Some that might interest folks here:
- Real Player - The inventors of streaming & the poster child for enshittification
- iRiver - perhaps the first major MP3 (and OGG!) player. DRM & iTunes not required.
- Napster - P2P for the early adopters
- KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses. (And BTW the source of my user name: klu9 = KaZaA Lite User 9)
- MP3.com - At first indie artists uploading their own materials, then users uploading their own CDs
- Radio.Blog.Club - Embed an MP3 in your blog
- Grooveshark - Streaming all music
- Usenet - A shadow of its former self but still a bastion of binaries
Personally, got started with Audiogalaxy, went all in with Morpheus & KaZaA Lite. Loved Grooveshark, discovered so much there. Still have a few RMVB (Real Media Variable Bitrate) videos burned on DVD-Rs somewhere.
Man, I loved my iRiver. Even though it had dogshit storage, the ability to record songs off the radio was so worth it.
Usenet is a weird one on that list. They frame it as Usenet by default from your own ISP, and that is indeed pretty much dead. But on the other hand there has never been more data shared through Usenet than right now. Absolutely everything is available on it, at full download speed, with encryption, without having to upload anything back to anyone.
People who still use (public) torrents to get their stuff have no idea what they’re missing out on. It’s a steep learning curve and not free, but once you have it all set up just right it’s amazing how well it works.
Do you have a good tutorial I can look at? As much as I like torrents, you’ve sold me on Usenet.
- KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses
There’s still a few P2P systems from that era that are still around. Soulseek is still doing very well for music, and some users on there have a bunch of things you can’t easily find anywhere else. DC++ and eMule/eDonkey2000 are still around but with much smaller networks.
One of the OG P2P file sharing methods (dating back to 1990) is still around too - IRC DCC.
