In the late 90s and very early 00’s you could
googleyahoo song names and get a downloadable mp3 link as one of the first results.
Cause search engines simply showed websites that contained your search terms, without filtering and AI algorithms.early ’00s*
Having no filtering certainly had its pros and cons, considering how much traumatizing shit google would throw at me as a child lol
Yep, too much of search engines today is people pushing SEO crap to rise in rankings and the businesses “protecting” users by delisting tons of sites that Google/Yahoo or who-the-fuck-ever has decided are “bad.” The number of times legitimate sites get swept up in that bullshit is too damn high.
Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That’s the biggest change.
omg, speed, why has no one said ‘speed’ yet? An hour-long tv show was 350mb, and it took three days to download.
Agreed. I can now download a multi-terabyte file in a matter of minutes or even less.
Wow multi-terabyte in minutes! There are not many ISPs delivering 100Gbps and even fewer are delivering 1000Gbps.
Unless you live on top of a data center.
Whoops typing while walking through a lobby and obviously had a brain bork. My mistake. GB.
Usenet Newsgroups were a big part of my life back then. Games, MP3s, Software, Movies, TV shows. So many Xbox games that I burned to DVD and loaded onto my modded Xbox. Those were the days. Now I only torrent some movies and TV shows thru a VPN and pay for everything else. My time is worth a lot more to me now than back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
What about those of us who pirated in the early '80s?
The computer lab at my junior high was basically one big floppy copying/trading center. It was great.
Speaking of the 80s I got a C64 and a friend let me copy a few 90 minute tapes with a bunch of games.
Ease of grabbing content. There are so many tools that make it too easy and automated. I mean this has changed drastically in the last 10 years let alone 90s.
Mp3 to cdda sounds like shit
mp3 to cdda sounds exactly like the mp3. It’s a wav file. Pretty much the unmodified output of the mp3 decoder.
The whole political discussion about Internet media licensing, like a 10-15€ tax to finance artists while making piracy global. In the end we have the same except it’s financing Internet millionaires over artists
Is it weird that I don’t want to pay for any streaming media, I don’t have a cable package, but if some reasonable system were created such as that I could have access to digital copies of media for a flat monthly rate I would pay it?
Like if someone would come and just say you pay $80 a month and you can watch listen to or read anything you can find and save them all locally for future reuse, no problems, I would probably pony up.
$40, yep, I’d do it. $80? Nope, I’d rather drop $2k on a new HDD array.
Yes I’m also the same way with ads. I’d happily spend more for internet if there was somehow an “ad surcharge” that would mean I’d never see ads or be tracked. Let me pay whatever the advertisers pay.
Adblock exists, and as such, I never see ads. You could do the exact same, for the low low price of $0.
I already do. I also want to pay my way.
The problem is what I’d like doesn’t exist (I’m not going to subscribe you a million different websites and still not even be ad free) and probably can’t. How much do all the ads I’m blocking cost? It’d be ripe for abuse but I’d essentially like a taxi meter, but it would charge me for website use from just one central account that I top up or is part of my internet bill or whatever.
I want the whole business model of using ads and tracking to pay for the internet to not exist.
I’d rather pay the same then use knowledge online to learn how to circumvent their bullshit. I will never pay companies to remove bullshit ‘features and items’ that make services inherently worse. It only enables them to continue molesting and raping you
The thing to remember is that internet and cellular service wasn’t available everywhere. I had to talk 10 minutes to a hill to get service to be able to make a cellular phone call. Most internet options required landline phones and wifi was barely off the ground for most consumers.
Media was something we extracted from the internet. Now the internet is something we have to extract ourselves from.
yourpiratedmovie.exe
Thanks, Limewire!
Who else downloaded LimeWire Pro using LimeWire?
In the aughts, pirates bay felt like the library of Congress. If a single commenter on a B tier forum saw it in a guy’s basement in the mid 80’s there was a sure bet at least 3 people were seeding it and one of them had great upload. If it wasn’t there, you had a dozen different sites with their own dedicated fans posting everything you could ever want.
Now it’s maybe 6 sites, they all have the exact same listings, and the only things with seeds came out in the last year of two. It’s like seeing your local library after a fire.
Private trackers.
Cinemageddon, for example, has lots of seeds on almost any worthless shitty B-movie you can think of going back to the early days of film.
Source: 16 years on CG
I can never get a CG invite, personally, I’ve basically given up except for that offer in my bio to eternally curse your enemies for one (still standing btw).
Unfortunately they never do sign ups, open or interviewed, and even if they did interview I’m only on IPT, which nobody takes as proof lmao. I mostly use usenet these days unfortunately, but at least it does have it’s benefits, DrunkenSlug accts are easier to come by and it is faster, and they have many things, but unfortunately lack B movies and other stuff I’m really into, but at least there’s IPT, slsk, yt-dl and internetarchive for some of those.
Internet archive may not be around much longer so grab what you can.
I know, I’m not happy about that.
I miss my hard drive full of music. Sure some of it was mislabeled, but at least I didn’t have to deal with ads.
There was this Russian website where you could download whole albums for like 50 cents. I absolutely loved it, because as well as current hits it also had the most obscure, crazy stuff, classical music, jazz, and world music. I think they’re all in prison now, the guys who ran it.
Memory unlocked.
I definitely know what you’re talking about (dispite not remembering the name of it) but they had everything. And if they didn’t, you could request it and they’d find it.
I miss that site now
Allofmp3?
Yeah that’s the one. I got so much music from that site.
Yes!
Holy cow haha. I “bought” so much music there. They got a ton of obscure gypsy brass band stuff for me when I asked too (Fanfare Ciocarlia)
There were a handful of them. Two I remember are allofmp3 and something like mp3eagle. One of those introduced me to Muse around the time Black holes and Revelations came out.
Allofmp3, that was it! I downloaded the Muse albums too. :-)
You can get an entire album or discography now. Back then I remember getting random loose mp3s of artists I was interested in, dictated by how many seeds happened to be online. Not sure I would bring that back, but it did make for some deep cuts becoming my favourite songs and not just the well known “hits” from albums.
The most dramatic change is probably how easy it is to hear any of that music in a legit way, and hear it instantly.
I burned CDs just titled “Pink Floyd”, “Beatles” or “Radiohead” with their entire discography of mp3s on it. I really got deep into a lot of bands back then.
This is how I stumbled onto Soulseek—I needed albums, not tracks
*arrs auto downloading stuff for sure.
Funny thing is that the only reason I’ve found *arrs a few years ago was Netflix deciding to be stupid, making me look at how I can manage my local library better nowadays.
What’s funny is that the source those *arrs are downloading from is largely unchanged from the 90’s &aughts by still being newsgroup based
Funny thing, I tried using newsgroups for their intended purpose after rediscovering that Thunderbird is also a newsreader. The amount of topics is large (and really old), but the ones I checked out haven’t had many updates. Though i admit I haven’t been brave enough to dive into the alt. group yet. It reminds me of the internet before the web.
…thats because newsgroups have been around a lot longer than the web?
Well, yeah. My first interaction with the internet was a friend’s technical savvy dad who had compuserve.
Noob
Yeah, I’ve been using newsgroups since the 90s back when I was also using xdcc on irc. Times were quite different.
