Retro Computing Corner: The World’s First MP3 Player (c. 1998)
Author: Rees | Date: August 31, 2008
Today we all take MP3 players for granted. iPods are ubiquitous, mobile phones can play the format, even most new car stereos support MP3 right off the showroom floor. But it wasn’t always like this – Back in 1998, highly illegal sites like Audiofind were giving away artist’s songs quite openly and completely for free in pretty poor-sounding 112 and 128KBps MP3 format, and we were downloading them with our 56K modems – often taking up to half an hour a time.
You could play the files on your computer or you could even transfer them to CD – provided you didn’t mind paying out £10 for a blank disc in the first place, and waiting 30 minutes for it to write while saying a little prayer to the CD-R gods, due to the media’s high failure rate at the time.
The $250 MPMan F10 came along and changed all that, however. Most people remember the Diamond Rio (pictured left) as being the first widely-available MP3 player due to a high-profile RIAA lawsuit, however the MPMan was knocking around the more upmarket hi-fi dealers for a few months beforehand, packing a heady 32MB of storage. Thankfully, this could be upgraded to 64MB thanks to a mail-in programme.
Shortly after the MPMan’s launch, Napster came along and helped us to share and organise our music files. Transferring those files to the device was a painfully slow process over a serial connection, but it didn’t matter – music was taking its very first steps towards escaping the physical formats that it had forever been associated with. Little did we know that 10 years later, even granny and grampa would be downloading their music from the internet, and the man in the street could carry hundreds of gigabytes of high-quality music in his pocket.
It’s all thanks to the MPMan F10.
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Wow, this bring back memories! I remember buying a Kiiro 128Mb mp3 player, shrewdly avoiding the 64Mb player.
Anyone know what happened to the website http://www.mp3dimension.net or http://www.mp3dimensions.net it was at the time the most popular place to go for all mp3 related news.
I vaguely remember mp3dimension… I also remember the Kiiro! My first MP3 player was much later on, I think one of those 256MB USB stick style players. I used my laptop for listening on the move up until that point – Toshiba Satellite, 166MHz, 16MB RAM, and a 320MB HDD!
Good times! Although I couldn’t use the laptop for anything else while I was listening to music, as it was such a huge strain on resources. That was the days of Winamp before AOL bought them out.
I think you are thinking of Dimension Music.
It is still online — http://www.dmusic.com/
Ok, here goes,
I have two questions that I need answered for a project for my end of school exams.
1. When was the first Mp3 invented, and what was it? I need pictures and info on it.
2. When was the first mp3 docking station released, and i also need the details on it.
This will be much appriciated thanks.
The MPMan F10 was the first commercially-available MP3 player, as it says in the story. I’m sure it wasn’t the first hardware player produced in a lab or by a private company for research purposes, though. I have no idea about docking stations unfortunately.
I’m sure it wouldn’t take long to find the info you need on Google – much as I love this stuff, I don’t really have time to trawl the internet doing research for other people’s homework! Good luck anyway.
first ever mp3 song was Toms diner, Suzanne Vega
My first mp3 player was actually a CD player with mp3 capabilities. It broke down but I still have it somewhere in a box of old techno-stuff that I keep… along with an Iomega 100 Meg Zip drive and a Sony MD player…. lol… darn, I shouldn’t laugh, this is only like 5 years ago… :S
But I still have a CD player with mp3 capabilities in my car. I find it very usefull until I get a real in-car mp3 player that can be detach and brought along to listen to my music on a walk.
This guys, Nathan M. Schulhof – says he invented the mp3 player: http://www.wcspeakers.com/speaker.cfm?ID=10007
I met him one time and that’s all he talked about, like broken record. I’m like “dude, was it an iPod?”. “No.” Ok then it didn’t matter. Eh? eh?
Wow, his site is really shitty. He looks like a douchebag too!
I remember my first Mp3 player, it was in 2001, 64mb player, expanded to 128mb with a Smart Media Card (haha). It came with some crappy USB wire and was SO unreliable!!
I seem to recall large hard disk based mp3 players with tiny screens around this time. Maybe it was shortly after this though. I know one this if for sure. Apple didn’t invent the disk based audio player.
The Archos? They were shortly after this, but weren’t hugely popular because they were so damn expensive… And ugly!
Expensive? Yes. Ugly? Yes. But, at the time when others were offering 20 MB, 64 MB, and 128 MB the Archos had a whopping 20 GB of storage! Of course it was the size (and weight) of a brick. But, it could carry your entire collection in 1998.
The first Hard Drive player was the PBJ-100 and had a small screen and 4gb drive and transferred and played only mp3s
The creative nomad jukebox was one of the first hdd based players – the size of a portable cd player, poor batt life, skipped if you broke out into anything more than a mild paced walk and had such terrible software!
Cost me £270 and I gave it away to a friend >.<
My firsnt mp3 player was a Rio mp3-cd player. While everyone had the 32-128mb USB stick things that were becoming increasingly cheap and popular, I got 700 MB per cd
Plus it played my original CDs. After the capacities started becoming gigabytes that sort of became old though. I remember when iPod was the ultimate mp3 player, now I have a Cowon iAudio7 8GB.
I had an MPMan. It cost £300. I dropped it in the bath the day after I got it (Boxing day). House insurance excess was £350. That was the end of that.
The moral of this story? Don’t listen to your £300 MP3 player in the bath!
” highly illegal sites like Audiofind and MP3.com”
Uh, mp3.com was never illegal, especially in 1998. Do some research before you write these stories. It was a completely legitimate website that allowed independent musicians to upload their music and make CD’s.
I did plenty of research, thanks.
I’ve now removed the reference to mp3.com, because although copyrighted music did show up on there quite often the site didn’t really meet the definition of “highly illegal”.
Not like Audiofind.net anyway.
this mp3 player is a colletor now! I want it!
its amazing how we used to have this as an Mp3 Player and now we have iPods, Zunes and everything in between. I’m an iPod owner. I love it! So much technology in something so small, we’ve come a long way in such a short time!
I remember when we broke 100 users for the first time on Napster. It was a big event. =P
Cool, it was at about 4,000 when I was on there. I guess I was one of the early ones, but you’re even more old-skool than I am!
Hah! I’ve still got my MP Man (the black MP3 player pictured at the top of this article) at home in a chest somewhere. 32 whole MB of storage, sure beats taking a portable CD player around with me!
Literally within a couple of months of buying the MP Man, the MP3 player market began to boom. Players got cheaper, their capacities increased, and that terrible feeling in my gut that a poor financial decision had been made intensified.
Live and learn, hey!
I too was napstering. though it was modem connection but still i remember the one and only song i downloaded from there – 4 non blondes – what’s up.
oh, the memories.
I remember coming across MP3′s long before Napster was about and when Winamp was resh on the scene – I still use Winamp by the way!
Anyway, there wasn’t much around music wise to download and I think Garbage – Happy when it rains was the first track I ever downloaded and I seem to remember it took some finding. It was from a site that was basically just raving about this new technology and had a few samples and demos. Actually the first MP3 was a demo of a train or something like that – wasn’t even music!
It was Christmas day I seem to remember and I’d bodged together some cables to make my PC reach across to the HiFi. I really wanted to see if it would sound usable or not (being a bit of a vinyl freak at the time!).
I remember ranting about this to my girlfriend at the time and promising that this was a bit revolutionary and we’d be seeing a lot more of this in the near future. She wasn’t that interested and basically just wanted to get us out the door and over to her mothers place for Christmas dinner. Ha!
How right I was and as it happens and she turned out to be a much bigger downloaded than I was. She’s probably out there somewhere right now all “Torrented up”
I had a Rio, and it rocked.
And it was free because I got hold of 20 for a competition when I was the tech-columnist for ISP-portal NetscapeOnline – another old brand that has since fallen into dissuse
What about the Creative Nomad? That first hard disk MP3 player IIRC.
Any chance you still have the program to put music onto the Rio? I still have mine and would like to try to put it back into service. Any help would be much appreciated!
Tony
My first was the Diamond Rio 500 which held about 12 songs. Sweeeeeet. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Rio_500.jpg
I had a Rio 600 SE (which meant it had 64MB instead of 32MB). Later I upgraded it to 128MB using a 64Mb “backpack”, which replaced the removable battery cover adding to the internal memory, that became available. Right from the start I remember that they were going to release a “backpack” that would provide a 340MB microdrive that never came.
I replaced it with a 20GB Gen 2 iPod that I still use every day.
I used to love Napster. Too bad those RIAA bastards wrecked it. I’ve never heard of the MPMan, only the Rio. My first MP3 player was an iPod Mini 4 GB. Now I have a Creative Zen 8 GB.
The First MP3 player,”MPMan F10″was developed by “SaeHan Information Systems” which is headquartered in Seoul, Korea and imported by Eiger Labs, Inc.
R.I.P. MPman F10
I recall when the first mp3cd players came out in the summer of 2000.
I went from NYC (where they had sold out) down to NJ had a friend pick me up and we drove to the other side of philadelphia to a CC to get a Philips Expanium. It played all bit rate MP3s and standard Audio CDs. Plus it could play cdr & cdrw. I still have it and use it some times in my shop.
I just wish I could find a dvd based mp3 player that had similar or better navigation, which I haven’t yet. philips has been getting steadaly worse each new dvd player they make, as far a good mp3 support.
http://www.amazon.com/Philips-EXP103-eXpanium-45-Second-Anti-Skip/dp/B00004UE2R
It had a good DtoA converter and not being limited to 192Kb like many of the early players made this my $200 investment into mp3s. Still haven’t gotten a pod even though I’ve been on macs for ever (will probably get the next ipod touch).
Been using my sony walkman phone, a through back to when I had the second walkman model. And now to get real “I remember when”, back in ’82(or was it 83) sony came out with their second walkman (it had been the original gray brick upto then) which was high tech for the time. it was as small as a casset tape case, when it was slid into storage size (with out a tape in it). It took one AA battery, and you could by battery chargers at the hardware store. So I had a fleet of AAs with clear packing tape around their sides to spot any early fluid leaks. That model also had the first sony sideways headphones. Here is an article once where someone made an ipod case out of one.
http://www.ipodhacks.com/article.php?sid=2509
http://netconrad.com/WMF10/
http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/sony/
I knew of MP3′s but never had an mp3 player until the iPod came along. Wooow, it’s amazing how far music has come LOL.
On the morning the Rio SE 64MB came out, a co-worker of mine came running into the room shouting “Best Buy has the Rio posted fro $20.89!!!” I ordered 6 of them. Best Buy called and tried to get me to cancel the order, but I refused. Some days later I got two Rios and 4 huge boxes containing Philips stand-alone CD burners bundled with portable CD players (capable of playing recordable media) and a letter asking if I would accept the burners instead of the MP3 players since they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Suffice it to say I made some money and still had a Rio, a CD burner, and a portable CD player to boot. Fond memories!
Nice haul there i’m glad they honoured it to some extent still, not like the fun we had here at TTB when we tried to get some Apple 1TB usb hard disks that the Apple website had put up for a ridicously cheap price! So we all bought one but they pulled some small print mumbo jumbo on us and cancelled our order!
I’d forgotten about that particular painful episode in my life. Thanks for bringing that up again!
Ups Seems I lost my memory about my Mp3 player that I ever had.Thank you to remind me again…
Very Nice sait
My first MP3 player was an Archos Jukebox, later Rockboxed. Recently picked up a Lyra RD2201A at a second hand store for ten bucks because it looked cool and retro. For fun I played the same high bitrate file (converted to wma on the Lyra) and also played it on my current player, a Sansa Fuze, which supposedly has the best sound quality of the current crop. Also tried it on a Dell Pocket PC I bought used for 20 bucks.
Suprisingly, the song sounded much better to my ears, using good in-ear headphones, on all of the older players over the Fuze. By better I mean it sounded fuller, even if it had a little hiss.
I can only conclude that the more recent integrated SOCs just don’t sound as good as the more complicated computer-based (eg Texas Instruments) chips and amps used in early players. The early players had crummy screens and bad battery life but it appears the power went into pumping out music. It is the laws of physics–a brick with a big battery can pump out more voltage than a sleek player with a wafer-thin battery that gets 20 hours of battery life.
For us old-timers, remember that the same thing happened with portable CD players. The early 90s players with four batteries sounded much better than later players with shock protection and long battery life.
Moral: Unlike some retro electronics, older MP3 players are worth keeping around.