Same! And APC rings a bell - were they MP3 and ISO?
I was an MP3 courier in a group on a lot of global top sites. I remember being in an irc chan for one of them (I think it was the hungarian one) and kali of the top group RNS stated his birthday or something else personal and said "oh crap I shouldn't have said that" lol. He was indicted by the DOJ in 2009! He was found not guilty of conspiracy to commit copyright infringementalthouh 4 other members pleaded guilty.
They busted sites from time to time but RIAA couldn't do anything substantial. I stayed away from movies and tv because that was riskier and I enjoyed getting music a week or two before the p2p platforms got them. And also getting high quality rips. The sister group that did ISOs eventually got busted.
Saw the move from ftp to fxp and shell accounts and semi-auto and automated trading. Some government officials would spend years to infiltrate the groups to bust the sites and members.
Anyway, it was with being a courier that I got interested in code and had an insane amount of lines to handle all the topsite rules on what they would accept and I traded semi-automated. We even had a UI to help.
I actually met a few people from those days in person and they were really cool. Still friends with one of them today. Many groups required meeting in person or doing a phone call before you could join and then they eventually relaxed that.
MP3. They were mostly rippers but I was a courier who would get their stuff on topsites and then the indies or courier only groups would distro it. I have trouble remembering all the structure and rules (written and unwritten) after all these years, but an ASCii NFO file still makes my heart leap like nothing else!
Ah yes! So APC was more like an RNS then. I recall now after looking up some of your groups' releases too. APC was the next best group as far as releases to RNS. I probably have a ton of those NFO files from back in the day and the courier mp3 rankings for EU and US. I was #1 US and top 5 Europe once. EU was quite hard due to competition and latency, although a uni shell account certainly helped. :)
Most were current year only US releases, 192kbps and VBR?. Some accepted 320kbps and older releases if they had never been ripped. Some topsites only accepted releases from certain groups. My favorite site had a folder with an archive of all the billboard top 100 albums. I think that was the top swedish site (bbs?) or maybe chiplips which I believe was hungarian. There were a couple good ones in US (MIT/RIT) but the others were in sweden, hungary, netherlands. I think one in France.
It was interesting to see how those groups and topsites were chased and shut down, but the P2P platforms that came out made it impossible to shut down anyway.
I was an MP3 courier in a group on a lot of global top sites. I remember being in an irc chan for one of them (I think it was the hungarian one) and kali of the top group RNS stated his birthday or something else personal and said "oh crap I shouldn't have said that" lol. He was indicted by the DOJ in 2009! He was found not guilty of conspiracy to commit copyright infringementalthouh 4 other members pleaded guilty.
They busted sites from time to time but RIAA couldn't do anything substantial. I stayed away from movies and tv because that was riskier and I enjoyed getting music a week or two before the p2p platforms got them. And also getting high quality rips. The sister group that did ISOs eventually got busted.
Saw the move from ftp to fxp and shell accounts and semi-auto and automated trading. Some government officials would spend years to infiltrate the groups to bust the sites and members.
Anyway, it was with being a courier that I got interested in code and had an insane amount of lines to handle all the topsite rules on what they would accept and I traded semi-automated. We even had a UI to help.
I actually met a few people from those days in person and they were really cool. Still friends with one of them today. Many groups required meeting in person or doing a phone call before you could join and then they eventually relaxed that.