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The file-sharing service music nerds still mourn: a website where you queued songs, a tiny program called Satellite that kept hunting for them while you were away, and forums that turned strangers into Italian-prog-rock experts. Audiogalaxy rose when Napster fell in 2001 and went dark on June 17, 2002, the day it settled with the record industry.
The bear on the desktop, the search box full of misspelled MP3s, and the toolbar nobody remembered installing. Free Peers' BearShare rode the Gnutella network from December 2000 until a $30 million settlement with the record labels ended it in 2006, and in a lot of houses it was the reason the family computer got slow.
Your Nomad Jukebox or Creative Zen sounded better than any iPod — more formats, zero iTunes, pure PC-forum credibility — and it battled the white earbuds in every comment thread of the 2000s. Then came the wildest ending in the MP3 wars: Creative sued Apple over a music-navigation patent, and Apple paid $100 million to settle.
The flash-memory bricks that freed your MP3s from the desktop. Diamond's Rio PMP300, arriving in September 1998 at $200, was the first MP3 player that actually caught on — deck-of-cards sized, running forever on one AA battery, holding maybe eight or ten songs. No moving parts meant no skips, a revelation after a decade of portable CD players. The RIAA sued to kill it; the courts sided with you instead.
The iPod that came out of Steve Jobs's watch pocket. Thinner than a pencil, an ounce and a half, a thousand songs — and a screen that scratched so easily the lawsuits started within six weeks.
The media player that ran the MP3 era. Winamp's dark little window with the glowing green equalizer, endlessly customizable skins, and the MilkDrop visualizer pulsing to your music was where a generation organized its first ripped-and-downloaded music collection — and yes, it really whipped the llama's ass.
The file-sharing client that outlived Napster and became Japan's favorite: queue positions, upload slots, a couple thousand chat rooms and a network that refused to die. When the RIAA shut its maker down in September 2005, two community patches had the whole thing back online within days, and the patched network kept running for years.