B
  • Reply 4 of 17
    a_greera_greer Posts: 4,594member
    A few warz type sites back in the day...on dial up...before napster...then napster came along and WOWSA!!!...then it died, only tio be replaced with Kazaa lite which was replaced with limewire+winmx, winmx was replaced with Bittorrent last year and now I have a trifecta - First iTms (the 128k stinks but it is legal) if I cant get it there I look on bit torrent, if that fails, I go to limewire, and if that fails I go old school and call speacilty CD shops near by (gotta love Vons baby!)
  • Reply 5 of 17
    newnew Posts: 3,244member
    must have been hotline.
  • Reply 6 of 17
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    Illegal download came late for me and was always very limited.



    For a long time our copyright laws here was fairly liberal. I could borrow CDs from friends or the library and make legal copies. So completely legal I build up a large collection of MP3s beginning from when I got ripping working around 1998. The law was changed less than a year ago.



    Later came the urge to get different live versions of electronic music. I used limewire for that up until a few years ago. But as CosmoNut said the poison is alive in your blood and the risk to your health last for years. I hope I will survive it. So far so good



    For a short time I used iTMS but find the selection rather limited. So now I find myself a very active user of gemm.com again. gemm.com is half the reason why the internet was build. It is to online shopping what google is to internet search. Read how it works and you realize how incredible smart it is. And I just love the old skool HTML formatting.
  • Reply 7 of 17
    I started with music the same time i started with digital music. It was about a year and a half ago.



    The reason i started with music was i started driving. Because i was spending so much time awake on the way to school (as opposed to asleep on the bus) i started listening to the radio and i was hooked ever since
  • Reply 8 of 17
    cosmonutcosmonut Posts: 4,872member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by bergz

    Anyone remember scour.net?





    That name is REALLY familiar and I know I used it a lot, but I don't remember much about it. Care to refresh my/our memory?
  • Reply 9 of 17
    My "digital" music revolution began with Sony minidiscs around 1998. We didn't really have the storage on our old family (win 95) computer at the time, and minidiscs seemed to be perfect. Looking at the advantages and disadvantages of portable MP3 players when compared to a minidisc player, the MD player clearly won; MDs were cheap: around 50p - £1 per disc, small, and (most importantly) I could carry around a number of disc to change albums. I spent hours transferring CDs to MDs and digitally labeling them up. I had around 70 MD albums copied from the original CD.



    In 2000 we got a new computer and slowly started playing with MP3 features, after our win95 computer just couldn't handle the playback of MP3s... And then in the summer of 2001, I looked around for MP3 players. I had good experience from my MD days, so bought one of Sony's first players. This was a mistake. £180 it was, and the unit was gorgeously small, came with a 64MB memory stick (which could be upgraded in the future), the interface of the unit was slick (and if I remember correctly, used the stacked menus Creative has now patented) and had a jog wheel/dial on the side to quickly scroll through the music.



    The bad: Sony's PC software stank. You had to use it though, because they insisted you use their Atrac3 encoding, and the player wouldn't actually read MP3s. But it was so awful I used it once to encode about 20-30 tracks and never used it again.



    Sony was close. So close. Close to becoming the digital revolution we have seen with the iPod. If that software had been right, it could have been marvelous. The jog dial was perfect, pretty much exactly light the scroll wheel would be on the iPods; but the scroll wheel would be more stylish. I still maintain the opinion that if Sony had better software and supported MP3 playback they would be where Apple is now. Sony must be kicking themselves...



    Over the next few years I continued to use my trusty MD player. Toying with Real's music jukebox using an Atrac3 encoder to encode music on the fly for my old Sony player; this was also short-lived.



    By 2004 I had my own computer and every CD I owned was on my computer. The best software I found was Creative's mediasource and it was great. I got a small 256MB Creative MP3 player in January and used that, until I eventually worked out that 40-50 tracks just isn't enough to carry around all the time (something that urged me to buy an MD player in the first place).



    As Apple was in the news over here with the release of their UK iTunes Music Store, I though I should give it a go. And it surprised me. It was better than the Creative software. Honestly I had gone through about 10 media players trying to find the perfect one, Creative was there for a long time, and seemed perfect. iTunes just had a few more features which made it better than perfect.



    I used iTunes for 3 months and a year ago I got a 40Gb iPod 4g and a PowerBook (yes it was iTunes that made me get a PowerBook, not an iPod!). I can't be happier with this combination, and now I don't have to faff as much as with Creative's software; iTunes just does it all for me. I laugh at the hours it took to encode and name the tracks for a MD, when now I have a CD imported in 5mins and loaded onto my iPod ready to go out and listen to it in the gym/car/wherever.



    It's been a journey, but all that are willing find enlightenment! (Sorry if it's a bit long and drawn out)
  • Reply 10 of 17
    bergzbergz Posts: 1,045member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by CosmoNut

    That name is REALLY familiar and I know I used it a lot, but I don't remember much about it. Care to refresh my/our memory?



    Multimedia search engine. It was great way back when I had T1. Died (was bought) in '99 or 2000 You could find so much obscure music, vids, anything, much like P2P nowadays.



    --B
  • Reply 11 of 17
    Mine started when iTunes was first released. I had played with encoding mp3's before iTunes, but I remember having to either pay or settle for "encoding with npmp3" or whatever at the beginning of the track. The HD (4 GB) in my PowerBook limited the amount of music I could encode, though.



    Of course my digital collection really took off when I bought the first iPod. It's been increasing ever since,
  • Reply 12 of 17
    gargar Posts: 1,201member
    My own digital music revolution started when i bought my first CD:

    "Storm the studio" by Meat Beat Manifesto in 1989... one of the godfathers of modern "digital made" music.



    And then it took a while before my digital compressed music revolution started.

    Summer 1998 i bought a Sony MD-player... Nice, but i hated the fact that i had to buy a MD and dub the CD to it 1:1. So, while i didn't travel that much anymore, had a really nice stereo at home and sat most of my not working hours in the pub i didn't have much use for it.



    Around the same time a friend of mine showed me one of the first "mp3players" on his powerbook G3 233Mhz. I was pretty underwhelmed. i bought about 80 CD a year in those days and couldn't figure out why some one wanted to listen to bad compressed music on his computer. (I still can't).



    In 2001 apple came with the first gen iPod and because of my earlier experiences with mp3 i was not impressed: 1000 songs in your pocket? What about the 600 CDees in my collection? (And hey, i had no money to spend because the marketingbudgets of my clients had crashed in the second half of 2000 together with the internethype that triggered it in the first place.)



    Summer 2004 i gave it a try with my first iPod: a 40GB 4G. I experimented with bitrates because 128kbps was a little too sucky for me. After ripping most of my CD to 224kbps AAC files on an external harddrive and loading a selection on my iPod i had another problem: i had no clue what to do with this new toy.



    After a couple of months of regret etc. i noticed the shuffle function on the iPod... (i know, i'm slow, now and than) anyway, i'm lovin' it now.



    I never stole music on the internet via kazaa or limewire. Never bought music via iTunes either.

    I love the feel of a CD. I love it to stand in front of my music collection and select a CD to listen to. Not really revolutional but very satisfying



    anyway... ordered a 4GB black iPod nano for my girlfriend so she stops stealing mine.
  • Reply 13 of 17
    newnew Posts: 3,244member
    Any nostalgic feelings?



  • Reply 14 of 17
    Do MIDIs count?



    haha j/k



    i was a huge fan for Mini Discs ... until the Mp3 came out....and this is like.. 5yrs ago?
  • Reply 15 of 17
    years ago in 1998 "b.i." (before ipod) i bought one of those cd mp3 type players that had a teeny tiny screen with not much info on it and the sound was horrible. i ended up giving it away and then started transferring my cd's to my computer using musicmatch.



    napster was great because they had EVERYTHING, and you could find "out of print" songs you were looking for. i had a friend from hawaii that had been looking for a song called "touch by touch" by joy. since she was a child. the song had HUGE sentimental value to her, (she lost her um, virginity to it years later...) but it was nowhere to be found, i looked everywhere to buy it. but we found it on napster, and it made her cry. i will never forget that.



    but napster was bad because of the poor audio quality,constant cutting off of songs before they were done, and virus/trojan horse issues. back then people would load up a 4 gig hard drive with music and offer them for sale, i always wondered why i couldn't take my drive, slap a headphone jack onto it and listen to my music on the go! then apple came out with the ipod just in time.



    i now have 906 songs in itunes (465 purchased)12.66 gigs of music and 397 podcasts (i love the podcast "history according to bob")

    and will be getting the nano and the harry potter ipod. (yes i do love the potter books, im on book 4 now)
  • Reply 16 of 17
    newnew Posts: 3,244member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BMWintoxication

    ...and this is like.. 5yrs ago?



    10 is more correct.
  • Reply 17 of 17
    It started for me in 98-99 as well. First it was Macamp, and then I moved on to downloading songs off napster on my friend's Wintel and IMing them through file transfer to my computer where I would play them in SoundJam. I was kind of on the forefront of the whole mp3 thing. All my music from 99 on was mp3s burned onto cds. When the iPod hit in 2001 I got it immediately and have been loving the digital music revolution since.



    only one complaint. If I buy music from the ITMS, why can't I use it in my Final Cut movies? I paid for the music and I paid (a lot) for Final Cut Studio. Unlock this Apple, you greedy bastards!!!
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