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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."
What if the RIAA had won that lawsuit? Where would we be with music today?
Forgot to mention that it only took 30-45 minutes to transfer enough songs to fill up all that 128 meg via the serial port interface, its sole method of connection - with proprietary transfer software.
This space available.
Yes, the price improvement of flash is awesome.
I've been studying this and if the price improvement rate of flash stays about the same as it has for the last 5 years (and hard disk does the same) it will only be 4 years before every laptop has a flash drive.
Charts and data here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashdiskcomparo.html
$250 to carry around half an album. Genius! You really had to be a gimmick fan to be an early adopter for mp3 players.
Or a jogger.
I remember at the time most CD players (and MP3 CD players eventually) had a bad problem with skipping if you ran with one strapped to your belt. There was so called "anti-skip" technology (just a buffer that in theory would get you through the period you skipped the disc), but it didn't work very well. Vigorous joggers (or rope jumpers, etc.) would find that their players still skipped. I had a few friends that were early adopters of flash based players because flash just didn't skip. It was better to listen to half an album than it was to have a full CD and be constantly annoyed by the audio cutting out.
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 ;)