There was a pirated copy of "We are the Champions" by Queen circulating LimeWire and Kazaa circa 2003 that's given a generation of people mental whiplash.
Some hooligan thought it would be funny to splice/cut/edit "of the world" at the end of the song, so it concludes with "We are the champions" (jump cut / obvious splice) "of the wooooorld."
There's entire threads out there dedicated to finding that copy of the song because millions of people have heard it, but no one makes the connection between the hostile actors modifying those songs and sharing them on file-sharing applications versus the originals.
There were also numerous garage band covers circulating around also - "Smells like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana was a popular one to hear in extremely low quality with someone banging spoons or something.
What do you mean? Didn't Freddie sing it that way live? It doesn't end that way on the studio recording? Did they edit the studio version to match the live renditions?
Pretty sure the biggest victims of this were Rockapella (who apparently did every a cappella song) and Weird Al (who apparently recorded every comedy song).
Here’s how cool Al Yankovic is though: for years he maintained a list on his website of every comedy song falsely attributed to him and all the actual artists who made them. I don’t think it’s up anymore, there can’t be much need for it these days, but Al was very cool for doing that.
Yes. I once downloaded a Stroke9 greatest hits album, and it included the song "Story of a girl". When it came on, I thought "huh, I didn't know they did this song. Cool." Then for more than 10 years I thought it was their song.
Don't Worry Be Happy by Bob Marley was the one I remember. It was not by Bob Marley at all. It was by Bobby McFarren and came out years after Marley died.
But the file names were not as ordered and consistent like this, they were all over the place. Most of them did not even have proper meta data so I had lots of songs by "unknown artist". Creating playlists within a music player was a mess, you basically had to sort and play songs via the file system
Waiting 30 minutes to download a song just to hear someone’s bad Bill Clinton impression saying “my fellow Americans…”, the best of times and the worst of times
Core memory unlocked! The anticipation of waiting for the download to complete and then hear something absolutely wrong was frustrating but I look back at it now and can't help but laugh.
I had a copy of Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet that would cut out and loop back in the middle of the song. I listened to it so much I could sing along without missing a beat. Then whenever I heard the right version, it always felt weird when the song flowed through normally.
This is soft touch plastic. It is a plastic with rubberized coating which unfortunately starts to melt after some time. When that happens, you can just remove the coating with isopropyl alcohol and paper towel to get just regular shiny plastic.
I used to fill out metadata like it was a hobby. Albums were in organized folders "artist/album/disc no. - track no. . track title.mp3". Some had release year and composer metadata lol
I have my old fat iPod classic in my car now. I found an iPod Jack in the arm rest and went searching through my old tech drawer to dust it off. It's got so many bangers on it, but sometimes it just cuts out halfway through a song, waits for 30 seconds and starts the next one up, always when you're just getting into it
I had some little grey box of an mp3 player in the late 90s that held like roughly one or two smallish albums. I remember one day finding a recording of my gym teacher trying to figure out how it worked for like five minutes after unknowingly pushing the record button.
TV: mainstream streaming services didn't exist and you were forced to watch whatever was on cable, unless you were one of the early movie pirates.
Internet: dialup, shitty DSL, poorly designed web 1.0 sites. Need I say more?
Life: yes, you were young and not cynical yet. That's why it seemed better. As a fully grown adult in the early 2000s, things were not that different. I had the Iraq invasion, Bush, and the "war on terrorism" to be angry about.
You're not wrong, they were better times for sure. The wild west of the internet days full of questionable clicks to sites and downloads. We were so young. We had so much to learn!
I had one of these in college. It was a good little player. Reasonably inexpensive. One end was a cap that came off and was a full size USB, so that you didn't need to carry around cables.
I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to figure out that the hold switch made the storage mount as read only when plugged into a computer.
I went through a few over the years. Some were this exact brand (in blue or black). Some were basically the same but more square. At first they had built-in storage, but later ones just had a micro SD slot. Some used a AAA battery, some rechargeable. Some had an FM radio tuner built-in.
They were all great. My smartphones ended up replacing them eventually, but it was really nice to have physical buttons. And, in college in the 2010's, it was nice to have a USB drive on me at all times.
I have one almost exactly like that (different brand, but looks exactly the same besides that). Would anyone know how to recover data from it (some text files, and potentially some recordings made with the built-in microphone)? Whenever I plug it into a computer the loading screen comes up on the player but nothing happens (computer can't mount it), and turning it on also just gets me to the loading screen where it stays without moving forward.
I don't think it even gets assigned a file in /dev.
[26850.924530] usb 2-3.2: new high-speed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[26851.024961] usb 2-3.2: New USB device found, idVendor=10d6, idProduct=10d6, bcdDevice= 1.00
[26851.024976] usb 2-3.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=0, Product=0, SerialNumber=0
This is all that dmesg displays when I connect it to my computer.
Soulseek was Amazing. What was cool is you could chat with people. I met a "Girl" from Israël and she made me discover a lot of cool rap bands like CunninLynguists. It was fun.
It's better than ipad anyway. You just stick it in to load music onto it, you don't need iTunes or a cable, and it's nore compact too. I miss those simple devices.
I remember way back in the day helping a friend back up their stuff. I never had used an iPod before and plugged theirs in to their computer expecting to be able to just use the file browser to get to it, like common sense would dictate. That's the day I discovered Apple doesn't really do common sense.
You can still buy 'em on AliExpress for example (I got the RUIZU MP3 player without a screen for 20€). If you are a sound nerd or hifi enthusiast you can get one that connects to a Bluetooth DAC (like the fiio for example) for super sound.
It's kind of quiet in a way to just push play and knowing exactly what you'll get (no hiccups, no commercials, no "you maybe'll like this new song Spotify stuff"...).
I still use one of those MP3 players and MP3s of music and podcasts, best way to go for a walk and not have to worry if you're mugged, all they get is a cheap MP3 player!
There is a song that I can no longer access on an old iPod. It was that song "Better Off Alone" by Alice DJ, but it had like extra songs added into it kinda like a mashup of a few other songs. How I WISH I could go back and download it on Limewire. :(
I went full circle. Downloaded from Napster back in the day, and now I subscribe to their streaming service. They apparently pay artists better than some of the other streamers, too.
30GB of music on an SD card, because my phone cant do LTE and is stuck on EDGE. If you have old CDs, spend an evening watching YT or something while putting in a new disc every few minutes, otherwise download from youtube with Newpipe/Seal/yt-dlp or buy stuff on bandcamp. Probably saves you a couple 100 megs of data volume each month
@jimmydoreisalefty@3FingersOfMilk, Vivaldi Android has inbuild a own YT client.
Alternatively you can use Andisearch, which permits to watch YT and others, sandboxed in the search results.
I still remember the day my dad took this out of his pocket and put earphones in my ears in the bus. That day I understood he's not that old and still has a young guy living inside him.