Petteri Pyyny
11 Aug 2021 6:24
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.
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.