This is during the era before Spotify existed: during the time CD’s were big along with the infancy of iTunes including the first iPods during the early 2000s (third party sites is where users uploaded mp3 files of songs, the full length available for free download) my cousins would often download entire albums.
The same crap generations before did with vinyls (with a wax mold, used to etch the soundtrack onto a wax copy but audio is shit) since buying an official copy from a record store isn’t cheap for some people. I’ve heard “torrented” songs from cassettes (via a tape recorder) when the radio played a song, press record.
Music stores in the 90s would sell CDs of the latest hits from known artists of the time, a friend would buy a copy then rip the hell out of it by “pirating” the entire album onto a blank CD-R. Pirates did the same with concerts of famous singers, placing a tape recorder on the side adjacent of where the singer would perform.
Torrenting isn’t a slang term for pirating, you can legally torrent things it’s just a file transfer protocol
I’m guessing “SilentStriker” Is also you
Yeah, a “torrented” cassette? That’s called bootlegging or ripping, depending on how you recorded it onto the cassette.
Bootlegging is setting the recorder up against the radio and hoping your parents/siblings stayed quiet long enough for you to record the whole song. Or maybe you simply abandoned the idea of getting a clean bootleg, and recorded a mixtape where you added your own commentary/sang along/etc.
Ripping was running the audio signal directly from the radio into a cassette recorder, bypassing the whole “room noise” issue entirely.
Of course, every radio recording (regardless of whether it was bootlegged or ripped) would always have a few seconds of the goddamned DJ talking over the beginning/end of the track.
And CD piracy was a big deal back when consumer-grade CD burners first hit the market. I remember my dad checking CD albums out at the library and using his dedicated burning setup to copy the albums. He built an entire desktop with the express purpose of ripping CDs for himself and his friends. It had one CD drive, and like five or six burner drives right below it. So he could make five or six copies at the same time. He’d keep two copies (one for the house, one for his truck) and then the rest would get passed around to his friends. He even made custom CD labels with printable CD-shaped adhesive stickers, so he could peel the album art off of the page and stick it directly to the CD. He had a template saved that let him print out like four labels at once.