Nowadays you can make decent-sounding files at this rate, but in 1998 encoding options were far more limited. Rio's first version of the PMP300 had just 32MB memory, enough for around half an hour of tunes-not even a full album. The idea of a music jukebox that could hold everything is what hooked me into the idea of an MP3 player, but it was actually smaller-capacity devices like the Rio PMP300 that established the category. This was before the first iPod, or indeed any large-capacity MP3 players existed. The Rio PMP300 was released in 1998, almost 10 years before the iPhone, at a time when the average UK home broadband speed was around 33.6Kbps-almost a thousand times slower than today's average of 28.9Mbps. The question is, 18 years after it was first released, can PMP300 could hold its own as a MP3 player in 2016? The pre-iPod iPod It wasn't-that accolade belongs to the MPMan-but it's probably the earliest one that many will recognise. ![]() It is the MP3 player most often wrongly cited as the first that was commercially available. Blocking the phone line was a nationwide hobby for years.īut rather than turn to the relatively sophisticated Creative Nomad (hey, this thing had a Firewire port on it after all) for my trip down MP3 memory lane, I opted for something more famous: the glorious Diamond Rio PMP300. I still vividly remember researching what LAME and EAC meant- this piece from the Ars Technica of old explains it in detail-and illegally downloading single tracks off of Napster using a dial-up connection and a dodgy US Robotics 56K modem. Well, apart from the assortment of weird and wacky audiophile players (I'm looking at you Pono Player), some of which could have been beamed straight from 1998. Each has a charm you no longer see, now that everything fits into an Android or iOS slab. My journey down the MP3 rabbit hole started during an afternoon spent reminiscing about the various music players I've owned over the years-the iPod Classics, an iRiver H140, a brief stint with a forgotten 20GB Philips box, and a Rio Riot, the Atari Lynx of unloved MP3 players. ![]() Our once-vast music collections have been culled in favour of convenient streaming music services that give us access to all the music we could ever dream of in just a few taps.īut were we better off before? I'm going to find out. While the advent of the iTunes store all but ended the need for physical media, there was for a short while an element of bragging rights attached to having a multi-gigabyte music collection on your iPod-but even the idea of owning digital music is fading. Do you remember the days of flicking through racks of CDs on a Saturday afternoon, looking for the album of an artist you just heard about, perhaps a £3 bargain, or even just cruising for eye-catching covers? Bliss.
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