Exactly. If a CD cost $20, but ripping it cost $100 in resources, one would just buy another CD.
I have had a digital music library from 1998 onwards.
Prior to that, I had not heard of the .mp3 format, and storing CD tracks as AIFFs would have eaten my hard drive very rapidly. (I had a couple anyhow but it was a novelty thing, not appropriate to rip all my CDs and store them that way).
I remember that my ripping software starting around 1999 was Proteron’s N2MP3.
I had an aftermarket 2x SCSI external CD burner and rapidly started burning 10 albums per CD or thereabouts and carrying them around with me.
Note that a slight upgrade version of Winamp was released two weeks ago. A full upgrade to 6.0 is expected next year.
It’s still kicking.
I started my digital music collection when I went to college in 1997. Our home computer from 1996 had a CD drive, but the hard drive was only 1.2GB, and my college computer had a 2GB hard drive. So storing anything but MP3s would be completely impractical. I started ripping CDs and used MacAmp to play them (the Mac version of WinAmp). At that time, the processing power required to decode an MP3 was non-trivial, especially for variable bit-rate files which soon came along to improve quality while allowing smaller files. That tracked along with hard drive capacity to quickly become irrelevant after about 2000. I think most of my collection was just 128kbps but the encoders were much worse back then too. There were some songs with sharp sounds like bells ringing or cymbals that would distort and crackle no matter what settings I used. Nowadays the LAME encoder can rip those songs even at lower bitrates and not distort, even if the overall quality isn’t so hot.
I was in college studying computer science at the time. Hard drives existed, but were insanely expensive. I remember seeing those ads around 85-86. And those were considered breakthrough prices. Not long before that 10 meg HDs ran in excess of 10 grand, more than the cost of a new car. The average user was still using 5 1/2 inch floppies, (which were also relatively high. We had to get floppies to use for many of our classes, and they cost us $5-6 each. We preferred taking classes where we used the DG MV/8000, because we were given a whopping 300k space for storage in our student accounts.
FWIW – I remember a bit from a conversation I had with a guy while standing in line in the unemployment office in Santa Monica, California in either 1970 or 1971. He told me he was experimenting with a system that had no moving parts for recording and playing back music . I have no idea who he was nor how his project turned out.
I remember a visit from a pair of computer consultants working on our servers. They gave us a CD full of MP3’s and a program to rip CD’s to MP3. This was a command line DOS program that would rip a track - an entire CD would take up to a day to process. (those were the days) This would have been around 1995 or 1996. Typical PC’s had CD readers, a writer was significantly more expensive. (But we had one at work)
CD’s I first saw for sale in mid-1983 in Toronto. However, in those days the IBM PC was just coming out, a 20MB disk was huge, and something that could hold an entire 650MB CD was not current for another decade or more.
Nope. In 1983 almost no one outside of business had a hard drive. The typical computer of the time had a 5.25" floppy drive if you were lucky, and if not, you were storing your files on cassette tape. Most home users also did not have an IBM PC. They had Apple II’s, TRS-80’s, TI 99/4’s, or maybe a Commodore PET.
In 1984 the original Mac came out. It did not have a hard drive, but rather a new ‘high capacity’ 3.5" floppy. When you bought programs back then, large ones would come on multiple floppy disks, and you would have to change disks on the fly as the program needed.
Mid-decade brought computers like the Atari ST and Amiga, and IBM clones that brought prices down. You could get cheaper hard drives by then, but they still weren’t common. The Macintosh SE was the first mac with an internal hard drive - 20mb, for an additional $1000. It came out in 1987. No one I knew had a Mac with a hard drive - that was for rich people. In Canada a Mac SE with a hard drive was about $5,000 - about the same price as an IBM PC with hard drive. You could get a pretty good used car for that kind of money.
I wouldn’t say hard drives were ubiquitous until maybe the late 1980’s or early 1990’s.
FWIW, I remember when the first affordable 40MB 3.5" drive became available, a Conner drive that retailed at $399 - an astonishing $10/MB!
I re-sold tons of those - you could put two in a MacII if you removed one of the floppy drives. That would have been around 1989-90 or so.
(For a comparison, Amazon has a 3TB drive for $60 today, or .002¢/MB, a factor of 500,000 reduction in price/MB)
I bet you could have ripped an audio cd to a .iso or a .cue/.bin filepair before .wav.
And although you couldn’t play those files in, say, iTunes, you could probably load them up in a cd drive emulator and play them that way.
Of course, everyone else has pointed out that the storage required was impractical. The real answer is that this became doable and easy when hard disks got cheap enough and lossy compression got good enough that it was reasonable to try. Before that, why burn a ton of money on expensive hard drives to store copies of cheap pressed disks?
You can’t generally rip audio cds to .iso, and .cue/.bin pairs are much more recent - wiki suggest they were introduced with CDRWIN in the mid-late 90s, long after .wav files. And you obviously couldn’t have played them in iTunes.
I’m not sure when cd emulators first appeared - I certainly didn’t see one until the early 2000s, but it’s entirely possible they were earlier. But even if they did appear in the early 90s, hard drive space required would make them impractical for the home user.
Huh.
Did early CD drives that played audio cds just output an analog audio stream, or was there a way to read the binary data off the disk? If the latter, then you could have stored a binary dump of whatever was on it, then played it by feeding that data to whatever played the music from the cd. But if the drive itself had the DAC, then maybe not.
.wav like tiff is a wrapper than can hold audio in several different format, including compressed audio. But by far the most common format is LPCM, 2-channel, 44,100 Hz, 16 bits. This is the same as data on a Redbook audio CD.
Yeah, not exactly the same but when ripping (or burning) a CD you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s all headers, padding, Reed–Solomon code, etc. No data gets converted.
Thinking of a .wav like a CD track is not enough of an issue to get excited about.
Ripping an audio CD off an old 1x CD-ROM takes as long as the length of the CD. So up to 74 minutes (or 80 if someone really crammed the disc). 2x might take half as long, etc. But at higher rates the drive can’t maintain the max speed the whole time plus other issues.
Trying to do anything interesting, like compressing the audio, while ripping on an old Pentium 100 or some such was something else entirely.
Once soundcard/CD-ROM drives came along the bottlenecks for ripping/using a music library on a PC were:
- Disk space.
- Decompression time of mp3s. (I had a Pentium 120 that had trouble playing >128k encoded mp3s using Winamp.)
- Various issues with converting into mp3s. E.g., you could record an LP or cassette using the audio in of a sound card but the quality would be poor. Fixing these issues was often time consuming.
3 could be solved by using CDs as a source. 2 went away soon enough with faster processes. 1 remained an issue for a while longer.
There are both analog and digital ways to get data off an audio CD.
The analog connector is usually a 4 pin (3 wire) grey cable from the CD drive to the sound card (and later motherboard). The advantage of using this was the drive did the real work of getting the data off the disc and freed up the CPU for other stuff.
The digital stream comes straight off the IDE connector (in those days). Note that this was raw bits complete with the Reed–Solomon error correcting coding. So the software had to strip that out. The error correction isn’t perfect on a flaky disc. You got “sound” but maybe not an exact match of what was put there. Some ripping programs would read and then reread a track, compare the bits and if they were different do some more reading/checking to find the best possible bits to pass on. This added quite a bit of time to ripping.
The IBM PC had 2 floppy drives (5-1/4 inch). Replace one of those with the 10MB drive - started about 1985. And… if you pulled the PC across the desk while the computer was turned on, you would most likely crash the hard drive. The first utility to install was a “park the drive head” program.
The XT was available about 1986 and had a 286 processor… IBM cleverly did not allow their PC division to sell any 286’s above 8MHz because that made the $5,000PC almost as powerful and their $100,000 System/36. As a result, Compaq got a major head start selling 10MHz then 12MHz (eventually 20MHZ) 286 PC’s.
(Fun story - my dad wrote a program for his 286 to diagonalize 50x50 matrices. It would take about 24 hours on a 286. He decided to try it on his new 486 and after trying to debug it for an hour, realized that it was actually not crashing, it finished the same task and returned to the DOS prompt in 5 minutes.)
To give you a scale of things - the IBM 370/135 mainframe I operated in 1980 ha 4 disks of 40GB and 4 disks of 280GB. The processor, from about 1977, was apparently about the same power as a 386/25. The VAX we installed in 1993 had an array of 1GB disks and that was YUGE! for those days. A few years later, it was pedestrian. It was the late 90’s before an average PC had a disk equivalent in storage to a CD (650MB). 128Kbps MP3’s typically used 1MB per minute, only a 10-to-1 improvement over a CD, so a decent library still needed a LOT of storage. My iPod from 1995 was the first color screen one (still wheel control) and had a 20GB screen. It cost $600US. (Still works) 20,000 Minutes of audio; 333 hours; 14 days.
I acknowledge that IBM PCs were “business machines” and not exactly dirt cheap. But it is a fact that the IBM PC XT was available in 1983. Here is a contemporary ad. It’s hard to read, but the “base system” came with 128 KB RAM (expandable to 640 KB), one 5¼" diskette drive, and a 10-megabyte hard disk. It shipped with an Intel 8088 microprocessor; no way did it have a 286 in 1983. For that you had to wait until 1984 and the PC/AT model.
ETA if you want to spring for a mainframe at home, that’s cool. But it puts you even farther from the “typical PC user” tier than a top-of-the-line PC/AT which anyone could buy for the cost of a decent used car. 
Re. your father’s problem attempting true number crunching on an “XT 286”: AFAIK those did not come with a maths coprocessor, whereas the 80486 did (except for the crippled model). Also, the 486 was not available until 1989 and was a lot faster.
And what was this 20 GB iPod you had in 1995?
Just as an aside there was quite a scene in Amiga-land with music demos. Here’s one of the better known ones
This came on two single-sided 3.5" floppy disks, so about 1.5 meg? The Amiga helped out a bit with the graphics and audio, but still there’s some shit hot programming involved here. I had quite the collection of these at the time - bought out of the back of Amiga magazines, and frankly pirated too.
Yes, that’s the difference - between doing floating point a byte at a time in software vs. the 486DX’s math coprocessor.
(1995? Doh!!! iPod in 2005 I meant to say… even in those days, a 20GB disk was significant.)
IBM PC was announced in 1981. The “XT” version '83? included the 10MB hard disk. IIRC about then Commodore had announced a 5MB and 9MB hard disks available for their Commodore Pet (or was it C64?) line.
Also note the early PC’s had to introduce “wait state” when memory could not keep up with the processor clock speed.
My first CD drive that could burn CDs was on a Windows 95 machine. I feel confident that it was one of the earlier mass-market-available burners (even then it was still very finicky). I just pulled out the earliest music CD I burned and put it into a Windows 10 desktop, still readable, earliest file has a date stamp of March 1998.
So late 1997/early 1998 seems like a reasonable timeframe to be able to get a reasonably large library of songs in a reasonably small amount of space (that disk has 139 songs, which includes a fair amount of Yes and other prog rock), that can be read even by the devices of today.