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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
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.
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
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're one step ahead of yourself. You need to marry a gf before you can get a DIVORCE.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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