Link: https://rip.so/

Some that might interest folks here:

• Real Player - The inventors of streaming & the poster child for enshittification
• iRiver - perhaps the first major MP3 (and OGG!) player. DRM & iTunes not required.
• Napster - P2P for the early adopters
• KaZaA, Limewire & Bearshare - P2P for the masses. (And BTW the source of my user name: klu9 = KaZaA Lite User 9)
• MP3.com - At first indie artists uploading their own materials, then users uploading their own CDs
• Radio.Blog.Club - Embed an MP3 in your blog
• Grooveshark - Streaming all music
• Usenet - A shadow of its former self but still a bastion of binaries

Personally, got started with Audiogalaxy, went all in with Morpheus & KaZaA Lite. Loved Grooveshark, discovered so much there. Still have a few RMVB (Real Media Variable Bitrate) videos burned on DVD-Rs somewhere.

Usenet is a weird one on that list. They frame it as Usenet by default from your own ISP, and that is indeed pretty much dead. But on the other hand there has never been more data shared through Usenet than right now. Absolutely everything is available on it, at full download speed, with encryption, without having to upload anything back to anyone.

People who still use (public) torrents to get their stuff have no idea what they're missing out on. It's a steep learning curve and not free, but once you have it all set up just right it's amazing how well it works.

Do you have a good tutorial I can look at? As much as I like torrents, you've sold me on Usenet.

Man, I loved my iRiver. Even though it had dogshit storage, the ability to record songs off the radio was so worth it.

While I posted the link here in !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com , that's not the focus of the site; I think they're considering Usenet "over" as a place where many people discussed things. (I know I haven't used it for that in... over two decades?)

It's so weird seeing their name out in the wild. I've never met anyone who's heard of them. I had a couple of their mp3 players and they were fantastic!

I would have expected that too, but they say:

the specific thing that died is not usenet itself. it is usenet as a service your isp gave you.

Not really unfortunately. As much as I dislike linking to Reddit their Usenet subreddit does have a decent wiki with some of the info you'd need:
https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/index/

To get started, I'd say to get a cheap block account from the Reddit Usenet deals wiki: https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals/. A block account gives you a fixed amount of download (1TB, 2TB, whatever) that lasts indefinitely. If you use it just for music or books (for example), one block could last you a very long time. If you find yourself needing more data, you can get a monthly subscription with unlimited data.

You also need an indexer, which is how you search for content. DrunkenSlug, NZBGeek, and NZBPlanet are popular. These cost money, but sometimes they have a lifetime plan where you just pay once. Sometimes they have open registration, but other times you need to get an invite from an existing user. There's free indexers like NZBKing, but they're often full of junk, and lack encrypted content.

SABnzbd is the most popular downloader software. It's free and open-source.

• Add account to SAB.
• Search for what you want on the indexer.
• Download the nzb file (points to where the files are located on Usenet) and add it to SAB to download the contents.

I think that's it for the basics. There's more to it - different backbones have different data so one provider might have data that a different provider is missing , you can fully automate downloads with Lidarr/Radarr/Sonarr/Readarr, you can aggregate results from multiple indexers using NZBHydra/Prowlarr - but you can figure that out as you go :)

Still scratching my head as to why GrooveShark was forced to shut down, yet SoundCloud still exists and has ads/paid tiers for the same service of users uploading songs they don't own.

I believe the smoking gun were emails showing that Grooveshark management told employees to upload music, fatally undermining the "safe harbour" defence of "we shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of users if they upload copyrighted material".

Which meant people had to actively find & pay for a Usenet provider. Which they didn't do when there were so many additional venues to discuss things online for free.

Honestly the barrier to entry of Usenet was always high, finding a working Usenet provider only made it slightly harder in a world where everything lives in your browser.

Yeah, Usenet is amazing right now. I just with the discussion groups were seeing the benefit of the media and binary revival.