20 years ago, the first pirated MP3 file was posted on the Internet

Metallica "Until it Sleeps" and other hits of 1996

On August 10, 1996, the ripper under the nickname NetFrack provided for publication on a pirated FTP server he made a rip track While It Sleeps from the Load album by Metallica . So began the mega-movement in the demoscene on copying and publishing music CDs.

By 1996, everything needed for global music file sharing appeared: the DA2WAV program (CDDA) for rip, the L3encode program for encoding to MP3, and the console utilities for playing MP3 files through Sound Blaster.

The new MP3 music compression format was known only to hackers, but the masses soon learned about it when, on April 21, 1997, the Windows Advanced Multimedia Products (WinAMP) player came out with a beautiful graphical interface (clarification: in version 0.2a, the interface was not yet very beautiful ) . A small program of 4.2 MB has made a real revolution in the world.
')


Interestingly, WinAMP was distributed in the shareware model, but the users of the free version were absolutely not limited in functions. Despite this, the office of Nullsoft very quickly was literally littered with checks of ten dollars from thousands of users. Each month, checks came in at about $ 100,000. In June 1999, at the peak of the dotcom boom, Nullsoft with its shareware program was sold to AOL for a modest amount of $ 100 million. The author of the program, the young hacker Justin Frankel, was very pleased.


Justin Frankel, three years after the AOL deal, when the corporation finally let him go free and allowed him to resign.

It all began a few years before, when rippers came on the scene. They worked under pseudonyms and united into ripper groups. Judging from the surviving artifacts, the first of the ripper groups was Compress' Da Audio or CDA. It was she who released that historic rip with the track "Metallic", dated August 10, 1996. Besides her, other groups worked: Digital Audio Crew , Rabid Neurosis and others.

The work of the groups became possible when the first program appeared to copy the contents of an audio CD to a hard disk. The program DA2WAV recorded tracks in WAV format. It is not widely used, unlike the next version called CDDA. With the release of this utility for the first time it became possible to make copies of CDs.

Unfortunately, in those days, data transfer rates left much to be desired. One 10-20 megabyte WAV file would be downloaded from the FTP server for several days or weeks (if the server supported resuming after the connection was lost), so it was crucial to find a way to compress the sound, albeit with a loss.

The L3encode program developed by the German Fraunhofer Institute , whose specialists invented the innovative lossy sound compression format MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3), came to the rescue. This format later became the generally accepted standard for audio compression on the Internet, like JPEG for images.

The loss in quality in comparison with the original WAV was small and almost imperceptible by ear, therefore MP3-files were ideally suited for distribution on the Internet.

With the advent of CDDA and L3encode, music could not only be compressed, but also distributed on the Internet. And it began.

A lot of ripper bands came on the scene. The demand for digital music was huge. At first, MP3-files were distributed through FTP-servers and BBS stations. Then, to transfer the files, Napster and Kazaa file-sharing applications were developed, and then BitTorrent, which we are still using successfully. So, thanks to digital piracy, technologies developed and the reality in which we are now gradually formed.

In a sense, the first release of the CDA with the songs While It Sleeps , Mission Impossible , Black Hole Sun ( SoundGarden ), Sweet Dreams ( Marilyn Manson ) can be viewed as a hacker track list of the 1996 model. It can be seen what kind of music listened at that time advanced computer youth. Despite the presence of two pop hits ( Mariah Carey and Culture Beat ), this track list seems to be clearly shifted to a heavy part of the musical spectrum.

For the sake of respecting the memory of the first rippers, let us recall all the hits from the first-ever MP3 compilation. If you listened to music in the 90s with the help of the WinAMP program, then surely you will be able to learn some of the works.


Metallica - Until It Sleeps


Spotify playlist