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This was the first song ever ripped to MP3 format

Written by Petteri Pyyny @ 11 Aug 2021 6:24 User comments (3)

25 years ago first MP3 rip by a warez group was released Twenty-five years ago, the first "official", illegal MP3 rip was released to public. The honor goes to Metallica's Until It Sleeps which was released back in 10th of August, 1996.
First publicly availably MP3 tools were just released back in 1996, with WinPlay3 being the only Windows-based player at the time and l3enc being the best tool to actually convert music from CDs to MP3 format.

Surely, ripped songs were produced even begore August, 1996, but the first release by a scene group is being dated to that specific date, as shown by the associated .nfo from those days. The release group was called Compress Da Audio, a relatively short-lived MP3 ripping group, who just managed to get the fame of being the first group to enter into the wonderful world of MP3 music.

First MP3 rip from 1996, .nfo file




The MP3 phenomenom grew rapidly from those days, with the advent of better ripping and encoding tools appearing during the winter of 1996-1997 and with the first version of WinAMP player. Coming years, MP3 became the synonum to illegal music, as P2P networks became a commonplace and people didn't have to rip their own music to MP3 format anymore - but could simply download songs from P2P networks.

The era of MP3s also marked the birth for our site, AfterDawn. Our humble original idea was to create a place where one could find all the information about MP3s, their technology and to provide place to download all associated software, too.

Tags: history MP3
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3 user comments

111.8.2021 08:41

I still remember the first CD ripping processes back in fall 1996. As I didn't own DAC-capable CD drive, the audio had to be hijacked from soundcard back to the soundcard in order to save the CD into .wav files. For full 74min CD that meant 74 minutes of "ripping".

Then, with 166MHz Pentium of mine, a single 3 min track took anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes to encode into 128kbps CBR MP3 file, using l3enc (the only encoder at that time).

Since that time, stuff developed pretty rapidly: DAC capable CD-ROM drives became a norm, encoders got faster, Winplay was replaced by WinAMP, etc.

211.8.2021 18:50

@drd Wow! 60' to encode one single song. It's amazing how much the world has changed in these 25 years, the music business in particular but the whole world in general. Internet changed everything.

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 11 Aug 2021 @ 6:51

312.8.2021 14:31

hehe, i remember when burning an mp3 cd that my sys req's were so close that if I even moved my mouse during the burn process it would fail out. Rips took fooorrreeevvveeerrr...

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