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.
omg, speed, why has no one said ‘speed’ yet? An hour-long tv show was 350mb, and it took three days to download.
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.
Id actually bring back the power to pirate.
The amount of effort that has gone into trying to extract every possible stream dollar makes me just wanna fuck the system. I am happy to pay to watch or play something, but pirating is the only way to get it without being ripped, “this is no longer available” or “buy this other platform and make an account”.
Steam and GoG got alot of my money because I could buy what I actually wanted. I would have happily paid for a soap2day app that allowed me to just select and watch stuff. The amount of 90s cartoons I could show the kids…
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.
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.
I used to pirate because I was poor back then. Now that I make a decent living I’m more than happy to pay devs for their hard work.
I really miss the original Napster. I got so many good songs off of there. Now I really don’t know where to find new music that I’m going to like. I feel like I’ve listed to most of the stuff out there (even though I know that’s impossible), or it’s just not a unique sound. Everything just seems to blend together even on a “discovery” mix seeded with artists I don’t listen to much.
yeah, I’d really like a thing like jellyseerr that’s easy to hook into the *arrs for browsing for suggested/popular/new music.
Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That’s the biggest change.
I miss mixed CDs. You meet someone, you understand their music tastes, and you make them a mix of stuff that you think they’d like, but from your favorite known artists. I made plenty, and ones I received got me into some awesome bands.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It’s how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.
*arrs auto downloading stuff for sure.
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.
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.
