Myself and millions of others used Napster over dialup. It was just as excruciating as it sounds. It would take from overnight to 24 hours to download a single song. And that’s if you were lucky. You might have waited all day to download a song and once it was 98% complete, your mom or someone would pick up the phone in the other room and destroy all your hard work.
I remember around 1999 my friend’s dad worked for the military and had a T1 line to his house. My friend claimed it was so fast that on good days he could listen to a song while it downloaded! I was very jealous.
I think we’ve been over when it was conceivably possible and when the average person might have been able to start a music library. But is there any actual person we can point to and say they had the earliest digital music library. Is there a factual answer to that question? Was there any musically oriented tech millionaire or computer science professor in the early 90s, say, who was at the forefront of digital music storage? Even just as a proof of concept?
Back in the mid-90s I could find CDs at Circuit City, Kemp Mill records, and a few other CD only places for under $10. I was never really a Top40 listener so I never had to pay those premium prices of $10.99 or $11.99. There was also those mail-order subscription services I used via those I could get CDs for cheap.
I used to use Napster and like sites for music I couldn’t find on CD, like stuff from EU, or, local bands from New York or West Coast. I had a huge collection of music from all over.
In college there were those that were “collectors”. All they did was download and brag about the amount of MP3s, it never did it for me as the audio capability of a computer was terrible and then you throw in a format like MP3 and I didn’t get spending all that time to get stuff that sounded worse than the radio.
Depends what kind of answer you are looking for. Commercial digital recording started out during the 1960s. As for proof of concept, Wikipedia notes Bell Labs digitally recording sound onto a computer in 1957.
A propos this, there are pros who will argue (and explain why) that even CDs or DATs are strictly a mass-consumer product and don’t sound all that superb compared to, say, good old 2-inch reel-to-reel tape and other pro formats. (This depends somewhat on the quality of the recording/mastering/playback equipment but there is a valid technical point there.) The good thing about the abandonment of those physical distribution formats is that now better-than-CD quality digital music is commonly available to the average user. Eg the popular FLAC encoding can deliver much better than CD quality.
Sure, but in practical terms, your average 286, 386 or 486 had a 40 to 120 mb hard drive in 1991, most likely an 80.
And in 1995/1996 you could get a 1 gb drive- I had one, and had the most disk space of anyone in my dorm.
I remember 1997-1998 being the point when people started ripping CDs to MP3 and sharing them a lot- I still have MP3s from that era myself. It took a few more years after that for the iPod to really take off, and a while later for streaming music to really take hold.
CD burners were still expensive- I think my company paid like $250-300 for ours in 1998/1999 (not sure exactly when we bought it), and the media itself was colossally expensive as well.
And no… no iPods in 1995. There weren’t even iMacs in 1995; just a bunch of super overpriced PowerPC based Macs. Apple was struggling pretty hard in 1995 as a matter of fact.
I was thinking of a music library like the OP was talking about. Commercially produced music saved to a hard drive by either ripping CDs or downloading over a network, though I doubt the latter method was a good option until well into the world wide web era.
And a library that could be updated. I remember my Aunt getting a Windows 3.1 computer that came with a couple of low-res music videos when she bought it. “Right Here, Right Now”, “Enter Sandman” and maybe one or two more. But there was no way for us to add music to that list at the time, so I wouldn’t count that as a “music library”. It was just a demo that helped sell computers.
I suspect around that time (1993-1994, maybe?) there had to be somebody somewhere who could put music onto their computer and listen to it over the computer speakers or headphones. Sure they needed a high powered computer and a big hard drive, maybe a fancy sound card. But businesses and colleges had those things, and I imagine rich computer nerds did too. Can we put a name to one of them? Someone like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates come to mind, though I suspect those particular wealthy nerds worked too much to focus on an experimental digital music library.
I didn’t get invited to any LAN parties in high school. :mad: And in my experience, it was that bad. What with one or both sides of the file transfer dealing with possibly multiple songs, plus other web browsing and internet usage, and the fact that 56k was a theoretical maximum and not anything like an average speed at my house, I always felt lucky if I could wake up to a song I started downloading the night before. Usually it was closer to a whole day, though once they got near 24 hours, I wrote them off. The longer it took to download, the lower the chance of eventual success, and I could use that bandwidth for something more promising. Thankfully, this was after AOL and other providers stopped charging by the minute, at least.
I did a research paper on MP3s back in high school, and one thing I remember is that my sources said that it was not until the 120Mhz Pentium that computers were powerful enough to play back an MP3 in real time.
I also remember later getting my hands on a laptop with about that processor, and it was indeed that difficult to play back an MP3.
That said, do note there was digital audio compression before the MP3. Heck, the name should give you a hint to that.
I went to Comdex’s in back-to-back years, apparently 1990 and 1991. I called it “A country fair with suits.”
The contrast between those two years for the big PC makers was noticeable. The first one the PCs were split up into “Regular PCs over here, multimedia PCs over there.” The second year they were all multimedia PCs.
That was the transition point where people generally expected their PCs to have a sound card and CD-ROM drive. But still pre-mp3 era.
Regarding the “3” in “mp3”. The standard came out of the MPEG-1 audio/video standard. The full name originally was “MPEG-1 Audio Layer III”. So it’s from a form of audio encoding used in the MPEG-1 standard. The “I” and “II” audio layers weren’t suitable for efficient song compression.
Regarding the timing of processors: Pentiums were introduced in 1993. The 120 in 1995. That would be when you could play non-demanding mp3s on a PC.
I bought a 120mb SCSI HD for my PC around 1990. Something like $300 with an 8-bit controller. That could hold a few uncompressed songs. So still too early.
I think I’m converging on the 1995-1997 era for the OP’s question.
Napster was a bit later - it launched in June 1999, and only lasted two years before it was closed down in the face of legal challenges*.
A normal home user would not have been able to build a digital library on their pc without compression tech, CD-rip tech and enough storage space. It seems that all of these things became available at around the same time.
Music became digital with the introduction of the CD. They had replaced vinyl by the end of the 1980’s, and you could store them on a hard disk and play them back (as CDs) with a suitable program, but this was not an option until about the mid-nineties. I recall having a 330 MB HDD in 1993, a 720 MB HDD in 1994, and a 1 GB HDD in 1995. It was only about then that it really became feasible to store digital music in any format on disk. MP3 reduced the file sizes, of course. Sound cards and CD drives were cheaper by the early 1990’s, as well.
I was never at the bleeding edge of technology, it is always an expensive game and the hardware is always version 1.0, with all that that entails. Thus I never had the latest hardware, but the difference was only a year or two. I don’t recall trying to play back music on a 386 or a 486, but I suspect it could have been at the limits of the processor.
I recall seeing ads for systems for PCs that had a kind of jukebox system for playing CDs, and ones dedicated to copying and playing back CDs. Both went the way of the dedicated word processor. These days, with HDDs in the terabyte range, you could copy CDs onto such a disk and use a suitable program to play them back directly. Some time I’ll do it with my collection.
In 1993-4 a friend of my brother was proudly demonstrating his new double speed CD-ROM burner drive. We copied several CDs worht of music, but I can’t recall if they were mp3 or compact disc format. PRobably CD.
Same here. My memory’s faded but back in 95-96 my project manager plopped a CD-R on my desk and said “check this out it’s a new format called MP3 that lets you store 50+ songs on one CD.” I can’t remember what software we used for playback, Quicktime maybe, but I don’t think I had trouble playing them at work on Windows 95.
At the time a lot of people at work had PCs, many with CD readers, and some techies had CD writers for backups and software distribution, and computer usage rules were pretty lax back then. So presumably people working in some offices could get the techies to burn MP3 CDs for them, if only to use at work.
As far as I know the MP3 codec is backwards compatible, so if I’d kept that first CD-R I could say my library started in late 95. By 1999 I’d discovered mp3.com and spent several weekends downloading enough MP3s to fill several CD-Rs, later transferred to HDD and still part of my music library.
I’m curious about a couple of things though. Did Quicktime work for music playback? And what about the first PC games like Myst and Civilization, did they have background music and how were they distributed?
Quicktime is a media format/library thing. The actual playback software is called Quicktime Player. It supports several image/video/audio formats including mp3s.
The music in old computer games was generated on-the-fly in most cases (think like a MIDI file, only simpler). Actual audio files were limited to special uses.
Regarding burning CDs c1996-7, I remember I would buy a box of 10 CDs (with jewel cases) for $10 on sale. So think in terms of $1/CD around then.
I checked an old backup and the earliest mp3s I found were from 1998.
Note that there is a Napster web site out there. It does streaming. (So the artists are still getting screwed.)
Myst was distributed on CD and had background music and animation. The music was downgraded to 8-bit, 11 KHz quality for technical reasons (ie slow CD-ROM read speeds); similarly, videos were encoded as QuickTime Cinepak.
I don’t remember what music codecs QuickTime 1.5 supported, but I’m sure someone can find the list. I doubt it had MP3, though.
But that was a Mac. Which you might remember, at the time was considered overpriced and technically inferior by people who used PC’s.
On our home IBM compatible, our first hard disk was 40MB in 1983. That would not have been considered ordinary in 1983, it was high-end. Novel netware was introduced the same year. And they were selling xenix at the same time. AIR, MS boosted the MSDOS boot partition size to 32MB the next year (1984).
The fact that we could have a 40MB drive in our (DOS 2) home computer in 1983 reflects the fact that they were easily available, and common in business machines where required. (Tech note: 10MB partitions, block driver).
Win 3.1 was released in 1992, and a Win 3.1 computer would have had a 20MB+ hard drive. (" Installed size on the hard disk was between 10 MB and 15 MB. "). People using DOS on second-hand computers would still have been using floppies. Network servers and anybody with any money would have had bigger disks.
Windows 95 had, as I recall a maximum disk size of 8GB: ordinary people had already hit the 2GB limit. Storage cost on HD was still higher than storage cost on 3.5" floppies, so HD was used for active storage.
The 1983 PC (clone) played (digital) music on the PC speaker. My father had an only sightly above ordinary level of interest in computer music, and he could have started a collection then, but his actual interest was in making music, not storing it.
That reminds me that it wasn’t uncommon for computer games (Covert Action comes to mind) to have an option for Roland MT-32 sound.
Either you’re remembering wrong or your family had a lot more money than mine. PCs didn’t directly support hard drives until 1983 with the introduction of the 1561 expansion, which initially had a 10 megabyte hard drive. I haven’t been able to find what they cost, but 1983 a 10 meg drive sold for 2-3 thousand and the 1561 required a separate power supply, so it must have been a bundle. The earliest price for a 40 meg drive I can find is in 1987. There were ways to connect a Winchester drive, but they required connecting it to the floppy controller and using a patched version of DOS to make it look like a huge floppy (with no subdirectory support).
and had background music and animation. The music was downgraded to 8-bit, 11 KHz quality for technical reasons (ie slow CD-ROM read speeds); similarly, videos were encoded as QuickTime Cinepak.