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 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.
I remember using Napster and playing all these songs on Winamp on my computer in 1998. Amazing how all these years later music access is more restrictive, not easier.
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 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.
ah the good old days, where instead of recommendation algorithms you had some guy deliberately adding more popular artists' names to songs so you'd accidentally download them and broaden your horizons a bit
shoutouts to whoever mislabeled Chylinska as Rammstein in 2001 btw, you made me like 5% cooler
I remember having a chinese-branded one that could fit abooooout thirty mp3s on it. It had one of those buttons that you could click in all four directions or in the center, but to charge or change the songs on it you needed a really hard to find cable.
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.
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 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!
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.