the high seas have grown more treacherous, but you still can.
More treacherous than LimeWire was? I think the fuck not, that boi was filled with Justin_Bieber_Baby.mp3.exe’s
That stuff is so easy to deal with, 1 its fucking obvious its a .exe and second you can just run it in a VM. What, is your PC going to struggle running a VM that only has to run audio or video?
It’s considerably easier to deal with these days so the seas are less treacherous. Even Windows’ default antivirus will catch most of those too.
In what way?
many governments will snitch on you if they find you doing it. some countries need a vpn to hide yourself now. and some other smaller bullshit.
The government will snitch on you to who? A foreign government?
usually to the copyright holders so they can sue you. or they cut your internet access.
i said “some governments” but really i should be saying “ISPs in some countries”. my bad choice of words might have added some confusion.
Yeah, ISPs are usually under pressure to obey the copyright holders. But VPNs should always be used.
That’s the point though, basically no-one used VPNs back in the day.
Now its basically required.
Today it’s harder, not more dangerous.
But also everything is darker.
Even if somehow a quarter of the songs you downloaded started with “My fellow Americans…”
That was painful.
Meh mule/donkey network ftw back then!
Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware free, just plain free file sharing network for Windows, Mac and Linux. Our rooms, search engine and search correlation system make it easy for you to find people with similar interests, and make new discoveries!
Soulseek is very good to grab rare music and other stuff difficult to find on mainstream medias/markets
It’s good that Soulseek exists, but it’s way more finicky than LimeWire was and it’s significantly less user friendly
I’ve literally never had a problem with it.
I downloaded Nicotine, made an account, selected the folder for media, then searched for the movie I wanted and hit download. It puts the movie in the folder I selected and then once it’s downloaded i put it on my movie drive.
Misattribution killed Limewire. Downloading a song that turned out to be something different was annoying, but downloaded porn sometimes turned out to be actual CP.
Frostwire is still available and it actually works better than Limewire ever did.
And sometimes things you really really didn’t want.
We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
Napster was so early that most folks didn’t have the bandwidth and CPU speed to deal with decent-quality video yet, so it initially only did MP3s. I think some folks forget about it because they didn’t get into the piracy scene until they could get TV shows/movies/software etc.
I vividly remember spending twenty minutes downloading a single song over my 56k modem 🥲
I still have a few folders of music from Napster.
That belongs in a museum!
So do I.
No, the real problem was that Napster had central servers that could easily be taken down via litigation. Limewire was fully P2P so there was no single point of failure.
That’s why Napster went away (possibly before people late to the party had a chance to use it), but it didn’t stop it from being “the OG.”
We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user’s shares.
I originally started with eMule, which I just learned is still being updated. FOSS FTW.
Also Limewire allegedly still works if you use version 5.5.10. I’m tempted to test it out in a VM.
Weird Al Yankovic - Oops I’m Pregnant Again (REAL).mp3
It was remarkable how much fake Weird Al music there was. Someone maintained a helpful “Not Al” list.
Still can brother 🏴☠️
For those wondering check out Soulseek clients like Nicotine+. Even better, these days most of the files are well tagged.
Set to search only file sizes of >320 and revel in limitless FLACs.
And when you downloaded “Yoursong.mp3.exe” you knew you were about to have the best day ever!
(To this day it amazes me how so many people don’t pay attention to file types and keeps them hidden.)
I blame Windows, as it (I believe) hid file extensions of known file types by default. Was it, because it was aesthetically more pleasing? I dunno but it sure was a hazard for the unaware user.
Their entire security model depends on knowing file extensions, but they still hide them. Even if you enable it, there are some extensions that still won’t show, like .lnk (shortcut file). You can absolutely have executable code, and therefore malware in a .lnk file.
I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).
Custom icons didn’t help either, since they could just use the default icon for the spoofed file type. Though using a different program that changed the icon would negate that and make any of them obvious.
Also helps to use a method other than double clicking the file to open it, like drag and drop. Which was my usual flow with mp3s anyways because I generally added them to my massive playlist and double clicking risked replacing my playlist (that might have not been saved in forever) with a playlist with just that single song.
I liked it when winamp added the media library. Took me forever to rate my songs, but eventually my “new song flow” was move the new album folder to the artist’s folder in my music folder then tell winamp to rescan for new files, and then import my 3+ star or unrated songs as my playlist, played on shuffle. And occasionally grab a new format plugin if the album was encoded as something new and rescan until the new songs show up. Then give any noise or gag tracks 1 or 2 stars so they don’t make it to my main list after the first listen.
I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).
Replace your double-quotes with backticks, like this:
yoursong.mp3 .exe.
While it’s super annoying for the tech savvy, and gives a great opportunity to ill willed tech people, I’m sure it was an idiot proofing move. The average user is a not-so-tech-savvy office person, having relatively fuck all knowledge on extensions, and back in the day pretty much all programs got picky when facing an unknown/unsupported extension. Your average Joe/Jolene opened ‘veryimportantspreadsheet.xls’, renamed it to ‘veryimportantspreadsheetnew’ (without the extension), and made it impossible for Excel to open it by double clicking. Then in the best case they triggered an IT support request; in the worst case they reported that the very important spreadsheet got lost/corrupted and data was lost.
And most porn was that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off.
I remember actually searching that one out to see. Strange what you’ll do when you’re a teenager.
Fuck you for triggering that memory.
I can still hear the sounds he made.Was that the Chechen rebel video because I hated that
“Turbo-Charged Connection”
252kbit/s
Hot damn! I can listen to the song I want about 2 hours from now!
Among many other misattributed MP3s I downloaded off LimeWire, I remember downloading an mp3 of a “new leaked Nine Inch Nails song” called “Digital” that even had an intro read by a some DJ on a radio station (supposedly).
It ended up not being Nine Inch Nails, but I loved the song anyway, and had no idea what it was until a decade later when I found it again online. Still fuckin rocks too:
Boom Boom Satellites - Push Eject
I also remember a Tetris Theme remix by Aphex Twin that was very much not Aphex Twin.
I also remember downloading the Aphex Twin remix of Beck’s "Devil’s Haircut"and the remix was so bad I thought it had to be fake (it’s not).
Somewhere in my files I still have the file of a hoarse, cracked male voice singing along to Ricky Martin’s “Bailamos”, purportedly recorded from Martin’s mic by a sound tech when he was lip synching live on stage.
Probably fake, but I want to believe.
I actually still have songs in my playlist that I discovered the same way. A lot of the saints were incorrectly labeled so it was hard to make sure you got the right one without listening to it. Found a lot of unknown artists this way.
Dude what is this Tetris one. I remember this too.
I also remember some some that was by a dj called dj triangle and it was a super high tempo song with all kinds of songs mixed in. Haven’t found it since those days.
Quality: 5 stars but it’s a 128mb MP3
For sure. You weren’t gonna hear the difference on your $2 headphones or the speakers connected to your monitor anyway.
Plus, file size was king. My first mp3 player (dlink dmp 90) had 16MB of internal memory and used those original SD cards for more (up to 32MB, but who could afford that?).
So 128kbps offered a really great compromise because it was still better than FM.
Limewire was the rotten version of Kazaa, Kazaa lite and Bearshare. Loads of viruses and mallware. By the time Limewire was there, torrents were already so much better, but usenet has always been, and still are far superior. I pay €9,50 for usenet and download anything I want. No more streaming services, just fully automated movie and series downloads with Radarr and Sonarr. It runs on my NAS, so every morning I have new episodes downloaded, repaired, extracted, renamed and placed in the right series folders. I have more rights, better quality, no ads, better service, subtitles, log of what I watched with Kodi, I can stream what I want to watch from my NAS from all around the world.
Fuck me i haven’t thought of bearshare in 10 years
10? Only 10? Last time I used it was at least 20 years ago. I’m almost 38, I used it when I was 16. We’re old dude
