Actually, this is exactly how I got into mp3s.

Back at warwick university, where myself, Mike, Roger, John and John also went (though not all at the same time), there was a terminal room in the CS dept called the Fyshbowl, because it had glass walls.

This is where all the geeks hung out, despite the room being starved of decent hardware (lots of ADM-3As, a couple of IPCs, several ELC(?)s and one Sparc 5 a bit later on).

Anyway, people got to finding sun 8khz mono .au files around on the net, and built a jukebox/chat server. You could log into it, chat, search for music and play it (queue it up), which was used for general entertainment for everyone in the room.

When the sparc 5 came on the scene with its bigger speaker and better sound (22khz?) people found l3dec and integrated it - it didn't have enough CPU for full rate decode though! I used to record (at 22khz) my CDs on my pc through an analogue connection, mp3 encode them and bring them in on floppies to build the library.

Later versions even had fair queuing, so if someone had queued 10 files then another used queued 1, it'd go in as nr 2 in the list.

Richard Neal was the original perpetrator

Hugo