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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> It was the time when almost everybody had a collection of MP3 files on the hard disk drive, and Winamp was one of the most downloadable Windows applications.

Objection: nobody had a collection of MP3s in 1995. The computers of 1995 didn't have the power to decompress an audio encoding like MP3 in real-time without an accelerator card. People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs, and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files (where it then took up half their 1GB hard disk, so this was mostly a novelty—unless you were the proud owner of a $2000 1x CD burner to burn the PCM audio back onto.)

MP3s became a big thing around 1999, with better computers and the release of Napster.

WinAmp itself was released in 1997, but wasn't immediately popular because people didn't have music on their computers to play using it. It took off around 1999 as well (which is why everyone remembers Winamp 2, rather than Winamp 1.)

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I'm relatively confident I had MP3 decoding software running on a 486 circa 1994/5. Even today, mpg123's website states "Plays Layer 3 in stereo on an AMD-486-120Mhz or (of course) a faster machine." and of course 48MHz ARM M4 microcontrollers can also play back MP3s.

cdda2wav seems to have existed by 1996.

the "quantum bigfoot" 1GB-and-up HDDs also in 1996 could hold several albums, especially if you ripped at lower rates like 64kBit/s.

I also recall exchanging MP3s on IRC with /dcc send, and am reasonably confident this was 1998 or earlier.

On the other hand, "On July 14, 1995, Karlheinz Brandenburg sent an e-mail announcing the .mp3 file extension had won a poll and announced that the old .bit file extension should no longer be used."

So while literally 1995 is early for people to have a "collection" MP3s on their home machines, the time before everyone had moved on _from_ Windows 95 sure overlapped with the mp3 era, especially for early adopters.

I recall 1997 being when every IRC-type person had mp3s and a cd burner. One was lucky to have a hard drive large enough to convert mp3s to wav files before burning. Otherwise you had to decompress "on the fly" and hope for the best. Could be done at 0.5x for higher chance of success, if I recall correctly.

I remember when the first burners came out that were capable of automatically resyncing and restarting after an error. I've forgotten the brand now, but there was one company that shipped it first, and instantly everyone in the LAN party scene bought it. Ricoh maybe? Burning anything was such a pain before that. Even if you took every precaution in the world, you couldn't stop a big truck from driving by and turning your burn into a coaster.

I recall a friend having a pentium 1 at 100mhz and could only play 64-128 kbps mp3's if he did literally nothing else. The song would skip from time to time and would immediately start skipping if you moved the mouse. From what I remember this was with winamp.

My first machine was a 100mhz Pentium; Winamp used about 25% CPU to play MP3s - I did it all the time while coding and hanging out on IRC. Can't think why your friend's machine would struggle with the same setup. Maybe older versions of Winamp were underoptimized.

I used Sonique for a while because it looked amazing - slightly poorer performance, but felt worth it. Later on, Sonique "optimized" for later Pentium releases and it became much too slow on the P100, so I switched back to Winamp.

Also, it still boots. :)

He was lucky he had a legit pentium, I had one of those cyrix CPUS that claimed pentium speeds, except the floating point unit was rubbish.

The only way to play mp3s was in linux where I shutdown every possible daemon and ran the decoder at the highest priority.

Here's a modern demonstration of decoding MP3's on various 486-class machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zZpzxHSeM

Looks like they're all DX CPUs.

What's up with the socket? It looks like there aren't enough pins on the CPU, but they're used for the Pentium Overdrive.

Early mp3 decoders depended on floating point. Using modern fixed point code will let you run on less capable hardware.

The reference implementation is floating-point, for accuracy, but you can bet they were using fixed-point back then, as DSPs and such would be fixed-point only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 was released in 1995 and requires "only" a 66MHz 486, available in 1992.

I totally forgot about that one! I'm also unsure why I'm being downvoted for sharing software that dates back to '98

I remember our family's Mac, with a 68LC040 CPU, which was a 68040 without a dedicated floating point unit, could only play back mp2 files in realtime.

There was a program called "amp" that used fast integer math.

I compiled it on an SGI Indigo running at 30Mhz and it would play up to 256kbps files using 90 percent of CPU.

MIPS at 30Mhz is comparable to contemporary pentiums at much higher frequency of the era. The Indigo probably had faster memory, io and bigger caches than pc's mere mortals could buy. The comparison is simply not fair.

But this program called "amp"... I'm very curious to see if it could be compiled to run on a recent machine.

Let me see if I can track it down...

I agree with you, but 30Mhz! That is a very low clock for 256kbps decode.

MIPS did very significantly outperform Intel at that time.

http://www.mp3-tech.org/programmer/sources/amp-0_7_6.tgz

Found it.

An Indigo sat in the office for a time playing tunes from an NFS share we would populate. I eventually took it home to do the same thing. I forget how I parted ways with that old box.

I am not inclined to build it at the moment, though it may well make for a great micro controller project one day.

Nice! Still compiles with a minor modification: added a break on the default case of a switch. Time signature is wrong when playing though.

Edit: Fixed: add "frequency = frequency/2;" after the comment /* Set the output frequency */ in file audioIO_Linux.c

Cool! I liked the quality output of that player at the time. Highs were clean.

Does it still hold up?

Maybe I will build it just for grins myself. Thanks for the tips.

I can't critically evaluate the quality since I have no high quality mp3 nor Hi-Fi audio devices. An old recording of mine http://marcodiegomesquita.tripod.com/rda.mp3 sounded with very unsaturated bass; which is good, I think I recorded/mastered it wrongly or the software I used at the time decoded it like amp decodes it. It actually sounds really good with amp.

But yes, it uses very little cpu. Maybe less than dosamp.

I had similar experiences. Yeah, I need to build it now. Have a few tracks that often have watery highs, just not crisp. Amp played them great.

Maybe I will play your track after the family activities. Edit: Except access denied, lol. No worries.

Hugh of death likely. I can download it correctly from here: https://marcodiegomesquita.tripod.com/

Cool, thanks.

Slackware still has amp.

What version?

Slackware? 14.2

I was wondering about amp. Maybe a newer one exists? Sorry to be unclear.

It is available from debian archive: http://archive.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/a/amp/

I entered college in 1995. I downloaded my first MP3 in summer of 1996 (Savage Garden -- Chicken Cherry Cola). By the end of 1997 (which is when the OP is talking about, when Winamp dropped) I had hundreds of MP3.

Scour was released in November 1997, and it was released to solve the problem of a whole bunch of college students having their MP3 libraries available via Windows shares, but it was hard to find what you were looking for. Scour fixed that.

So maybe not the general public, but in 1997 someone released a search engine specific to finding MP3s, because people already had large collections.

> So maybe not the general public, but in 1997 someone released a search engine specific to finding MP3s, because people already had large collections.

I was the author of MP3 Fiend around this time.

It was a desktop metasearch engine for MP3s that worked in conjunction with multiple download clients.

It was very successful at the time, only for Napster to come along and eat my lunch.

It got ... called out a lot by the press.

https://i.imgur.com/0hnIG5Y.jpg

Hey it's not your fault! It's like trying to complain that UPS aids drug dealers.

> I downloaded my first MP3 in summer of 1996 (Savage Garden -- Chicken Cherry Cola).

LOL, I know exactly what song you mean, but it was called I Want You. We did it in my a cappella group in 1997.

Oh I know, but the MP3 was called Chicken Cherry Cola. :)

Ah yes, the days of mis-titled MP3 files, incorrect metadata, and other artifacts. Sometimes an MP3 of a song you liked had a click in a certain spot, or occasionally some kind of sound like an AIM message coming through.

I ran my company's (unofficial) MP3 server in '99, and I spent a LOT of time managing files.

I ultimately went back to college in 2002 which was the right time to catch Apple's first attempt at Home Sharing in iTunes (I forget what it was called), where basically every single Mac on the campus network was running an HTTP server advertising all of its music for download.

> but wasn't immediately popular because people didn't have music on their computers to play using it

I think Audiograbber was the first popular program to rip MP3's from your CD collection. Best I can tell, it was first released as v1.41 in Feb 1997. Winamp came out a couple months later.

And then young people were absolutely listening to their CD's as MP3's on their computers by the summer of 1997 -- I know I was, it was just so much more convenient. And you definitely didn't need to wait for Napster if you were on a college campus with dorms -- you'd find tons of "anonymous" network shares filled with thousands and thousands of tracks in the fall of 1997 for sure.

And the Diamond Rio player came out at the end of 1998... I remember that was huge... all of a sudden your MP3's were portable!

That's the gap between a computer enthusiast and average population. Most people weren't on a campus with a LAN. Many people were relying on 33.6K dial-up with metered a metered ISP, often on their phone line they needed to receive calls. For most people MP3s were just too hard to transfer.

Cheap CDRs were the other big breakthrough. Now people had a reason to download music so they could burn it to listen in their car. But that's well after Win95.

> between a computer enthusiast and average population

Not computer enthusiasts -- just college students.

I remember being pretty surprised, it wasn't the CS students who had all the ripped music. It was the party kids. The "killer app" for MP3's was the ability to put together all-day and all-night music mixes that could be shuffled instantly. For the first time you could DJ effortlessly.

I downloaded plenty of music on shitty dialup. It’s not like there were any other options. The hard part was finding them until Napster etc

Audiogalaxy stands out more in my mind for some reason. I never used Napster much.

I was a big fan of Soulseek back in the day. Everyone else I knew used Limewire

I think Audiograbber was the first downloadable software I ever paid for that did not come in a box.

I still have my Diamond Rio player just need to find a paralell port to see if I can get it wroking.

> People swapped MIDI arrangements of popular songs

I recall downloading MOD files back in the day from various BBSs. This is probably pre-95 by a few years. MIDI files were good but you needed a good sound card to play them. I recall drooling over ads of the Gravis Ultrasound (I had a SB Pro).

Thank you for clarifying that essentially it was Win 98 (maybe Second Edition) when those applications took off.

I seem to recall a MP3 player that worked directly from DOS during that era. My computer couldn't play them in Windows, but could using the DOS based player around that time.

I have to disagree. A pentium at 100mhz was enough to run winamp and play 128kbps mp3 without any hiccups. Doing more than that at once was complicated, but not impossible.

I used a 100mhz Pentium with 64MB or memory and, later, a 166mhz Pentium with 128MB. Win98 (people are correct that midis were way more common in the ‘95 days, as even a 2MB mp3 would take forever to download on dial-up and hard drives were small) and my experience was than any OS was fine if you were only playing mp3s, but on anything but BeOS or QNX you’d get bad pops and UI lag if you did anything else while a song way playing. Linux was actually worse about this than Windows, in fact, but both were bad.

I had a pentium mmx 200mhz with 32mb ram running windows in 1997. I could run winamp or realplayer, and at the same time I could download using get right, chat on mIRC, browse the internet using netscape and still had a file manager window open. All at the same time.

Changing from one window to another allowed me to see widgets been drawn. It wasn't snappy, but it wasn't a crawl. I could still open a dos window and run qbasic or turboC. I had to be careful: drunk pointers risked stability of the system.

At the time I never had the same thrashing problems I have today running linux. That is why I'm so hopeful about systemd-oomd.

I could keep the machine like this for almost a whole day. A windows 9x machine rarely passed 24 hours uptime with heavy usage without a bluescreen.

I later upgraded the machine to 64mb ram, 2 harddisks, 2 floopy drives and both cd drive bay became occupied: one with a cdrom drive and the other with a cd burner. I then replaced the winmodem with a network card. It was a good machine. The only thing that barred me from using linux on it was the soundcard (AZT-R2316) that had no linux driver. It 2mb s3 video card worked better with linux. By the time the sound drivers arrived it was 2007 and I already had a new linux-only 2006 machine.

With Linux, FVWM which was damn lightweight (and still is), and some "nice" sttings I was able to do it better than W98. Rxvt was far lighter than XTerm. Most software was for the cli after all.

Fluxbox/blackbox was even lighter. I think lightweight linux distributions, like damm small linux, could run faster than windows 9x. Unfortunately, easy to use, highly compatible, lightweight linux distros only became popular after the win9x era.

Actually, FVWM was lighter than even Blackbox, check it up.

On "highly compatible", well, you could run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash.

Mandrake was slow to boot on a 90's class machine compared to damn small linux. Also "run mandrake and send drakconf and KDE to the trash" doesn't ticks the "easy to use" box.

At that time I was running IRIX. Had none of those problems.

Winamp was 1997.

I remember there was one software decoder that was fast enough in 1995, so I plugged in my Pentium/100 laptop to decode music and pass it uncompressed to my desktop Pentium/90 (which was too slow) over 10base-T!

I still have bootable Cyrix 133MHz that has MP3’s on the hard drive, they wouldn’t be there if it couldn’t play them.

Being possible != being practical

It was possible, practical and happened. Collections were smaller because drives were smaller. MP3 became more popular by the end of the 90's, but a good 1995 machine, 100mhz pentium with 8mb of ram and 512mb harddisk, was 100% practical for playing mp3.

Yes they did. Straight otta Fraunhofer! We used Winplay3 and mpg123 to get mp3playback. Winamp was a godsend when it came, due to many quality of life improvements.

> and some folks ripped PCM audio directly to WAV files

yup, that was me. I had to be very selective about what songs I wanted off a small number of CDs.

I seem to remember doing that before ripping and faster CD drives too - instead capturing audio output. That was painful.

Thank you sir. My windows 95 machine could not play an MP3, and I could hardly download one in my dialup connection. My entire hard drive was 500mb, and I couldn’t have saved many MP3s even if I’d wanted. I did have about 1000 MIDI files, though.

They were compressed to shit back then. Like 96kbps bitrate or something. (way before variable bitrate was a thing).

I remember them being like 1.5-3 mb each. Not that bad of a download with a 56k

Ah yes, I remember when a 1MB download took 30 minutes to 1 hour to complete.

Now I don't even blink over hitting a webpage with multiple megs of assets.

The hacker news favicon is bigger than most webpages of the time :D

I had a 56k modem, but in practice, I could seldom get 3kbps. Just a bit too rural. 2 - 2.5 was usually what I got.

I have a hunch that you're mixing up bits and bytes in that memory, because I very distinctly remember seeing the internet explorer 4 download progress indicator telling me that I was getting 4.5 "KBPS" down on a 48K link, which makes sense when you convert kilobits per second to kilobytes per second. Internet Explorer would give download speeds in kilobytes per second. If you were getting 3 kilobytes per second, then that's equivalent to ~28.8 kilobits per second, which my buddy who lived out in the middle of nowhere would get. He would come to my house in town so he could get better performance in Runescape. This was in 2003. I am not joking.

You have the right idea -- I wasn't mixing them up, but as you note, I expected to be able to get more than 3KBPS on a 56.6k link. I still managed to download about 3,000 songs on that link, though! I was very dedicated. I couldn't actually browse the internet while downloading, so I had to queue up webpages, or just find something else to do while I downloaded a single song.

Indeed. But I definitely had a collection of MP3s on my Win95 machine as soon as Napster hit the scene. I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive. By the time my mom gave me her Pentium 2 Win95 machine when she upgraded Napster had already came and went. Kazaa was the next big thing for a while, but it was never as good. CD-R/W drives were a game changer for a while though. I was amazed by the ability to load multiple CDs to make a play list and then be prompted to load the each CD into the drive to burn the tracks I wanted.

> I was able to fit exactly one Blink 182 album on my 1GB hard drive.

Dang, 1GB back in these days was pretty legit. A 128k MP3 was something like 3-4 megs per song - I'd fit a bunch on a 100 meg Zip disk back in the day and feel like a king.

Yep, it was an aftermarket HD. The original was about half the size.

I do remember using my 1997-era computer (Pentium II, 233 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 3 GB disk) to listen to audio even though I didn't have a collection of MP3s. Many computers at that time shipped with a CD-ROM (if not a CD-R or CD-RW) drive, and so could play back audio off of CDs.

I also remember waiting a few minutes to download Winamp, ICQ, and the like. (A dial-up modem would get 4 KB/s down on a good day, so 146 KB was not insignificant for an application.)

You are mistaken. It took a lot of cpu but definitely worked. I can't remember the name of it, but I used some quirky mp3 player for a couple years before winamp came out.

I do remember being impressed how mod / tracker based music was so much more efficient on our P5 120Mhz. It was something like 10% of cpu vs 50% for mp3.

I graduated from high school in 1996, and everyone in college dorms were exchanging music files with point to point sharing in the dorms. It was early adopter era, but the computers could handle it.

Ripping CDs and encoding was definitely a different story.

The Commodore 64 was introduced in January, 1982. Here's the C64 decoding and playing an MP3 in real-time:

https://youtu.be/0mF9kXZAjsI?t=17

Someone always pulls out a C64 demo. This is using a bunch of tricks to do it and it is massively compressed.

It generally isn't doable. My Amiga 600 without the Vampire or a Prisma Megamix cannot play MP3s of decent quality and the Amiga was far more capable than C64.

Also, some of us had sizeable RealAudio collections.

Sure, the quality is shit by modern standards, but it could easily be played by ordinary computers of the time and took up very little space.

In I think Winplay 3 there were options to play them in mono for weaker CPUs (386 or at least 486).

FWIW, F97/S98 was when MP3s started to take off on my college campus at the time.

I love nerd-peen measuring contests threads like this.

People were still using Windows 95 in 1999.

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