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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.

thats_the_joke.jpg

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.

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

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

Also GTA: SA

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"

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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