Tenth Anniversary of First Commercial MP3 Player 166
Posted
by
Zonk
from the now-they're-implanted-at-birth dept.
from the now-they're-implanted-at-birth dept.
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."
And to think.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:RaveMP (Score:5, Interesting)
not responsible for the actions of its customers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah those where the days (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
wow (Score:2, Interesting)
I Used To Have A PMP300 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I actually owned one of the first Rio 300s... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course they lost [virtualrecordings.com], 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.
Re:And now you can get 32GB flash (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [mattscomputertrends.com]
Crippleware (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Crippleware (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey I had one and to be honest I loved it, running with a mp3 player versus running with a CD player, which would you choose?
Re:Crippleware (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I'm still using my MPMan (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Liars (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder what the industry would look like today if Apple hadn't come on the scene, would the mp3 player industry still be as big?
Re:Personal Jukebox (Score:3, Interesting)
Ironically, the reason I *got* the PJBox was because after having my car broken into and stereo stolen yet again, I decided to never again buy a nice stereo for my car. From now on I would just use the stock/cheap stereo and listen to my music from the mp3 player. Something I still do to this day.
The PJBox was a fine system though. It wasn't very pretty though, just a big rectangular box. But I had friends with Nomads and Archos systems and the PJBox still seemed functionally superior to me.
I kept using the PJBox up until the iPod Minis came out with even more storage than my old PJBox did. That was when I finally broke down and switched.
If I remember correctly... (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't remember correctly... :) (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheers!...
personal or portable? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.