You could get anything you wanted and it was FREE

Using Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro
- And it was GPL, so it wasn't even copyright infringement.
  
  I have never used Limewire, but if they had distributed binaries that you should pay for, it is a copyright infringement, even if you could technically compile it yourself. There are applications that do this and it's compatible with GPL license.

And when you downloaded "Yoursong.mp3.exe" you knew you were about to have the best day ever!
(To this day it amazes me how so many people don't pay attention to file types and keeps them hidden.)
- I blame Windows, as it (I believe) hid file extensions of known file types by default. Was it, because it was aesthetically more pleasing? I dunno but it sure was a hazard for the unaware user.
  
  Their entire security model depends on knowing file extensions, but they still hide them. Even if you enable it, there are some extensions that still won't show, like .lnk (shortcut file). You can absolutely have executable code, and therefore malware in a .lnk file.
  
  While it's super annoying for the tech savvy, and gives a great opportunity to ill willed tech people, I'm sure it was an idiot proofing move. The average user is a not-so-tech-savvy office person, having relatively fuck all knowledge on extensions, and back in the day pretty much all programs got picky when facing an unknown/unsupported extension. Your average Joe/Jolene opened 'veryimportantspreadsheet.xls', renamed it to 'veryimportantspreadsheetnew' (without the extension), and made it impossible for Excel to open it by double clicking. Then in the best case they triggered an IT support request; in the worst case they reported that the very important spreadsheet got lost/corrupted and data was lost.
- And most porn was that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off.
  
  Fuck you for triggering that memory.
  I can still hear the sounds he made.
  
  I remember actually searching that one out to see. Strange what you'll do when you're a teenager.
  
  Was that the Chechen rebel video because I hated that

We all on here pretending Napster wasn't the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
- Napster was so early that most folks didn't have the bandwidth and CPU speed to deal with decent-quality video yet, so it initially only did MP3s. I think some folks forget about it because they didn't get into the piracy scene until they could get TV shows/movies/software etc.
  
  I vividly remember spending twenty minutes downloading a single song over my 56k modem 🥲
  
  No, the real problem was that Napster had central servers that could easily be taken down via litigation. Limewire was fully P2P so there was no single point of failure.
  
  I still have a few folders of music from Napster.
- We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
  Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user's shares.
- I originally started with eMule, which I just learned is still being updated. FOSS FTW.
  Also Limewire allegedly still works if you use version 5.5.10. I'm tempted to test it out in a VM.

Among many other misattributed MP3s I downloaded off LimeWire, I remember downloading an mp3 of a "new leaked Nine Inch Nails song" called "Digital" that even had an intro read by a some DJ on a radio station (supposedly).
It ended up not being Nine Inch Nails, but I loved the song anyway, and had no idea what it was until a decade later when I found it again online. Still fuckin rocks too:
Boom Boom Satellites - Push Eject
I also remember a Tetris Theme remix by Aphex Twin that was very much not Aphex Twin.
I also remember downloading the Aphex Twin remix of Beck's "Devil's Haircut"and the remix was so bad I thought it had to be fake (it's not).
- Somewhere in my files I still have the file of a hoarse, cracked male voice singing along to Ricky Martin's "Bailamos", purportedly recorded from Martin's mic by a sound tech when he was lip synching live on stage.
  Probably fake, but I want to believe.
- I actually still have songs in my playlist that I discovered the same way. A lot of the saints were incorrectly labeled so it was hard to make sure you got the right one without listening to it. Found a lot of unknown artists this way.
- Dude what is this Tetris one. I remember this too.
  I also remember some some that was by a dj called dj triangle and it was a super high tempo song with all kinds of songs mixed in. Haven't found it since those days.

lots of free viruses too.

And sometimes things you really really didn't want.

Fake system of a down - link song was golden.
- Download Worms.exe
  I just wanted to play worms
  
  Liero was an amazing contender
- Duuuude. I just decided to look this up on chatgpt. I had no idea that was NOT system of a down. Sounds exactly like serj lol. I used to crank that shit. Be sure link. He come to town. Come to save! The princess Zelda!
  
  please don't "Look things up" on chatgpt, use an actual search engine..
  
  haha that's funny. Sorry to break the news though.
- Link - he come to town He come to save - the princess Zelda

Using LimeWire free to download LimeWire Pro. Classic.

Came here to mention soulseek
- I was using Soulseek in 2005 just before Boards of Canada put out The Campfire Headphase, and I must have grabbed a fake because the version I heard sounded nothing like them and I didn’t care for it. Many years later I would realize my mistake, and the real thing is my favorite album of theirs, but I still wonder what that fakeout album actually was.
  
  BoC!!! 🩵🥂
- Still used today for FLACs
- FUCK, YEAH!!!

It was FREE.
But at what cost?
- EVERYTHING!
  
  I did download a car

My PC got AIDS once from Limewire Lite, true story.
EDIT : it was Kazaa had a lite version, not Limewire. Good days lol.
- Step 1. Download Kazaa Lite Step 2. Use Kazaa Lite to download Kazaa Step 3. Profit

Limewire was the rotten version of Kazaa, Kazaa lite and Bearshare. Loads of viruses and mallware. By the time Limewire was there, torrents were already so much better, but usenet has always been, and still are far superior. I pay €9,50 for usenet and download anything I want. No more streaming services, just fully automated movie and series downloads with Radarr and Sonarr. It runs on my NAS, so every morning I have new episodes downloaded, repaired, extracted, renamed and placed in the right series folders. I have more rights, better quality, no ads, better service, subtitles, log of what I watched with Kodi, I can stream what I want to watch from my NAS from all around the world.
- Fuck me i haven't thought of bearshare in 10 years
  
  10? Only 10? Last time I used it was at least 20 years ago. I'm almost 38, I used it when I was 16. We're old dude

I feel like I have more availability to get what I want now, than when I was using Limewire/Kazaa/Napster/eMule/etc.
If it was super popular, you could get it. If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn't actually what you wanted.
I used to have a demonoid account and kept my seed ratio high just because that private tracker had the biggest collection of random ass music and movies you couldn't find anywhere else. Unreleased shit and whatnot.
- Private trackers have gotten way better. I think they've figured out how to retain obscure and rare things. At least RED, GGn, OPH, BTN and PTP have. I'm sure there are others.
  Come back to torrenting if you feel trapped by subscriptions and enshittification. There is a bar to entry, but it ain't too bad.
  I do miss the weird fake tracks. There was a whole 3rd "Portishead" album that fake.
  
  I kinda wanna look up who actually made that "Link, he come to town!" song. Because it sure as hell was not System of a Down. lol
  
  Know anyone with invites to acid lounge? I let my account lapse for like 5 years, and cannot get back in, bo matter how many attempts at requesting.
- If it was obscure, uncommon, niche, and other synonyms, if you did find it 90% of the time it was simply given an incorrect name and wasn’t actually what you wanted.
  This is literally how I got introduced to several bands I never would have heard otherwise. Missing one track off one album, downloading...this definitely isn't the right track, but who is this? And now I need to download another 8 albums by that band...

Hey does anyone remember searching for the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? What a fun time...

Define free? Constant viruses, trauma from seeing killings and executions. Was it worth it? Sure but it wasn’t free
- Can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Learning to torrent is what greatly increased my computer literacy when I was a kid.
- Or dumb songs with swooshes in them lol

the high seas have grown more treacherous, but you still can.
- More treacherous than LimeWire was? I think the fuck not, that boi was filled with Justin_Bieber_Baby.mp3.exe’s
  
  That stuff is so easy to deal with, 1 its fucking obvious its a .exe and second you can just run it in a VM. What, is your PC going to struggle running a VM that only has to run audio or video?
- Today it's harder, not more dangerous.
  But also everything is darker.
- In what way?
  
  many governments will snitch on you if they find you doing it. some countries need a vpn to hide yourself now. and some other smaller bullshit.

Still can brother 🏴‍☠️
- For those wondering check out Soulseek clients like Nicotine+. Even better, these days most of the files are well tagged.
  
  Set to search only file sizes of >320 and revel in limitless FLACs.

Before torrenting kicked off, this was one of the only ways you could ever get anything. And it was great!
- Dc++ as well
- You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
  
  Sure I did. Also, I also went to usenet newsgroups to download stuff. I hated that shit. One of the best things about LimeWire was autoresume downloads that got terminated because your connection dropped.

Even if somehow a quarter of the songs you downloaded started with “My fellow Americans…”
- That was painful.

Meh mule/donkey network ftw back then!

Funny how, despite corporate trying it's hardest to kill it, we've only managed to get better, more organized and safer with file sharing (and perhaps because of them, in many ways).
- It was Metallica.
  Edit: Metallica killed Napster, the others didn't want a lawsuit, Kim Dotcom... Yeah that's a saga
- YES!!! I just want to take the normies with me.

Quality: 5 stars but it's a 128mb MP3
- For sure. You weren't gonna hear the difference on your $2 headphones or the speakers connected to your monitor anyway.
  Plus, file size was king. My first mp3 player (dlink dmp 90) had 16MB of internal memory and used those original SD cards for more (up to 32MB, but who could afford that?).
  So 128kbps offered a really great compromise because it was still better than FM.

SongYouWanted.mp3.txt.rar.zip.lnk.exe

"Turbo-Charged Connection"
252kbit/s

I once downloaded a 650MB movie in less than 10 minutes. I dont know how that was possible at the time as I had a sub 1 mbit line. I just know I went to the bathroom and came back to a downloaded movie. Always figured it was a bug of some kind on the modem as apparently the cable modem was doing the rate limiting.

Frostwire is still available and it actually works better than Limewire ever did.

Weird Al Yankovic - Oops I'm Pregnant Again (REAL).mp3
- It was remarkable how much fake Weird Al music there was. Someone maintained a helpful “Not Al” list.

Misattribution killed Limewire. Downloading a song that turned out to be something different was annoying, but downloaded porn sometimes turned out to be actual CP.

They even had "Don't Worry, be Happy" by Bob Marley.

That Turbo-Charged connection was pulling more than 200 KB/s

Any former WinMX heads in the house?
- /salute. The old dev of WinMX has continued. Check out Tixati, DarkMX, and Fopnu.
- Yes! Got a lot of mislabeled songs I ended up really liking and expanded my tastes quite a bit. Fun times

Am I right in thinking that limewire and kazaa were like proto-BitTorrent ? P2P file sharing
Was Napster the original too?
- Napster was the first dedicated p2p file sharing program IIRC. Peer-to-peer was done before then using DCC (direct client connection) on IRC servers, but it was hardly the same experience. Limewire and other BitTorrent software took off after the music industry killed Napster.
  The brand was brought back a while later, and it was legitimate if I recall, but by that time nobody cared. BitTorrent had taken center stage, and iTunes had become a thing. The latter eclipsed BitTorrent (for music) because it was dead nuts reliable, and unlike BitTorrent, using it wouldn't get your Internet cut off. And it was wired into the iPod ecosystem, so for most people it was a very easy choice.