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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.
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."
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
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.
$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.
At that stage - neither, I'd have chosen the cassette player :)
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 ;)