[minikomi]

Very fond memories of using Audiogalaxy, and also soulseek.

Soulseek especially had a community where you found someone who was into the same kind of music as you (obscure breakcore! japanese garage punk!) and could browse their collections, and chat to them also! What a wonderful way to make music friends and get good recommendations.

[majkinetor]

SSK is the best of anything mentioned here. You can find everything. Community is extremely big and it is there 25 years and will hopefully be another 25. The coverage level is so good that you can find any release in loseless format. There are folks having millions of audio files and 50TB of highly organized data.

I pretty much doubt it can be taken down at this point.

[tomduncalf]

Audiogalaxy was awesome. I loved how you could browse every file that had ever been online, rather than just what was online now, and queue them up for when they came online again. I’d just leave it running on our dial up connection when everyone went out of the house (no dedicated line so you’d clog up the phone, the good old days haha) and then come back to some exciting downloads I’d totally forgotten that I ever queued

[slackerIII]

Audiogalaxy dev here. That was my favorite part of the design.

One of my other favorite parts was that prioritized matches based on how similar their domain name was to yours, so a lot of times you would end up grabbing files from someone in the same dorm or city (cable modem IPs had hostnames back then had the city in the name).

[mat0]

oh man I’ll never forget that site. I remember my dad and I trying to find the name of a song to download (Endless summer nights), none of us knew any english at the time, but we loved that song. So he was listening to a recording of that song, we knew the band name but we didn’t know the song name. And by some magnificent chance I was reading the tracks in the AG ui and that part of the track played and I said to my father (in spanish) “that’s the one. download this one”. “you sure?” “yes, do it!”. downloading took so long in our dial up modem, but when we could play the track it was so amazing. the audio quality, no radio voice on top. absolute bliss. thank you

[minikomi]

Thank you! Something about the site allowed for wonderful serendipity for finding music. I had a blast.

[easydidit]

Audiogalaxy was simply great! Thanks for your service :)

I always think, how different the internet was back then. Oh well, nostalgia:)

[a-french-anon]

https://nicotine-plus.org/ for the free software/UNIX people, by the way.

I don't use it anymore since getting into private trackers because the network (central server) is proprietary, the experience is much less polished than BT and I want to be sure of the release (LABEL/CATALOGNUMBER) I'm downloading.

[smcleod]

Soulseek is still going hard.

[tomduncalf]

Don’t tell anyone! Haha

[ValdikSS]

There's Android client as well: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.companynam...

[inigyou]

> com.companyname.andriodapp1

And to think that if I want to publish an app I need to submit to Google for retinal scanning and anal probing to prove my identity (which wouldn't help because my identity is banned from submitting apps, but still).

[joshstrange]

I'm right with you on how companies can hide behind layers in ways individuals can't, I'm still salty my address is public for on the Play Store, but the text you quoted "com.companyname.andriodapp1" is just the bundle ID. It can be anything, it doesn't have to have any connection to your company or your app at all, it's just a unique string. It's only convention that most people use a reverse domain name.

It's fun sometimes to see what that app was called before a pivot or what the internal name was since you can't change it (once published) without losing your users.

[ValdikSS]

It's andriod!

[thenthenthen]

Well we need new users!! Audiogalaxy was super.

[archi42]

On the more legal side of services was the original last.fm - as a pupil/student I spend days/hours discovering new music there. Not only due to automatic recommendations, but a lot of time by browsing other people's listening habits - just like browsing the music collection of someone else on soulseek.

[brunorro]

Did I hear Soulseek? Look for slskd in github. I had a tear on my face when I could find people sharing japanese math rock :)

[crowfunder]

Obscure breakcore hell yeah! Wish SSK channel was more alive or there was a better place to network.

[jbaiter]

It's still there!