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Tenth Anniversary of First Commercial MP3 Player
Pickens writes "The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was launched in March 1998 — the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, though the price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release of the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300. The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had become the subject of a lawsuit from the RIAA which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home Recordings Act. It was later ruled that the Rio had not infringed the Act because it was not responsible for the actions of its customers. Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legal entanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rival gained from the lawsuit."
No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
At about 10,000$ of damages per song, 32MB doesn't seems that small!
;)
In fact, it should be "engough for everybody"
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
that sounds eerily like the kind of argument they make to this very day.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear mp3 player.
Huh, is that the RIAA at the door?
What if the RIAA had won that lawsuit? Where would we be with music today?
In the obsolete technology museum otherwise known as my house, I have two RaveMPs, one of the first MP3 players... and they both have the expansion chip to expand the memory to a full 128 meg! Almost enough for an entire CD! And the expansion chips only cost me like $150 each! (I got a good deal.)
This space available.
I do believe it was the Diamond Rio PMP300 was first. I remember my order being on hold because of the lawsuit. I can't get to wikipedia. Anyone have insight?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
It was an innocent time on the internet, when you could download mp3s from the web, and nobody cared if you didn't upload.
...about the same time I signed up for my slashdot account. :) I couldn't wait to buy the thing, but I eventually got an MP3 CD player to replace it. Couldn't beat 650MB of MP3's at your fingertips.
How many of you still own a PMP300?
(I won't ask about that first player... "who?")
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
The iPod hasn't been out for 10 years. Stop trying to rewrite history.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Does that mean it is established that it is unlawful to rip MP3's yourself?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I was a proud owner of the Rio500, and pumped that sucker up to 128mb with a SmartMedia card- total cost: $280. That was a lot for a poor high school student, but in return I was showered with first-adopter nerd envy. At that time, the idea of bringing 3 Cd's worth of music to school with me in 1/4 the space of a CD player was just awesome.
I can just see the internet comments now:
"Put 512mb on a player and I'll buy it right now- 32mb is just too small."
Yeah, it was a few years after the first MP3 player, but more than anything the iPod launch was the real catalyst. I was one of the naysayers who thought "What the hell is Apple thinking?!?!?!" when the iPod came out. Guess the joke is on me, because I'm now an owner of that market dominating family of MP3 players.
The 6th birthday of the Personal Video Player is coming up in June. This is interesting, because legal video content is still a developing market. Apple is getting their feet wet with TV Shows and movies, but I believe that music stores were more developed in 2004 than video stores are now. In this market, I think that digital video download competitors still have a chance against Apple though. Especially if some big names like Tivo and Microsoft team up. I'd find it hard to purchase an iPod Touch if I could play Tivo recordings on a WMV player as a part of Tivo service. It'd make the $20 for the DVR + Video use totally worth it.
Oh, of course the redundant No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
I remember my cousin waiting at the door for the delivery of his Eiger F10. He tore through the packaging and out slid a matte black device no bigger than a pack of cigarettes with a few silver buttons and a 3 digit LCD display like you'd find on the cheapest CD players.
If I recall the device had 32 megabytes of memory but accepted MMC type cards. The best part had to be the parallel port connection. A connection that (unbeknowenst to him) had to be reconfigured in the BIOS. After almost an hour of manual flipping and frantic swearing, he had finally transferred his first 8 songs to the first MP3 player available to consumers. And it only took 20 minutes! Oh progress...
And to think I actually, seriously just bought my first non-optical MP3 player (as in CD-less) 3 days ago. I got the m250 that was on sale at newegg for $30. That was finally low enough for me. I'm so cheap (and poor). It's really good too if you're looking for one.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
for under $200!
http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/usb_32gb.htm
An increase of capacity at around roughly 1000x in a decade. I don't know if the trend will continue.... but if it does we'll be at 32TB in another decade.
I guess even those who don't use music players can be thankful for those devices as they, along with digital cameras, were really were the commercial products on the market that really sold and pushed the flash envelope. Sure there were PDAs/GPS units and other stuff, but in comparison they really niche markets that were happy with 256MB or whatever in most cases. Now things like the airbook (and all the SSD notebooks to follow, yes there were earlier ones I know), iPhone and the convergence of devices will further drive the market for more space.
In Australia it was illegal until last year. Considering that the iTunes store didnt open there until 2005 leaving almost no way to use them legally , and around 200,000 had been sold by then, a large number of the population were basically criminals.
I always was under the impression that it had been the first portable mp3 player (well I guess technically my laptop was portable ad it could manage to play mp3, but you know what I mean) I read this article today and suddely felt a little less forgiving to my old player and the hoops I had to go through to get music from my linux box onto the player. Oh well
I remember it was one of the perks given to early employees at a dotcom called myplay which let users store their music collections online and access it from anywhere in the world, as long as you had an internet connection, it was of course another portable media player - the iPod which let people take their music collection (or at least a decent part of it) anywhere, regardless of interet connectivity.
Funnily enough I now work at imeem which lets users upload their music collections and share them with other users, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
Of course they lost, but if they had won, it would have been an 'illegal' item, which would have brought me no end of satisfaction.
What's that old adage, when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns? It wouldn't have been much different.
"Powers. I have them."
$250 to carry around half an album. Genius! You really had to be a gimmick fan to be an early adopter for mp3 players.
I record my sleeptalking
1. there are no criminal copyright laws in Australia.. only the pathetic "especially egregious acts" wording in the Copyright Act which claims criminal prosecution may be possible.
2. way to set up the seppos and the limeys for a "wasn't it started as a prison colony" joke.
How we know is more important than what we know.
to study foreign languages. I had (from the ages before the internets) lots of language tapes, which I compressed about the time I got the thing. Since they sound a lot like bad phone anyway, compressing them to a low bitrate doesn't relly matter much. So, don't look down on 10 year old technology. Even in this age it can be put to good use ;)
The Personal Jukebox (also known as PJB-100 or Music Compressor) was the first commercially sold hard disk digital audio player. Introduced late in 1999, it preceded the Apple iPod and similar players. The original design was developed by Compaq Research (SRC and PAAD groups) starting in May 1998. Compaq did not release the player themselves, but licensed the design to HanGo Electronics Co., Ltd. of South Korea.
"You got me a WHAT?! I told you I wanted a PINK IPOD NANO! You better not have wasted any money on this... what do you mean you bought it from a guy on the internet. ARE YOU CRAZY? I want a DIVORCE!"
You're one step ahead of yourself. You need to marry a gf before you can get a DIVORCE.
Now that actually sounds reasonable, provided "especially egregious" starts at about "running a pirate content selling scheme" level or something. Of course, there's still the matter of how far civil charges will take you, which I really couldn't even begin making a decent guess at.
I remember that much of my high school populace didn't upgrade from portable CD players to MP3 players until early 2006. Shows just how poor they really were. I remember my school banning them along with cell phones because OMG YOU CAN RECORD TEST ANSWERS AND BURN THEM TO A CD!!!1
And seeing as how this is /. you'll likely also need to take step 0, get girlfriend. Wait scratch that, I forgot step -1, find female willing to stand your presence.
Sometime in 1998, I got one of the very first CD players (discman style) that played discs burned with MP3s. Wonder how much that cost me at the time? Of course, I didn't have a CD burner, but my office did. Blanks were expensive, but you got a whole lot on one. Still skippable and non-pocket-sized, though.
My $30 player with an SD chip slot (and FM tuner) is quite nice enough for me. Also have an in-dash player in the car with an SD slot.
Another device that comes to mind -- although I can't remember firmly enough exactly when it came out to argue that it was "first" -- was the Pontis MPlayer3. It was definitely one of the first ones that I remember seeing, and from the archived press releases I can find, I think it came out in the Summer (Jul-Aug, maybe a bit earlier) of 1998. The German company that produced it limped along for a long time afterwards, producing some Linux-based devices in fact, although they now seem to have been subsumed by 'Arcus Audio' which makes non-portable gear.
... and the Pontis wouldn't use SD cards.
I always thought that the Pontis was a good design and deserved more success than it got, but it was an example of a bet on other technology that failed to pay off. The design didn't have any internal memory, and depended entirely on MMC cards for storage. At the time that meant 16 or, if you could find them, 32MB cards. (Data transfer through the serial port, no less.) Although the price on Flash memory eventually did come down to dirt-cheap levels, it took a lot longer than some of the rosy predictions Pontis made, and when really big cards did arrive, they came in the form of cripped SD cards rather than MMC
I still have one of them kicking around somewhere. They had their strengths: the physical design was nice (no moving parts!), they ran a long time on two AA batteries, and the controls were simple enough to use without looking at the display, even if you were wearing gloves. The iPod could take a few lessons from it, frankly, particularly on that last measure. But it's all but useless now: although the cards it used were regular MMCs, they used a weird proprietary filesystem on the cards, and they can't be read or written to without the special reader and software.
It'll be interesting to see how long those cards hold their data for; years from now I wonder if I'll be able to stick some batteries in it and groan at my questionable taste in late-90s pop.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems with 32MB of Flash storage...My first MP3 player wasn't the F10, but rather a Diamond Rio. It too only had a 32 MB card. I remember encoding albums in 96kbps so that I could fit a 45-minute CD on my card.
I'm feeling a little spoiled with my iPods and the fancy 320kbps rips on them now.
:q!
Hey, wasn't it true that Australia was originally a prison colony? So it shouldn't matter that a large number of the population were basically criminals. I mean, that's true of us here in the US too.
SRSLY.
Still have the receipt from compgeeks.com for my Genica "MPTrip" MP3 CD Player purchased May of 2000. The first of its kind, it could hold a whopping 650MB of MP3s vs. the dinky 64MB the flash players did.... for only $99! http://web.archive.org/web/20000511030931/http://www.genica.com/MP3-CD.htm
It really was a POS though, every track on regular CDs buffered 3 seconds no matter what, including gapless CDs. It claimed to have read CD-RWs, but they later retracted that. My player did indeed play them until one day they stopped reading and started spinning the CDs BACKWARDS!
I'm enjoying my MPMan (well, actually, an F20V, not the F10, to be accurate) - I've had a Zen, an iPod, and a few other things, but I keep coming back to the F20V like an old friend.
Even though it only takes data transfer over proprietary parallel.
Even though it doesn't support VBR MP3s because it apparently doesn't support some bitrates.
Because it hasn't broken in almost a decade of use.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
When will the RIAA file suit against E-Mail providers?? It is a protocol that enables people to share illegal files via it's "attachment" feature. Guns kill people, right?
I had one of those Eigerman MP3 players; in fact, I still have it laying around somewhere. It came with 32mb, not 64mb. However, far more important was the fact that it had a SmartMedia slot which meant I could easily swap music, it wasn't like the cards at the time had much storage space anyway.
This was the F20 model, however, because the F10 model described in the article came with 32mb and apparently so slot. Consumers could send the device to the company and have it upgraded to 64mb for a fee.
I did find it interesting at the time that these MP3s popped up for a while and kind disappeared for a while. I assumed that people weren't really interested in these things; perhaps they found them to be an inconvenience given that a PC was needed to get music on the devices. I think the attitude is a bit different now that PCs are a bit more ubiquitous and people are comfortable with the notion of MP3s.
What I found interesting was that while living in Asia before the advent of the iPod MP3s were a bit more common there. It's not so much that they were popular, but that they were easier to find than in the US.
Then Apple came along with the iPod and changed everything. Although I found Apple's marketing at the time obnoxious, like I always do. They practically made it seem like they had invented the MP3 player.
Certainly the iPod's simple and trendy helped make it a success, in the very least it looked different from everything else on the market and seemed more approachable. On the other hand, I can't help but think they benefited greatly from entering the market just when consumers were ready to embrace the mp3 player.
If I remember correctly, the first portable mp3 players were portable CD players that could play CDs and mp3-encoded CD-ROMs. I am not sure which company first came out with them, but I remember purchasing the first brand named player (Phillips Expanium) in 1998. I still have it today. It works fine. I use my Archos 404 now, but still keep the old gal around, just in case. http://www99.epinions.com/content_6881185412
"Care about people's opinions and you will be their prisoner." ~~Tao Te Ching~~
This player was not a CD/MP3 player. The F10 had 32 Megs of memory which was not expandible. The next verion (the one that I have!) the F20 had an expandible memory slot for SmartMeida cards (those thin memory cards, remember?). You could expand it to a whooping 64M of total memory. I tried inserting a 128M card but it wouldn't play. Also the interface for uploading songs was conected to the _parallel_ (LPT) port of the comp. It was pretty unstable. The filesystem was also not FAT12/16/32 based so it was a hassle to get the songs on the player a few yeras after when it was hard coming by Win98 (for which the software was written). There was a Linux driver released by I digress... :) .. I still wish I had gotten the F10 just for its potential legendary status. BTW, my F20 is still running after all these years, while I've had several other "el cheapo" players die on me.
Cheers!...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Hey, wasn't it true that Australia was originally a prison colony? So it shouldn't matter that a large number of the population were basically criminals. I mean, that's true of us here in the US too.
The original USians weren't criminals, they were religious extremists (aka fundamentalists). I guess they were criminals if they couldn't practice their religion on the other side of the pond.
I've still got mine on a shelf, I haven't used the thing in years. Unfortunately no PC I currently own has a parallel port, and even if one did I'm sure the software probably doesn't even work on Windows XP. I'll load up an old craptop with Windows 98 and give it a go shortly.
:D
Another Rio product that I still own, use and love is my Empeg Car player. It's since been upgraded from its factory 4GB up to 120GB of hard disk space - more than enough to hold my entire CD collection in FLAC and make it available at my fingertips. And yes, it runs Linux.
Yes, "Happy Birthday" is under copyright (well at least the melody). Thanks to our ridiculously industry-driven copyright law.
But it's probably ASCAP which will come knocking...
I've got a Diamond Rio 300. Right next to my TRS-80.
--
make install -not war
By personal player I assume they mean portable player. I bought my first mp3 player in 1996 or `97 from Corporate Systems Center. (Copyright on the manual says 1996.)
It's a desktop unit with hard drive and CD player called the MP3 CD Blast It! It has a 4x40 backlit LCD display, built in amp and speakers, plays both CDs and MP3 disks. I still have it on my desk at work and it still works great. Hard drive is a little small (80M or less, I think), but I mostly listen to mp3s from the cd player anyway.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
I have a Diamond Rio PMP300 sitting right here on my desk. 32MB of digital music goodness, I could fit about half of the Lateralus album by Tool on it, encoded at 192kbps. I paid nearly $250 for it (Canadian) because I couldn't justify spending even more on the 64MB model. :) I remember being slightly miffed at the claim that it could hold "such and such" number of songs, but that was only if they were encoded at 64kbps, which sounded terrible.
Now I have an 4GB iPod Nano 3g that fits all my currently ripped music at a minimum of 256kbps plus a few funny videos that I've collected with room to spare (about 400MB). It cost about $150 Canadian. How times have changed.
~jaraxle
Rio presented two of the absolute best non-video MP3 players so far...the Rio Carbon and the Rio Karma.
I still have a Carbon that I bought at launch that works perfectly after repeated drops, getting stepped on, and even getting run over once. My Karma still works, although I did end up having to replace the hard drive in it a year ago (everything else works perfectly though...screen, scroll wheel, etc.)
To this day I have yet to find an MP3 player that had a better interface or that was easier to use with one hand than those two players. I personally think that if it weren't for iTunes, the iPod by itself would have never been as big as it is (try using a Carbon or a Karma's scroll wheel, and then sit there and tell me that you prefer Apple's mutilated nipple...it doesn't even compare)
Of course, all this is moot considering Rio went under and the last product they released was a hulking piece of crap...but for a time, they were the best on the block. In my eyes (since I don't care about video or any of that, just music) they still are top of the game.
Living With a Nerd
...or a bathroom scale?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If the battery got too low while my Rio One was playing, the firmware would sometimes become corrupted. I got proficient at running the "firmware restore" utility...
I'm the proud owner of a Diamond Rio PMP 300.
Works fine with Fedora 8 using rio107 open Source
project. If it wasn't by Open Source my trusty 64M
mp3 player would have suffer the fate of much good
hardware. My thanks to the rio107 developers:
Acknowledgments
===============
The following people especially contributed to version 1.07 of the Rio utilities,
many thanks to them and all others who contributed.
Rio 64M SE (Special Edition) Support
(Martin Sjolin martin@sjolin.ch).
FreeBSD support (Dermot McNally )
BSDI support (Steve Schultz sms@moe.sbsd.com).
OS/2 support (Bob Pesner bpesner@pcdialogs.com).
Playlist support comments and blank lines
(Tim Hogard thogard@abnormal.com).
Directory listing now shows sample frequency and
bit rate of each file (Bernhard Nebel
nebel@informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Faster detection of device (Harald Niesche hn@mind.de).
IO delays for initialization, tx and rx can be specified
on command line(Bob Pesner bpesner@pcdialogs.com).
An extra special thanks to "Mark B. Elrod"
for providing a 64mb Rio for us - without this, we would have been
unable to test and tweak the 64mb support.
LongLive Open Source!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
in the RIAAs stable.
The hundreds of other labels in North America are supposedly protected by a 'halo' effect, but the RIAA wouldn't lift a finger for 'em, in effect.
Since the coming of iTunes and digital downloads, where single songs are once again slectable, we find ourselves back prior to the middle sixties when 45 RPMs were the main means of selling music (and B-Sides were almost guaranteed to be crap,) but they were a lot cheaper to buy than 33&1/3 RPMs.
The RIAA's take prior to the coming of the Beatles and the 'concept albums' used to be measured in pennies per hundred records. But since the introduction of the >$10 12" vinyl album and the >$15 CD, the RIAA has seen its yearly take grow by leaps and bounds while the label's costs were covered by the same crooked contracts so they just raked in the money (while the artists were stuck with the bill for producing the homogenized pap they can end up NOT EVEN BEING ABLE TO PERFORM though it was created BY THEM.)
The RIAA is not too happy with the situation as their take goes down.
The labels are getting gutted by the internet.
The recording studios are getting left behind by the quality of digital recording equipment.
All in all, the digital revolution is really bending them over and doing them dry.
And I could care less.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Started with a Rio 300 right when the lawsuits started. I paid cash thinking "mwahaha they'll never take it from me!" Later on I got a Rio 500 and was astonished at all the music I could fit on it. Then I discovered minidiscs and had a Sony MZ-R500 and another weird Japanese model player. Eventually, I got a real MP3 player again in college, an Archos Multimedia Jukebox 20 that someone had junked. Total iPod killer, way ahead of its time. Ah, the good old days.
There are some kids..and they are on your LAWN!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on