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."

Re:huh?

[Selfbain]

The Rio PMP300 was the second portable consumer MP3 digital audio player (portable digital audio player), and was produced by Diamond Multimedia. It shipped in 1998.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 [wikipedia.org]

Personal Jukebox

[absurdist]

From Wikipedia:

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.

Re:And to think....

[Arguendo]

Actually, the case (RIA v. Diamond Multimedia [cornell.edu]) was surprisingly limited and there's still a lot of debate about what it meant. Which is why we're still debating this stuff today. The Ninth Circuit simply held that MP3 players were not "digital audio recording devices" because they didn't actually make the digital copies (computers did). There wasn't much discussion of copyright issues.

However, the Court did reason that its ultimate holding was consistent with the purpose of the Audio Home Recording Act, which supposedly was to "ensure the right of consumers to make analog or digital audio recordings of copyrighted music for their private, noncommercial use." 180 F.3d at 1079 (citing S. Rep. 102-294). And then the Court said the following:

The Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or "space-shift," those files that already reside on a user's hard drive. . . . Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act.

And then the company that made the Rio went into bankruptcy and Apple made a gazillion dollars. Sometimes it's good to be second to market.

Re:And now you can get 32GB flash

[sectionboy]

Just another testimony to the astonishing accuracy of Moore's Law.

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer."

                      --Gordon E. Moore in Electronics Magazine, 19 April 1965.

Pontis MPlayer3 was out there, too.

[Kadin2048]

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 [findarticles.com] 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 [pontis.de]' which makes non-portable gear.

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 ... and the Pontis wouldn't use SD cards.

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.