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[Rolan7]

I am aware of that one as well.

Unlike most others, I was a very early adopter of MP3, waaaaaaay back in the early 90s, when computers could barely play them. (Ever seen a 486 try to play an MP3? Hilarious stuff.) Our computer repair store had a huge collection of various kinds and genres of music all on shuffle.  We had just about everything in there, including KMFDM stuff. About the only thing we didnt really have was Bob Marley stuff, and shameless country yowling.

Jpop? You betcha. We had a japanese american on staff.

OCRemix is honestly the best part of that, but true, I pointed out Infected Mushroom for being an obscure thing I like (:
Listening to Nutmeg now.

And it sounds like you have some years on me, but I did enjoy installing mp3 codecs (and building MUDs) on Red Hat Linux in the early 00's.  Fedora?  Apt?  ?:

[milo christiansen]

So I'm curious.  How many people here maintain local file-based music libraries anymore?

I do. Lots of symphonic metal and little else. I also listen to a bit of internet radio, but I prefer a local music library. I actually wrote my own media player since I couldn't find one that was A) cross platform, and B) had all the library management options I wanted.

Streaming anything doesn't really appeal. If you are going to spend the bandwidth once, it is better to have a copy to keep (that may explain the size of my archive).

[wierd]

I am aware of that one as well.

Unlike most others, I was a very early adopter of MP3, waaaaaaay back in the early 90s, when computers could barely play them. (Ever seen a 486 try to play an MP3? Hilarious stuff.) Our computer repair store had a huge collection of various kinds and genres of music all on shuffle.  We had just about everything in there, including KMFDM stuff. About the only thing we didnt really have was Bob Marley stuff, and shameless country yowling.

Jpop? You betcha. We had a japanese american on staff.

OCRemix is honestly the best part of that, but true, I pointed out Infected Mushroom for being an obscure thing I like (:
Listening to Nutmeg now.

And it sounds like you have some years on me, but I did enjoy installing mp3 codecs (and building MUDs) on Red Hat Linux in the early 00's.  Fedora?  Apt?  ?:

We had 20gb of MP3s, *IN THE 90S*.  

We had a few songs that we would play purposefully to alert each other to situations in the store though.  Queen's "We are the champions" had a very special meaning, indicating that we had a belligerent moron at the desk. ("Champion" was code-speak for "Person who thinks they know everything about everything, but really shouldnt even own a computer, they are so incompetent with them." We would play "We are the champions" when one of our "repeat offenders" would come in.)


As for local collections--  have like, 10gb of 80s stuff on my phone right now. Living in the boonies, I dont want to be constrained by a data cap just to listen to tunes at work through my ear piece.

[Jopax]

I have close to a 100 gigs of music still. I prefer having whatever I can in storage so I can acess it even when I've got no internet, tho most of the stuff I listen to nowadays is usually only found online or is just a song or two from a particular artist which hardly qualifies for getting their entire album/discography if the other stuff isn't that great. It's also good for jamming my phone so I can listen to stuff on the go (tho a bit less these days since finding good headphones that don't break within a month is kinda hard) since mobile data is capped and not exactly cheap here.

[SalmonGod]

*checks*

My music library is up to about 190 gb... that's not including the stuff that I haven't incorporated into my library yet, because it's not been tagged and put into the folder structure.  Although I get everything in FLAC these days.  My track count is currently 22,792 songs.  The playlist I actually listen to regularly is about 5000 songs.

I started in on mp3s only a few months after my family got internet in 1996 (on a 100 mhz pentium with a 10 gb hard drive).  Started out trading on IRC.  Napster wasn't too long after that, and I must have been among the first users.  Won't discuss my current habits

[wierd]

The work phone is a weak-sauce horror show.  It has a crippled 8gb internal storage, and I dropped a cheap 16gb microsd card into it.  I am not forking out lots of moola just so I can put a really large MP3 collection on it.

I have a NAS at home for that.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, what I just listed is what's on my home PC.

But those 5000 tracks are on the USB in the car also

[ChairmanPoo]

my 486 played mp3 just fine

[martinuzz]

In my 39 years, I have only had a nosebleed once, back when I was 3 years old, and my manic mom stepped on the car brake too hard, smashing me from the back seat into the front seat's head support.

Apart from that, I apparently have pretty sturdy nose veins.


BUT THIS FUCKING FLU MADE MY NOSE BLEED LASt NIGHT. WTF

[Reelya]

I'll admit I can't listen to very much genuine punk.  I like the spirit of it, but unfortunately, that doesn't make it pleasant to hear much of the time.  Takes a certain special bravado from the performers to pull off.  But I admit it's a genre I haven't explored very much.

It's like anything else: if you haven't ever looked into it, you probably think it's a lot more "samey" than it actually is, whereas punk is really dozens of extremely different sub-genres. It's similar to how all thrashy Seattle bands in 1992 got lumped in as "Grunge": pretty much anything that was "guitary" and not easily pigeonholed back in 1977 all got lumped in as "punk". And then, all those original bands inspired other bands which branched out even more.

[wierd]

my 486 played mp3 just fine

Must have been a DX.   SX based systems could not do much else when the MP3 was playing.

[Reelya]

I'm pretty sure this would have had to have been the 1995 release of Mpeg2 audio layer 3, not the 1993 one, unless you were getting it from the pre-web era. Almost no websites actually existed until 1995.

Also, the first actual Windows 3.1 mp3 player came out near the end of 1995. And note, that this player was the reference player released by Fraunhofer IIS, creators of the mp3 format. There were no mp3 player programs before this date.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3

Also, it states here that you needed a DX2-66 processor or equivalent to run it. There are videos about running Winamp on a DX-33, and the sound chops up because the CPU can't process the data quickly enough. Playing mp3s in the early 1990s could only be 1993+, but there were no players or websites to get it from. So, it's believable that you were using Winplay3 on a DX66 or greater system in ~1996, not the early 1990s.

[wierd]

IRC is older than HTTP.  So are BBSes.

MP3 files were traded before HTTP based distribution.  (albeit, not that long before. Maybe a year or two.)

But you are spot on about 486 chips being unable to process the data fast enough.   You needed a DX chip so that the math operations could be offloaded to the FPU, since SX chips lacked one!!  SX chips had to use the general purpose registers to do mathematical operations, and that bogged the CPU down terribly under such loads; the OS could not both fetch from disk (since PIO mode HDD access was handled by the cpu!!), and do the computation simultaneously.  Remember, these were single core chips.

A really good DX66 (not a DX2-66!! they re not the same thing!!) could play MP3s and not bog down, but just barely.

[Reelya]

You would have had to play them as wav files as far as I can tell, mp3 would only have been used for transfer before 1996, because Fraunhofer IIS put out the first program to play them in september 1995.

https://www.mp3scene.info/articles/3/brief-summary-mp3-scene

According to this, no scene could have existed before 1995.

Sure IRC is older than HTTP. The real problem is that the mp3 technology isn't. You couldn't have physically had an mp3 playing program until the end of 1995.

Also, 486DX2-66 was the actual chip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486DX2
Yes, they are the same thing. There's no 80486DX-66, there's only the 80486DX2-66, which is a DX33 double-clocked, hence the DX2. If you think I'm wrong about that show me a reference.

[wierd]

I was thinking of DX50. My bad.

There was a DX50, and a DX2-50.  They are NOT the same chip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486

The DX50 actually ran at a real 50mhz, with a 50mhz FSB. No internal clock multiplier.  The DX2-50 and DX2-66 ran at 25mhz and 33mhz FSB respectively. The DX50 could push the bits harder/faster than the DX2-50 could, and could play MP3s without crapping out.  I know this from personal first hand experience.


For reference:

Spoiler: big images of old chips (click to show/hide)

486 DX50


486 DX2-50