Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Creamtastic Riches of Embarrassment: Accidental Napster Recordings
Posted by Steve Haruch on Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:10 PM
It really is like a series of tubes! Last week, this post by the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones led me to this post by Joshua Bearman, which led me to this post by David Dixon, who is an audio archivist and has a collection of MP3s that people (most likely) never meant to share:
Back around 2001 there arose a "perfect storm" of technological innovations which made possible audio files I call "mic in tracks". This was right around the time that Napster was just beginning to penetrate into the average computer user's lives. At the same time, an audio utility program called MusicMatch Jukebox was also being widely used, since it was often pre-installed on off-the-shelf PC's. MMJ allowed you, among other things, to make recordings using the cheap microphone included with the PC, and save the file in mp3 format. If you didn't give the audio file a name, it assigned a default name "mic in track" followed by a number. Now if you were also running Napster, and you were careless enough to be sharing everything on your computer (which *many* were), then anyone also running Napster could just do a search for "mic in track" and find and download these personal recordings, usually without your knowledge.
As Frere-Jones notes, some of Dixon's archive, including the "mic in track" files is online. (Scroll down a bit.)
Sure, people are uploading themselves playing along to their favorite songs or what have you, but these stumbled-upon demos, like the Cookie Monster vocal warm-up are way funnier for their unintended candor.
Gold says someone downloaded a bunch of his high school term papers on Napster once. I was more careful, as far as I know--and besides, when the original Napster was around, I was still very strictly all-analog when it came to recording. (Mostly because I had no idea how to use a computer to record music, nor access to any software.)
Anybody here accidentally share or download something awesome/embarrassing?
Comments (2)
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same here.
i was running a Tascam 414 rig in those days. sometimes even running my computer into the tape machine to use as a synth.
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We were early, and heavy, Napster users. In fact, when they started filing lawsuits, I checked the federal filings to see if we were among the unlucky.
Anyway, I rarely found much that was amusing or embarrassing (except for people's lame taste in music) but when I did, it was invariably homemade porn. Is there anything less sexy than homemade porn? Wait -- don't answer that.
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