Hey does anyone remember searching for the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? What a fun time…
Came here to mention soulseek
FUCK, YEAH!!!
I was using Soulseek in 2005 just before Boards of Canada put out The Campfire Headphase, and I must have grabbed a fake because the version I heard sounded nothing like them and I didn’t care for it. Many years later I would realize my mistake, and the real thing is my favorite album of theirs, but I still wonder what that fakeout album actually was.
BoC!!! 🩵🥂
Still used today for FLACs
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.
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.
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.
Before torrenting kicked off, this was one of the only ways you could ever get anything. And it was great!
Dc++ as well
You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
Even if somehow a quarter of the songs you downloaded started with “My fellow Americans…”
SongYouWanted.mp3.txt.rar.zip.lnk.exe
Using Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro
And it was GPL, so it wasn’t even copyright infringement.
I have never used Limewire, but if they had distributed binaries that you should pay for, it is a copyright infringement, even if you could technically compile it yourself. There are applications that do this and it’s compatible with GPL license.
The GPL explicitly allows redistributing without charge, even if you paid for it. If they didn’t want their program redistributed, they shouldn’t have licensed it under the GPL.
AFAIK the GPL does not forbid selling binaries in any way. You have to provide the sources of course.
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.
That Turbo-Charged connection was pulling more than 200 KB/s
They even had “Don’t Worry, be Happy” by Bob Marley.
lots of free viruses too.
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
Am I right in thinking that limewire and kazaa were like proto-BitTorrent ? P2P file sharing
Was Napster the original too?
Napster was the first dedicated p2p file sharing program IIRC. Peer-to-peer was done before then using DCC (direct client connection) on IRC servers, but it was hardly the same experience. Limewire and other BitTorrent software took off after the music industry killed Napster.
The brand was brought back a while later, and it was legitimate if I recall, but by that time nobody cared. BitTorrent had taken center stage, and iTunes had become a thing. The latter eclipsed BitTorrent (for music) because it was dead nuts reliable, and unlike BitTorrent, using it wouldn’t get your Internet cut off. And it was wired into the iPod ecosystem, so for most people it was a very easy choice.
