MP3 to EXE (1999) | Hacker News Reader

MP3 to EXE (1999)

rarewares.org

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I told my Dad this "Linkin-Park_Numb.exe" from Limewire is a common way to listen to MP3's.

But no, he insisted it bricked the family PC.

Pretty much a universal 90s and 00s kid exerience that.

I got so good at reinstalling Windows XP and then calling the Microsoft number to re-activate. Most of the time the automated system worked, but sometimes you even had to talk to a human and explain why you need a new key.

FCKGW-...

the only time I've ever memorized a software license serial key

Same here for Windows 95 OSR 2!

35296-...

I don't know why I know this, but the first five digits of a win95 key were a julian date. Your cd was pressed on the 352nd of 1996, or December 18th.

...RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

Wait? Windows XP didn't always come with the key scribbled on the disc?

Assuming the OP didn't have a reliable internet connection you would need to call in phone number to activate.

I wasn't allowed online until I turned 16 and was able to get my own job and pay for a second phone line. Prior to that, I had to shuffle stacks of floppies back and forth to use the T1 in my high school.

It did, but you could only use it 3 times (I think). After that you have to call to get a new one issued.

I had an Amiga. No one tried to poison my MP3s. :~(

Every time I'm reminded of Linkin Park songs I'm filled with mixed feelings. It reminds me of the 2000's, 144p videos, pre-iPhone era, when I was discovering myself (and so was the humanity as a whole). I don't wanna go back, but I don't know what to do with those memories either. It's a strange feeling.

Sounds like a good excuse for a drunken karaoke night!

FWIW I think they're getting back together and releasing a new album in November. Minus Chester, of course. RIP.

I still occasionally make low quality AMVs and record them onto vhs. It's weirdly cathartic. Like looking at my present self through the eyes of my past self and going "hell yeah we're still cool"

I miss all the old personal websites on Geocities, Tripod, etc and using web rings to discover them. Also learning how to write a website in HTML with notepad and learning how FTP works, and working around your free quota. My computer art teacher at the time was really good at shaving every little byte off a gif file.

I remember the first CSS I ever wrote was for my NeoPets shop. The tutorial they had on how to do it was full of little britishisms like "I know it's spelled 'colour', but for CSS we use 'color'".

This brings back such memories. Sometimes I really miss that era of the internet, but deep down I know I actually just miss being that age lol.

I would install Kazaa to download the Kazaa Lite installer, then I'd use that to try and cobble together albums I wanted, all with wildly different bitrates and tags, and sometimes completely wrong songs.

Getting all kinds of nasty viruses from cd key sites to play a burned copy of a copy of a copy of Brood War with my friends.

When I discovered slsk it was like uncovering the city of Atlantis to my teenaged brain.

I really miss how the internet felt like pure magic back then.

Soulseek was a goldmine for those interested in rare/unofficial recordings (including from rehearsals, smaller gigs, etc). I'm from a Small Country, so our alternative music scene has all kinds of surprising links between people. In the early 2000s, when irresponsible mp3-pirating was, like, the most obvious thing to do over here, some of those "well connected people" would put all kinds of crazy "kitchen recordings" online sometimes. Also, lots of vinyl/cassette rips that were not so easy to find. I collected a lot of gems this way, and probably spent hours and hours every week in Soulseek. And, thus, in geeky music.

It was a great environment: one where pirating (alternative) music really did almost feel like a noble cultural act -- as in, hey, we're sharing this stuff and thus help to keep these (tiny) scenes alive. It is quite possible that the fan base of many alternative groups increased somewhat thanks to Soulseek. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking by an embarrassed former pirate. :)

IIRC, the UI of Soulseek was great, too. Really simple and fast. Good times.

was? :)

We all pretend it doesn't exist so as to not draw unnecessary attention and I'd appreciate it if you'd play along.

I think it was GTA 3 or Vice City where you could place MP3s in a special folder to they would play on the onboard radio station of vehicles. This was the first song that started playing. Heard it so often, just driving around the city.

I miss these times. Easier times for sure.

edit: Well, on second thought not so easy times. But different problems. Problem that seem less problematic now.

Also GTA: SA

I remember how amazed I was that you could do this with the xbox versions of the game. You could save music files to the internal hard drive. Stuff like that made sense to me on the computer, but at that point a console with internal storage was The Future

I don't think your dad was wrong here, viruses/malware/adware were rampant on filesharing platforms. Back in those days I downloaded tons of cracks/trainers/etc and got pwned all the time. It made me really good at re-installing Windows 98/XP :D

thats_the_joke.jpg

It brings back lots of memories. There was even a way to pack an MP3 in a .wav file so it could play on Win31 players that didn't have native support for MP3, using Windows' codec instead.

Also, from the same site:

https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/cooledit.php

A program that I remember using back then. It's less than 1 MB, but has most of the features of Audacity today.

> There was even a way to pack an MP3 in a .wav file so it could play on Win31 players that didn't have native support for MP3, using Windows' codec instead.

Pack, or re-encode?

As I recall, it was wasn't decompressed, the MP3 data was written into a WAV file with a RIFF header. There were situations where you had a decoder available, but couldn't get your app to recognize that MP3 files were audio.

Pack. WAV doesn't need to store header and raw PCM data (which it usually does though), it's just a container.

CoolEdit Pro was bought by Adobe and became Audition.

https://www.adobe.com/special/products/audition/syntrillium....

Wow! I had a copy Cool Edit from a CompuServe CD, IIRC. That got me into audio editing and making my own ringtones and whatnot.

Cool Edit still exists! Though it got bought by Adobe and is now Adobe Audition!

>By the way, the player stub adds about 200 to 250kB to the MP3 file size.

Yikes! There's plenty of room for improvement then. An MP3 decoder fits into 15kbyte: https://keyj.emphy.de/minimp3/

Can't help but reminisce and think how wild those times were! Running a random executable downloaded over plain http/ftp just to play a song :exploding_head:.

Surprised there wasn't an MP3 to MS Office macros converter :D

> Surprised there wasn't an MP3 to MS Office macros converter :D

No need. Just embed with OLE and write the autoplay macro yourself. Office supported OLE probably since Win311 - remember Object Packager?

Interesting, though wouldn't playback require a preinstalled codec in this case?

It would. Windows had MP3 codec since WMP9, I think.

Or, if the recipient doesn't care about security, embed the .exe generated by that program.

Holy, this is the first place I downloaded the LAME encoder from when I was a pre-teen. Cheers

Many of times used this then added sub7 or backorifice - ahhhh the good ol days

Did you open and close a friend’s CD tray while on the phone with them?

Today we download pirated PDFs off sketchy Russian servers. So, a minor improvement at least.

Pretty sure that today's PDFs are infinitely more secure that EXE's in the 1990's. There is a sandbox and no native code execution in PDFs.

(That is, unless you use Adobe's PDF reader, which seems to support JS for some weird reason and has an RCE almost every month. But given there are tons of alternatives, you must really not care about security to use it for personal purposes)

Time to plug SumatraPDF[0] which I love! It's super lightweight and fast. It isn't able to edit the files though. What do you use to edit them? At this point I just use the reader included in Firefox

[0] https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader

Some of us at least hold out for pirated EPUBs.

Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.

Ah, the 90s, download an exe without concern, all the warez and keygens.

wow, most scary thing to do in 1999.

  Hey I'mma send you my new mp3 using mail! Or wait! I'll just send it in EXE format!

What a 90s thing to do! Shrug!

fast forward to the 2020s

Is there an app for that? I don't know how to put a shortcut on the a desktop anymore.

I dont even know what a folder is

So you're telling me "MasterOfPuppets.mp3.exe" could've been legit after all....

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