July 24, 2007

Post by **Spud** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:11 am

Calling the roll at 8:12am pst.

Question of the Day: What was the first mp3 you ever downloaded?

Provide link if possible. <a href="http://www.mightyoctothorpe.com/music/s ... p3">Here's mine</a>.

SPUD

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:23 am

Yesterday sucked.

Friggin' CD duplication company calls me last night to tell me the media I wanted for my CD is backordered indefinitely. They've had my order in-house for twelve days, and they tell me this now. I don't have time to source the job to another company, but I might have time to self-produce if I can get the materials together quickly enough. I don't know. They're in Irvine, CA, so I'll be calling in a couple hours to sort it out. What the Hell am I doing letting anyone else take any of the responsibility for my projects in the first place?

Plus, the car started making noise like I'd run over a Harley or something, and now it's in the shop for exhaust work to the tune of about $650. At least it didn't give out on me while I was out at a show or something.

Today started off on an up note though, as I picked up a birthday present for Andy: Guitar Hero Rocks The 80's! His birthday is Saturday, and we're making a Flying V cake and having a GH party. Metal Health will surely drive us mad.

QotD: Hoo boy, I really don't remember. It's been so long, and there have been so many...

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:26 am

Hey Spud, thanks for starting the roll call for today. (I had no question ideas what so ever)

My life has just been too stressful lately. I'm in the midst of a financial snafu (nothing bad, just an annoyance). I'm still reeling from all the stuff with my grandmother. M is going to have to have surgery soon to remove his adenoids. We have a hamster dying of cancer, which is leaving my wife an emotional mess. It's just been a lot of minuses lately.

But I'm trying to wade through this dark spot with the Wii, Harry Potter and other amusements. And hey, one good thing- people have dug the Monteserratian Secret Police song this week. MSP is me & HInc.

QotD:
First MP3? Gosh... it would have to have been back in the heyday of MP3.com's free downloads. Either than or a song I got off of the IUMA. Upon some research, I think it was probably "Bandages" by Hot Hot Heat.

king_arthur · Post by **king_arthur** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:44 am

QotD: back around 1997, I was the chief coordinator for a Larry Norman internet tribute CD called "Fresh Lions." This was mostly through the rec.music.christian newsgroup. I don't remember specifically what tracks were involved, but I remember that at least one of the artists submitted his song(s) as .mp3 files (most of the stuff came in on CDRs or DAT tapes), and I was really pleased that it worked to do it that way. I think that was the first dealings I had with .mp3 files... I was also happy that, as internet compilation CDs go (especially for 1997), all the music on there really was pretty good stuff.

Today I am pleased with my computer because I was able to capture a whole hour and a half VHS tape at DVD quality, and it's the first time I've been able to make that work (I've done some stuff as VCDs before, but that's lower resolution and color depth). Making some progress on "So Weird." The Mrs. wants me to try to get a CD writer working in a W95 computer somebody donated to the church to try to recover some files for him... that should be fun...

As always, Tuesday is mostly about taking my mom to pool class and lunch and then trying to get a few of my own things done in the afternoon. I've got a to-do list for the day, but it's a lot less "crisis stuff" than the past week or so, so that's nice. I seem to have mislaid a library book that I thought I returned a couple weeks ago, it's due 8/2, so I've got a little time to figure out where it went...

Oh, yeah, the freezer part of the refrigerator is starting to make funny noises, that may have to be replaced soon. Fortunately we have a big upright freezer as well, and the refrigerator we have was bought in 1986 when we moved to Arizona, so I guess it's had a good life...

Charles

EmbersOfAutumn · Post by **EmbersOfAutumn** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:45 am

QotD: Man, you're asking me to think wayyyy back here... We're talking about ever, not just on SongFight!, right?

I don't know the first MP3 ever, but the one that changed my life afterwards was back in like, 1998. I was big on the file sharing programs before they became less than legal. I was looking for some Blink 182 songs (was a huge fan around the time Dude Ranch came out) and found one song that was mislabeled Blink 182. It ended up being The Ataris, who have been my favorite band for probably 7 years now. It took me two years to find out who it was who sung that song.

Hoblit · Post by **Hoblit** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:41 am

Tuesday, busy. Our 'president' of the (very small) company is out for a week on vacation. The technical supervisor is out with girlfriend problems. One half of our billing department is out with boyfriend problems. (do the math) One third of the tech support representatives are/is out with a cold.

Barely finding any time to goof off! ITS ABSOLUTELY TRAGIC!

qotd: I have no idea, that was a long time and many hard drives ago. My first SONGFIGHT mp3 downloaded was probably A Thousand Swords by ADD...its been all downhill from there. If it wasn't A Thousand Swords then it was Do It For Captain by Raised By Wolves.

Embers, I totally love that album! (Dude Ranch)

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:50 am

Hey wait a minute, yesterday wasn't all bad. I forgot about that magician I took the kids to see. He was awesome!

Paco Del Stinko · Post by **Paco Del Stinko** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 10:59 am

Don't cheer up too quickly, Jim. I posted a cover song over here. http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtop ... 0391#90391

QOTD - My first MP3 was a Klownhole song from last March. I do very little downloading as I know that I could become a real nut about it.

Albatross · Post by **Albatross** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 11:10 am

QotD: I think my first mp3 was RHCP's "Love Rollercoaster." I believe my second one might have been that "Kyle's Mom is a Bitch" song from South Park.

First Songfight downloads were "Moscow, Idaho" by Redcar and "Romantic Cheapskate" by the Smoking Grapefruits. (whatever happened to them?)

Billy's Little Trip · Tue Jul 24, 2007 12:51 pm

jimtyrrell wrote:They're in Irvine, CA, so I'll be calling in a couple hours to sort it out

I don't think my presence would help, but I live 5 minutes from Irvine and I'll be by one of my job sites in Shady Canyon, Irvine later today. If there is anything I can do, let me know. We get all of our stuff done at Digital Brothers in Costa Mesa, which is right next to Irvine. They master and run all off our charity event collaboration CDs and such. They also did our BLT CDs and all of our show demos. They have a fast turn around, but you might be cutting it too close. The only complaint anyone has with Digital Brothers is that they are a bit more expensive than most, but it's a small company and they are actually brothers with a small staff of engineers.

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 12:54 pm

Thanks for that, BLT! I've been in touch, and we've worked out an alternate plan, so things are once again moving forward.

I'll check out that link you put up for sure though.

And Paco, I already said it in the other thread, but once again: awesome.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 3:16 pm

The next two weeks are going to be a long, drawn-out bittersweet farewell to my coworkers. Mostly I'm staying around and answering questions about my code as they come up.

When mp3s first came around I was heavily into the 'tracker' scene, and thought that mp3s would never catch on because tracked file formats were so much more space-efficient (and of course hard drives weren't big enough that the idea of having all your albums ripped and available at your fingertips was even on the horizon... I mean, who wants to use up 100MB of a 1.2GB hard drive for one album?). So it's probably fitting that the first mp3s I remember getting were Mellow-D's "blur green," an album which he produced using tracker tools but he found that the resulting mp3s were actually smaller than the tracker files.

EDIT: Also, this is my 2007th post, which took me by surprise when I saw "2007" out of the corner of my eye and thought the forum messed up and decided I just joined.

fodroy · Post by **fodroy** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 4:03 pm

qotd: In middle school nu-metal was awesome. My first mp3 was Slipknot's "Wait and Bleed."

Billy's Little Trip · Post by **Billy's Little Trip** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 4:07 pm

I saw "2007" out of the corner of my eye and thought the forum messed up and decided I just joined.

Damn, so I didn't join in 1701?

....I'm such a noob.

HeuristicsInc · Post by **HeuristicsInc** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 4:16 pm

When did mp3 become common? 1992? That's waaaaay back there...
-bill

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 4:32 pm

I think the mp3 standard was ratified around then but they didn't really start to become common until 1998 or so. I remember even in 1999 I limited my mp3 collection to my favorite 10 albums since that's all I had space for on my hard disk. Also I had to do all my own ripping and encoding (and cddb was way too unreliable to rely on the data), and id3 tags were still voodoo which broke a lot of players.

Sadly I can't find any actual information about when Blur Green came out. This predated the advent of blogs and the main Five Musicians (the group Mellow-D was most strongly affiliated with at the time) site has no dates on it. Also the links are to an FTP area at scene.org which no longer exists. What's left of the Hornet Archive indicates that it came out sometime before July 1997 though. It also says that Blur Plastiq came out in 1996, and that one was also a controversial mp3-based release (I think actually Blur Plastiq was mp3-only and came out first and then Blur Green he decided to release with the limited XM versions as well).

So anyway. In 1996, the Internet was still not ready for audio-stream-based music formats for distribution of full songs.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 4:40 pm

Okay, Blur Plastiq was still XM-based. Blur Green was the first mp3-based one.

So, 1997.

mkilly · Post by **mkilly** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 5:08 pm

Holy hell, the Ataris are one of the worst bands. Them, Yellowcard, Nickelback... Why do those bands make money, while solid acts like Octothorpe struggle to fill a twenty-seat venue.

No, I'm kidding. Octothorpe does well. But seriously Ataris are one of the worst bands out there working. The first mp3 I ever downloaded was Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

anti-m · Post by **anti-m** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 6:27 pm

I came late to the MP3 party. I don't remember the first song I ever downloaded...although I'm pretty sure the FIRST first one was probably one of my "band" back when we had a "webpage."

Here, I'll resurrect a link to it!

This is "Luna Park" by EggCartonZoo. Perpare yourself for four tracks of lo-fi fabulousness!

The delay on the guitar is reel-to-reel tape delay! Nerd out!

(Some day I'll post all my old songs for download on the internets for all the masochists out there.)

The first REAL mp3 I downloaded was probably something goofy like Erasure. (Oh L'Amour!) I also remember spending a long time tracking down the Talking Heads "Dream Operator."

This was all circa 2001.

Bjam · Post by **Bjam** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:12 pm

Today is my mum's birthday. I totally rocked the birthday, I've got to say. Got her tickets to a local NBC morning show sort of thing. We got free stuff(DVD of 'The Host', $10 gift certificate to Bed Bath 'n' Beyond, and a discount card for a local restaurant) and met a huuuuge American football guy who won a Superbowl with the Steelers. Superbowl rings are surprisingly very heavy, and unsurprisingly very tacky. Then Olive Garden for lunch(this was our first ever time there. Goodness, they give you a lot of food.)

On Friday I'm seeing Minnie Driver in the afternoon, and then Jonathan Coulton in the evening. Woooo. I need to make final plans with friends about those tonight... The JoCo show should be good; the venue is super dupe awesome. (I'm seeing him a month before he plays PAX; I'm so much cooler than Seattle.

)

QOTD: No idea. Probably some somesongs thing? I used to use Napster back in the day(I was a badass kid). Then that whole arresting people thing came up and I got too scared to download music

HeuristicsInc · Post by **HeuristicsInc** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 8:43 pm

Hmm, 1998? Then that would be at my current job, and several Macs ago and before I ditched my last Mac... No, I think that information is lost to the mists. Oh yeah, my first website had a song of mine on it, but it was .AU format hahahahaha.
-bill

PS Happy Birthday to the Mum of Bjam, she's a lovely lady.

Billy's Little Trip · Post by **Billy's Little Trip** » Tue Jul 24, 2007 9:04 pm

QOTD:
It would have been something off Napster. Those were MP3s, right? I forget. I just remember that when I finally got something burned onto a CD, I was amazed and could never remember what I did to make it work. Needless to say, I had a lot of CDs that didn't work, so I made mobiles out of them. They started out to be wind chimes, but it turned out that only dogs could hear their alluring chime, so mobiles they beee.
It would have been for one of my home movies, so it would have been some industrial or serious heavy metal, like Pat Boone.