Tag: piracy

My First MP3

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Somebody shared with me a tweet about the tragedy of being a Gen X’er and having to buy all your music again and again as formats evolve. Somebody else shared with me Kyla La Grange‘s cover of a particular song .Together… these reminded me that I’ve never told you the story of my first MP3…1

Screenshot of tweet by @bewgtweets posted Oct 17, 2021, reading: If you want to know why Gen X’ers are always mad it’s because we had to replace our record collections with a tape collection that was then replaced with a cd collection that was then replaced with MP3’s and damn it how many time must I pay to listen to grunge
I didn’t/don’t own much vinyl – perhaps mostly because I had a tape deck in my bedroom years before a record player – but I’ve felt this pain. And don’t get me started on the videogames I’ve paid for multiple times.

In the Summer of 1995 I bought the CD single of the (still excellent!) Set You Free by N-Trance.2 I’d heard about this new-fangled “MP3” audio format, so soon afterwards I decided to rip a copy of the song to my PC.

I was using a 66MHz 486SX CPU, and without an embedded FPU I didn’t quite have the spare processing power to rip-and-encode in a single pass.3 So instead I first ripped to an uncompressed PCM .wav file and then performed the encoding: the former step was done almost in real-time (I listened to the track as it ripped!), about 7 minutes. The latter step took about 20 minutes.

So… about half an hour in total, to rip a single song.

Dan, as a teenager, sits at a desk with his hand to his chin. In the foreground, a beiege two-button wired ball-type computer mouse rests on the corner of the desk. Dan is wearing a black t-shirt with a red devil face printed onto it.
Progress bar, you say? I’ll just sit here and wait then, I guess. Actual contemporary-ish photo.

Creating a (what would now be considered an apalling) 32kHz mono-channel file, this meant that I briefly stored both a 27MB wave file and the final ~4MB MP3 file. 31MB might not sound huge, but I only had a total of 145MB of hard drive space at the time, so 31MB consumed over a fifth of my entire fixed storage! Even after deleting the intermediary wave file I was left with a single song consuming around 3% of my space, which is mind-boggling to think about in hindsight.

But it felt like magic. I called my friend Gary to tell him about it. “This is going to be massive!” I said. At the time, I meant for techy people: I could imagine a future in which, with more hard drive space, I’d keep all my music this way… or else bundle entire artists onto writable CDs in this new format, making albums obsolete. I never considered that over the coming decade or so the format would enter the public consciousness, let alone that it’d take off like it did.

A young man in jeans and a blue coat stands on the patio in the back garden of a terraced house, dropping a half-brick onto the floor. In the background, an unused rabbit hutch and a dustbin can be seen. The photo is clearly taken using a flash, at night.
If you’re thinking of Gary and I as the kind of reprobates who helped bring on the golden age of music piracy… I’d like to distract you with a bigger show of yobbish behaviour in the form of this photo from the day we played at dropping half-bricks onto starter pistol ammunition.

The MP3 file I produced had a fault. Most of the way through the encoding process, I got bored and ran another program, and this must’ve interfered with the stream because there was an audible “blip” noise about 30 seconds from the end of the track. You’d have to be listening carefully to hear it, or else know what you were looking for, but it was there. I didn’t want to go through the whole process again, so I left it.

But that artefact uniquely identified that copy of what was, in the end, a popular song to have in your digital music collection. As the years went by and I traded MP3 files in bulk at LAN parties or on CD-Rs or, on at least one ocassion, on an Iomega Zip disk (remember those?), I’d ocassionally see N-Trance - (Only Love Can) Set You Free.mp34 being passed around and play it, to see if it was “my” copy.

Sometimes the ID3 tags had been changed because for example the previous owner had decided it deserved to be considered Genre: Dance instead of Genre: Trance5. But I could still identify that file because of the audio fingerprint, distinct to the first MP3 I ever created.

I still had that file when I went to university (where it occupied a smaller proportion of my hard drive space) and hearing that distinctive “blip” would remind me about the ordeal that was involved in its creation. I don’t have it any more, but perhaps somebody else still does.

Footnotes

1 I might never have told this story on my blog, but eagle-eyed readers may remember that I’ve certainly hinted at it before now.

2 Rewatching that music video, I’m struck by a recollection of how crazy popular crossfades were on 1990s dance music videos. More than just a transition, I’m pretty sure that most of the frames of that video are mid-crossfade: it feels like I’m watching Kelly Llorenna hanging out of a sunroof but I accidentally left one of my eyeballs in a smoky nightclub and can still see out of it as well.

3 I initially tried to convert directly from red book format to an MP3 file, but the encoding process was too slow and the CD drive’s buffer filled up and didn’t get drained by the processor, which was still presumably bogged down with framing or fourier-transforming earlier parts of the track. The CD drive reasonably assumed that it wasn’t actually being used and spun-down the drive motor, and this caused it to lose its place in the track, killing the whole process and leaving me with about a 40 second recording.

4 Yes, that filename isn’t quite the correct title. I was wrong.

5 No, it’s clearly trance. They were wrong.

The Right To Read

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[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]

If you haven’t already read it, take a look at The Right To Read, a very short story written in 1997 and updated in 2002 – it’ll only take you a few minutes to read; it’s not ‘techie’ (anybody would understand it!), and it is relevant. The kind of things that are expressed in the story – while futuristic (and facist) sounding now, are being put into effect… slowly, quietly… by companies such as Sony, Phillips, Apple, and Microsoft: not to mention the manufactors of CDs and DVDs.

It’s been circulating the ‘net for years, but recent events such as InterTrust’s Universal Digital Rights Management System (report: The Register), which they claim will be ready within 6 months, and Microsoft’s ongoing work on the ‘Palladium’ project (report: BBC News) – topical events which mark the beginning of what could be the most important thing ever to happen in the history of copyright law, computing, and freedom of information.

So, go on – go read… [the remainder of this post, and three comments, have been lost]

Cool Thing Of The Day

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Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #12:

Download the entirety of that fantastic film, The Matrix, on to your hard drive, and watch it, wondering why your PC is running so slow until you realise that the film is occupying 1.4GB of the remaining 1.5GB of your capacity. Whoops.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.