The History of MP3 Players

and this is that episode. I've already covered the history of the MP three format itself and how digital audio works, so you can check out those earlier episodes as well if you want to. But first let me just give like kind of a very brief overview of the history of the MP three super summarized version. If you recall, it originated as a project out of a research company called the Frown Hawthor Gazelle Shoft Company. A team of researchers led by Karl Heinz Brandenburg created the MP three

format back in seven. Now, what he was doing was trying to build a compression formula that would allow for high audio quality that doesn't take up as much space as raw audio files do. Those are huge, so how do you get them smaller so that transmission is easier. He wanted to do this for audio transmission across phone lines. Now, the name MP three comes to us courtesy of the Motion Picture Experts Group, also known as IMPEG, and the reason the three is there is because the full name

for the format is the IMPEG Audio Layer three. So Brandenburg's team's research led to this audio compression format. Al Fraunhofer a Gazelle Shoft applied for a patent in Germany in nine and for a patent in the United States uh in. And this is a good spot to include a bit of information to clear up some ambiguity. An MP three player can be a couple of different things.

One version of an MP three player is just a program that you run on your computer and it's meant to decode compressed MP three files and then play them back so that you can listen to them. Now, the other meaning of MP three player is really what I was going to talk about today. That's a dedicated, typically portable device that is a decoder and an audio system all in one, kind of like a Sony Walkman was

the old cassette player. I think of MP three player as this handheld personal audio device, but technically MP three player can refer to either. And since it can refer to either. I'm going to cover the history of both, but I'm really going to focus more on those handheld devices. Now frown hawfor a gazelle shaft, and I do love saying that name over and over, which is why I take every opportunity to do so. They marketed an MP three player program for computers, but it failed to catch on.

It wasn't terribly user friendly, people didn't really care for it, and the MP three was actually in danger of fading into obscurity. If no one had created a user friendly MP three program, chances are that format never would have caught on and we would have some other compression format that would be the standard uh or at least a

major standard in audio compression. Now, there were other researchers and companies working on a way to find success where the German company found frustration, and that's when we flash forward to ninet. So remember ninety seven is when the

company first started developing the MP three compression format. Ten years later is when Thomas lav Lak created the a MP MP three playback engine now use Lac was born in Croatia and studied at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of electrical engineering and computing, and he had graduate weighted with a degree of engineering. And he developed his MP three player software when he was a student, and he

wanted to launch it as a commercial product. He said, all right, well, I've created this thing that can play MP three files, and I want to be able to make this something like a piece of software that could actually sell. So he formed a partnership with an American entrepreneur named Brian Littman. Together they created a new company called Advanced Multimedia Products. This was back in the time

when multimedia became like the catchphrase. It was a buzz term, kind of similar to like the way we call Internet of Things or cloud computing. Those are real buzz terms today. Multimedia back in those days was the big buzz word, and it also could mean things like full motion video in computer games, and I've talked about that in a previous episode. They were terrible and amazing and terrible. So Advanced Multimedia Product that's where you get the a MP

in a MP MP three. It wasn't AMP like an amplifier, but rather an acronym for Advanced Multimedia Products. Side note it was Lack would later go on to work in the world of video games. He co created a company called two by two Games, which released a turn based war game called Unity of Command. So, if you've ever played Unity of Command, that was made by the same person who created the first commercially successful MP three player program.

So this program hits the market and it is commercially successful, but it's not entirely easy to use for everybody. That's when a University of Utah student named Justin Frankel took this AMP program and he poured it it over to the Windows operating system, along with help from a few other developers, and he called this sport win AMP w

I N A MP. Justin Frankel, by the way, would actually go on to develop the New Tell, a peer to peer sharing program, and new Tell in this case is spelled with a g N you good New Teller. There's some disagreement online, by the way, regarding to who contributed to creating winapp and who was ultimately responsible who did most of the work. But I'm gonna be honest with you, guys, I cannot sort it all out. There are multiple stories out there. They all disagree with each other.

Some of them seemed to be a little more conspiracy oriented than others. It's very difficult to sort out what is the actual truth. It seems to me like there were multiple players involved and there's disagreement about who did

most of the work. So for the purposes of this podcast, let's say that Frankel developed WINAMP and just put a little asked a risk behind that phrase, because honestly, without chatting with all the parties involved, I can't really make an educated guess as to who whom was the ultimate party responsible. I'm guessing it was more of a group effort.

Now when AMP would actually go on to become one of the top MP three playback programs on the Windows platform, in it was a free program, anyone could download it, and that really helped cement the MP three format. It helped establish it as a format that would stick around because now you had a free program you could use. You had a compression formula that allowed you to store a lot more music in the same storage space as if you were to use the raw music files you could.

You could store way more music with m P three format because it compressed it so low, so low as in low storage space, and of course that depended upon things like the bit rate you set your encoding at and if you wanted to learn more about that, you can listen to the digital audio episode I did to talk more about bit rate. I'm not going to go into that here. So the NP three format was no longer in danger of fading off into obscurity. In one year after when it became free, A o L purchased

the rights to win app. They actually acquired a company called null Soft. That was the company that Frankel had formed when he was marketing win app. And the price for acquiring Nullsoft was a cool eighty million dollars, not bad for a University of Utah dropout. Frankel dropped out of the out of college once he had developed this

program because he was running his own company. He had created a startup and UH found enormous success by getting acquired by A o L. This was just one example of a long and storied history of people creating company needs that showed some utility and then selling out to a larger company. And by selling out, they don't mean they sold out in the you know, derogatory sense. They made really good business decisions by making millions of dollars

off of their work. Um, I only wish I had come up with something equally as useful so that I could be a millionaire. Gosh darn it, but don't we all anyway? It was not long for this world ultimately, because in a O l shut down winnapp. Uh you couldn't download it anymore. They stopped supporting it. But of course, by the MP three format was firmly entrenched, so the death of winnapp did not mean the death of the

MP three. And there are tons of other MP three pro player programs and MP three compatible programs out there, way more than I name. Some of them have really interesting features. Some of them are really slimmed down programs that just have basic commands. Most operating systems have some form of MP three playback functionality built into them with a stock application, so you don't even have to download anything to be able to access MP three files for

most cases. So instead of focusing on the software side, let's shift over to talk about portable MP three players. When did they start to show up? So while it was Lack was working on the a MP MP three player program, and thank goodness, I'm not gonna have to say that anymore. There was a company in South Korea that was busy creating the first solid state handheld MP three player. Now that company was this Sahan Information Systems Corporation.

The original product they launched was called the MP man Digital Stereo Player, kind of like a Walkman, but it's an MP man, And of course Walkman came from Sony. This came from Sahan Information system Now, the company wasn't prepared to market this worldwide, so they actually partnered with another company, Iger Labs, and Iger Labs was in charge of marketing this product over in the Western world, and they showed off the device at the nineteen s Bit

trade show in Germany. The product would then hit the consumer market in the summer of nineteen so you have the software side developing at the same time as the hardware side, which was kind of interesting right now. There were two versions of the early MP man MP three player. Others would follow after a while, but the first two, we're pretty simple. One of them had thirty two megabytes of memory, which was enough to hold about thirty two

minutes of audio encoded at a killabits per second. That's about eight standard length songs. Obviously standard length is you know, that depends, but we're talking three to four minutes, right. So, just for fun, out of the mischievous of my heart, I decided to ask eight co workers a simple question. If you could fit one and only one song on an MP three player for your use, what would it be? And so here is the how Stuff Works employee playlist,

as determined by the eight co workers I asked. H I asked a couple of others this question later on and tortured them as well. By the way across the board, when I asked this question, it was clear to me that the people responding were giving more thought to this question than perhaps any other piece of work that crossed their desk this week. That's not a judgment, I'm just making an observation. So co worker Allison said that she would put put under pressure by Queen and David Bowie

on this MP three player. Christopher went with a door by Prince, although he has since reconsidered his choice multiple times. Nathan chose later Alice by tool. Sherry chose telephone call from Istanbul by Tom Waits Ramsey, who is the director for the Forward Thinking series. Now his choice was waiting Room by Fugazi. Our office manager to Mika said she would go with the Imperial March by John Williams from

the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack. I think she wins. Julie, who hosts Stuff of Life among other things, went with Nina Simons Centerman, specifically a live version. She wanted me

to make sure I mentioned that. And then we have Matt Frederick, one of the hosts of Stuff they don't want you to know, who decided to torture me because he chose a song that I don't think I can pronounce sefan Inglare by a group called Seeger Ross, and I know I butchered it, and I know that that wasn't necessarily Matt's intent, But I also know that Matt is probably not disappointed to hear that I cannot say the name of the song he chose. Now, I think it's only fair that I do the same as my

co workers. But I'm giving myself all eight tracks. So here are eight songs I feel like I could put on an MP three player that could only hold those eight songs. First up is Tie your Mother Down by Queen, because it's a song that was written in nineteen six by Brian May and May went on to become an astro physicist. So if an astrophysicist can write an amazing song called tie your Mother Down, I think you have

to include it on your MP three player. Next, I've got Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, which I think is best played in a car that has all the windows rolled down. Third is my one and only entry from They Might Be Giants. This when we can't keep Johnny down, Because you know it's My name is Jonathan, so I went with that. Anyone who knows me is aware that I'm an enormous fan of They Might Be Giants, so

picking any one song from them was really tough. Fourth would be The Clashes cover of Pressure Drop, which was originally by Toots and the Maytals, which was one of my favorite cover songs. And then next I've I've chosen this must be the Place by the Talking Heads. Uh. Then we would have a song from a more recent band that I've become obsessed with. That would be The

Struts and Put Your Money on Me. After that s O B by Nathaniel Rateliff in the Night Sweats, and the last song I would put on my MP three player would have to be something that would indicate my love of musicals, So I picked the song once in a while from The Rocky Horror Show, not the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but the play The Rocky Horror Show, and specifically the roxy cast version. So look up the

different songs. I mentioned, both the ones that my coworkers picked and the ones I picked to kind of get your idea of why anyone would want to put that on an MP three player that could only hold eight songs. It will give you a lot more information about the personalities of the people who work here and of me. I guess that's also a warning. Now. I did say that the MP man was available in two versions. The

second one actually had sixty four megabytes of storage. That's double the amount of data you could stuff onto the other version. It did not have a rechargeable battery, though. The thirty two megabyte had a nickel metal hydride battery that you could recharge and had nine hours of playtime, which is pretty incredible, right, like nine hours to play eight songs over and over again. Well, the sixty four megabyte instead of having that rechargeable battery, it ran off

a single double A battery. Now, technically the double A could be rechargeablepending upon what brand you purchased, but you get what I mean. It wasn't inherently a rechargeable battery. The original player, the thirty two megabyte version, it didn't have expandable memory. So if you wanted to upgrade, you had to do this. You purchase your thirty two megabyte You decide, you know what, eight songs isn't enough, I'd

really like to have sixteen on there. You would send your thirty two megabyte model and a check to cover the difference in cost off to Eiger Labs, and they would send you a sixty four megabyte version in return. That's how you upgrade. It didn't have anything to do with removable storage discs or anything like that. So how

much did these things cost? Well, the thirty two megabyte mp man cost a cool two hundred fifty dollars when it launched in If you were to take that same product and look at inflation, you could say, all right, well today, that means it would cost close to three hundred and sixty eight dollars. So you would be spending almost three hundred and seventy dollars in order to listen to eight songs on the go in digital format, and of course that also depends upon the song length. Right.

If you wanted to store songs by the Ramans on there, you'd probably be able to squeeze in an extra tune because most remote songs are three minutes or shorter. But if you're a big fan of the musical genius known as meat Loaf, you might only get a couple of tracks on your m P three player before you filled up all the memory. Now I've gotten more to say about the MP man and the more successful MP three player that followed it, but first let's take a quick

break to thank our sponsor. The launch of the MP man wasn't an enormous success, but it did help establish the MP three as not just a digital compression format, but also a filed type that could be used for portable devices. So in September, just a couple of months after the MP man launched, a new MP three player emerged, and this was the Rio P MP three hundred and that debuted at a price of two hundred dollars, which then prompted Eiger Labs to reduce the MP man price

to two hundred dollars as well. The b MP three hundred also had thirty two megabytes of storage space, and you'd load music from a computer using a parallel port cable. Do you remember. Those were kind of the things we would use before stuff like USB cables became a standard. So how did this PMP three hundred measure up to

the MP man apart from the identical amount of storage space. Well, if you look at an MP man, and I do recommend that you search for these different devices and look at images just so you can see what these actually looked like. Um, the MP man had a very small digital display, almost like an electronic calculator, like handheld electronic calculator that you would have basic one, not even a

scientific model. And so it had a very small digital display that mostly showed how much time had passed from the launch of a song. And it had two physical buttons that you can use to navigate the device, one called mode and the other called info, and it weighed

about sixty five grams. The p MP three hundred had a larger digital screen than the MP man, and it also had more buttons, including three on the top edge of the player and several more on the front surface of the player beneath where the screen was a circle in the front, gave basic controls like play fast, forward, rewind, and stop, and other buttons allowed you to do things like change the volume level or select basic functions like repeat.

These would be things that become standard in future MP three players. The additional features and lower price point pushed the Rio ahead of the MP MAN. Now that's not to say that the launch of the Rio was perfectly smooth. In October nine, the Recording Industry Association of America a k a. The r I double A sued Rio Port, which was a subsidiary of a company called Diamond Multimedia. And Diamond multi Media essentially produced the Rio through Rio Port.

So what was the beef? Well, the r I double A claimed that the Rio violated the nineteen two US Home Recordings Act. The mp MAN was such a niche item that the r I double A didn't even take notice of it. But the Rio was making a bigger splash, and so the R I double A said, we've got a niphus in the butt. Anyone familiar with media organizations

knows that this is a pretty common occurrence. So you get a new technology that debuts and it allows people to create, play and share recordings of media and then lawsuits come flying in. We saw it with the development of video cassettes, both Beta max and VHS. We saw it with just cassette tapes. We saw it with c d s and specifically writeable c d s, and we

saw it with m P Three's no big shock. Every time that someone comes up with a new way to do this, we see the various industry UH components react normally through lawsuits. And on the one hand, you can kind of understand where they're coming from. If someone can replicate a recording or make it available for other folks to download for free, why would anyone bother to pay

for a recording? Right? So, why would I bother to pay for a song if I could just go online and download it for free and you know, there's no

repercussions there. But on the other hand, we've seen multiple times that the legal tactics don't prevent piracy from happening, and in some cases, lawsuits might encourage people who otherwise wouldn't dream of hirating stuff to actually go to the dark side and do it, saying saying, you know, I wasn't going to do it before, but because of the way this company is acting, I'm totally gonna do it now.

Maybe they're just justifying what their activity is, but it's not a great story, and it also leads to companies adopting various types of digital rights management or DRM that can ultimately cause more frustration to legal customers than two people pirating that software or files. More on that in

a little bit. So for about a week and a half in October, the r I double A was able to secure a sales ban on the Rio, so about ten days or so the Rio could not be sold legally in the United States, but by October six that ban was lifted. Real Port would countersue the r I double A in December and said that what that organization was doing was illegal. They were trying to stifle a market that they didn't actually control, and that market would

be digital music. There was a lawsuit that followed, and the court ruled that the Rio wasn't in violation of any rules because the company couldn't control the behavior of its customers. In other words, it's not an MP three player manufacturer's fault. If customers fill up their devices with stolen files, they can't control that. It's the same as saying it's not a computer manufacturer's fault if a hacker

uses their computers to make malware. Dell can't control if I take a Dell computer and start creating malware off of it, so Dell should not be held at fault if I unleash a damaging malware onto the world. By the same token, an MP three player manufacturer can't guarantee that its customers are going to play by the rules,

and it can't be held responsible when they don't. The r I double A appealed this verdict, and then the court said that the RIO didn't qualify as a recording device under the definitions a Recording Act, so therefore it couldn't be in violation of any rules because it didn't qualify for the rules that are I double A said, we're in play, so the MP three player lived to fight another day. On a side note, the r I double A would soon see its fears realized upon the

birth of peer to peer sharing services, namely Napster. These services became massive resources for pirates, first of music files and then later for all types of files. Now the technology itself and peer to peer sharing isn't illegal, but it was put to illegal use frequently enough that everyone in the industry was equating this perfectly legal means of distribution with illegal activity. It became an enormous headache for a lot of people who used peer to peer sharing

for totally legitimate legal purposes. Uh. It didn't help that there were also lots of people using it to pirate the crap out of music, movies, and games and other types of files. This would also extend into the era of the bit torrent networks. So I've talked about those in previous episodes. I won't dwell on it here. Those lawsuits, however, got the attention of the industry at large, and nobody wanted to get sued by a powerful organization representing the

interests of the major music labels. They had almost bottomless amounts of cash and could completely bankrupt smaller companies that

were trying to get into this industry. So various entities in the technology sector, including consumer electronics companies and various rights holders formed what was called the Secure Digital Music Initiative or s d m I. Their goal originally was to create a strategy, some encryption specifications and other strategies to prevent the unlawful distribution of MP three recordings, so, in other words, they wanted to create a digital rights

management strategy. To do this, they created a digital water marking process that would attach a bit of code to a music file, and that bit of code would act as a water mark. If you tried to remove the water mark, it would in theory, cause damage to the MP three file, so that you would get signal loss, you would have a lower quality sound file, or maybe it wouldn't even play properly at all. And they also

work to create a standard for MP three players. So the idea was that MP three player manufacturers would implement technology, some kind of code hard coded into the device that would prevent an s d M I compliant player from playing an sd M I compliant music file if it didn't have authorization to do so. So, in other words, think of it like a key in a lock. If the key was not present on the device, it could not unlock a music file that had been illegally loaded

onto the device. And to make sure that their plan worked, the s d d M I group invited various hackers to try their hand at removing a digital watermark without harming the MP three file. So there was a group led by a Princeton University professor of computer science and his name was Ed Felton. They claimed that they managed

the task. Now, the SDM I group said no, no, no, no, now, yeah, you you didn't do it because just because our software says that the watermark is gone doesn't mean the watermark is really gone. Plus there's signal loss here in this audio file, so you didn't really successfully do this. Now, Felton's group did not opt for the non disclosure policy. The group had offered a prize, a cash prize award to anyone who could manage to do this. If you opted out of that non disclosure policy, you were not

eligible for the award. Well, Felton's group never agreed to the non disclosure part. So they moved to publish their method to defeat the s d M I um uh D r m S strategy. And that's when several groups, including the r I double A, sprung into action. They threatened legal action under the Digital Management Copyright Act or d m c A. Felton turned to the Electronic Frontier Foundation the e f F, and said, hey, now this

is not fair. So they took it to the U S Department of Justice, and the d o J said, you're cool, Felton, because legit academic research isn't a violation of the d m c A. So the paper was published, the s d m I essentially dissolved without any fanfare in two thousand one. Turns out that protecting digital information is pretty tricky, and this approach was ultimately a failure. It's probably a good thing seeing is how those approaches

to DRM tend to do more harm. They they negatively affect legitimate legal customers more than they affect the people who are skirting around the law. And trust me, nothing is more frustrating than the feeling you're being punished for following the rules. Anyone who's played a single player video game that will only work if you have an active connection to the Internet probably knows what I'm talking about.

All right, back to the MP three players. After the launch of the MP Man and the Rio, other devices began to hit the market, and the biggest challenge companies faced was to provide a decent amount of memory storage while trying to keep the price down, because in those early days, if you wanted to use solid state flash based memory storage, you're paying a pretty hefty price. We're talking between three and four dollars per megabyte, which adds

up to about thirty five hundred dollars per gigabyte. That's that's an enormous amount of money. I don't have thirty dollars to spend on a one gigabyte MP three player. I don't have it to spend on a tarobyte MP three player, to tell you the truth. Now, a new MP three player debuted with a much larger hard drive then its competitors. And this was the Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox,

and it had four point eight gigabytes of storage. How How could Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox have four point eight gigabytes when everyone else is struggling with thirty two or sixty four megabytes? Did it cost the same amount as a car? No? And the reason was personal juke box wasn't using solid state flash memory. Instead, the Personal juke

Box actually was using a repurposed laptop hard drive. In other words, it used a disc based storage system hard disc, not floppy disk, and it used magnetic storage instead of the solid state model. Now, that kept the price down, but it was still monstrously expensive. The launch price for the Personal Jukebox was seven hundred dollars, which is about the same as one thousand, one hundred fifty one dollars

in today's money. And you might think that a laptop hard drive would make an MP three player larger and heavier than those that use flash storage, and you're right. It was not really a portable device, at least not in the same way that the flash based ones were. In two thousand, another disc based hard drive MP three player debut, and this one was the Creative Nomad Jukebox. It cost five dollars for six gigabytes of storage, so more storage for less money, But like the Personal Jukebox,

it was a hefty monster. It was too big for a personal listening device. It kind of looked like a personal CD player rather than MP three player, much too large to fit into a pocket. If you wanted to go lightweight, you would have to opt for something else, like the I to Go Ego, which had a micro drive capable of storing two gigabytes of music. But there was a hefty price tag for the Eye to Go Ego.

It cost two thousand dollars a two thousand dollar MP three player, and that's by two thousand year standards like the year two thousand. If you wanted to adjust for inflation, it's more like two thousand seven eight seven dollars for a two gigabyte MP three player. It's not even made out of platinum or anything. Other alternatives were also popping up,

though most of them had those storage limitations. There was the r C A Lira or Lyra if you prefer, it's l y r A, and that marked r C as attempt to get into the MP three player business. The first model had a thirty two megabyte capacity on a CF card, and I also had a fairly large monochromatic display and several physical buttons for operation. If you wanted to store music on the device, you had to

use proprietary software to write to the CF reader. Moreover, the files you'd store would be converted into an encrypted format that would only play on the Lira or Lyra or whatever. Now, because it actually used a removable memory card, you could upgrade the memory. You just buy a higher

memory card. Now, the max in those early models was five dred twelve megabytes, so still way less than those hard disk style MP three players, but far more storage than the standard models that were on the market, and

it kept the size of the device relatively small. One drawback was that when the Lyrah booted up, it had to read the full contents stored on the card, kind of like how your computer when it's booting up and it's trying to load the desktop, it has to read all the different things that are associated with the desktop before it can fully load. So the only way it could present a menu of all the songs stored on

the device was to go through all the contents first. Now, the more you stored on it, the longer that boot time lasted. If you had more than half of your device full and you had five twelve megabytes of storage, you'd be waiting longer than a minute just for the thing to boot up properly. So it wasn't the most convenient compared to some other devices. Now, that entire line of our c A products would persist and evolve, with

later models adding more functionality and more storage. Meanwhile, in two thousand, Sony joined the game by launching a device that sort of looked like a pen. It was called the Sony Viio m C P ten Music Clip, And boy doesn't that just roll off the tongue? I love these MP three players that all have letter and number of designations instead of just a quipping name that I can rattle off, Sony Vio m c P ten music clip. We'll just call the music clip from here on out.

It was a sixty four megabyte digital music player, so their entry level was a little higher than the previous models that had come out over the last couple of years. It costs three dollars. And here's another big difference. Unlike the other players I've talked about, this wasn't actually an MP three player. It didn't play m P three files at all. Why because in a very Sony fashion, it would play music files in the A track three format. That's a t R a C three format. That's a

format that was created by drum Roll Sony. So you can use included software to transcode files from MP three to A track three. But the whole process took a really long time. It was very clunky, and they paired it with a poorly designed program designed to move files from a computer to the player. Right, you would still download files onto your PC or rip music from a

CD onto your PC. Then you would have to transfer from the PC to your MP three player in this case, you would also have to transcode into a track three if it wasn't already in that format. It was very frustrating experience and it a lot of customers were upset that it wasn't really an MP three player despite the fact that MP three would appear on the box because of that transcoding program. I mean, the transcoding program was included,

so why not say MP three on the box. Uh. Ultimately, the the device did not get a lot of traction. It did not do very well in the marketplace. Also that same year, in two thousand, i Omega, which created ZIP discs, launched an MP three player called the Hip Zip and it had a forty megabyte storage capacity and use a scaled down version of the magnetic disc storage that they used for ZIP discs. But at this point the market was starting to get a bit crowded. There's

some confusion going on in the marketplace. A lot of companies were launching MP three players at different storage capacities for different prices, and the experience could be remarkably different depending upon which device you chose and which software package came along with it. So that you can manage your music database and load up your device. Keep in mind, this is a time where these devices didn't have WiFi connectivity. You had to physically attach them to a computer in

order to move music over onto them. Customers were starting to get a bit frustrated because it was a confusing time, and it turned out that having a bigger storage drive wasn't necessarily the killer feature because some products were just too frustrating to use. It didn't matter that you could store more music on them. The the process of getting music moved to the device was so irritating that a lot of people just didn't like them. But in two

thousand one, product launch that changed the game completely. Now, before I talk about that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, I mentioned before the break that we had a groundbreaking product launch in two thousand one. I am, of course talking about the Intel Pocket Concert. It's like i'man the iPod. But the Intel Pocket Concert did launch in two thousand one, and it was pretty cool.

It had a hundred twenty eight megabytes of storage. It cost a hundred dollars this amount of storage, and that price point was really attractive. It actually met with some success in the market, but it didn't last very long, not because of problems with the device, not because people didn't like it, but because Intel reorganized in two thousand one, and in that reorg they shut down at their home electronics division, and the Pocket concert fell into the home

electronics category. So it was a casualty of a reorgan It didn't have anything to do with the market acceptance of the MP three player. Just think if Intel had kept it, maybe the story would be very different. No, the one that actually launched in two thousand one that changed everything was the iPod. Now, it didn't change everything right away when it first launched, it was too limited to do that. Apple was not the powerhouse in two thousand one that it would become just a few years later.

It was still recovering from a very a tumultuous period in the company history. It had gone through a lot of turbulence in the nineties. Co founder Steve Jobs had returned to Apple in after essentially being exiled for several years. If you remember, Steve Jobs was kind of forced out of Apple, effectively forced. He was essentially put to the side until he stepped away because he wasn't in charge

of anything anymore. Then Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy after a series of terrible business decisions and strategies and jobs. Came back in as an interim CEO until he was starting to turn the company around and became the actual CEO, and he was working really hard to make the company healthy again. And the two thousand one launch of the iPod was one of the first really big moves Apple made to assert itself and become a leader in computing and electronics markets. So, the very first

generation of iPods had a large led screen. They had the classic scroll wheel. You put your thumb on the wheel and spin it around in order to navigate the various lists of songs. A scroll wheel in that first generation was surrounded by the control buttons like play and pause and the wine and fast forward, and so the device had a pretty simple and fairly aesthetic design, kind of clunky compared to today's technology, but less clunky than

a lot of the competitors that were out there. It also had five gigabytes of storage space, and it cost four hundred dollars when it launched. Also, it was aimed at a niche market because the only compatible computer you could use with the first generation iPod was a Mac. It wasn't compatible with Windows based PCs just MAX. The original iPods were running. Uh, they were rather compatible with MAX that we're running a brand new software package called iTunes. Now.

At that time, iTunes was just a management soft are right. It was meant to help you manage your your music files, but you had to get the music files from somewhere else at that point. Now, because of those limitations, the iPod didn't immediately dominate the MP three player space. What's more, other companies were starting to introduce innovations into devices, and that wasn't an effort to set them apart from all

the other competitors out there. In two thousand two, Arcs began to market a product called the Jukebox Multimedia jukeboxes in here anyway. The Jukebox Multimedia could play audio and video, as the name would suggest, and they had two different versions. They had a ten gigabyte and a twenty gigabyte version. The basic ten gigabyte version went on sale for four hundred dollars, so same price as the first generation iveod, but this one could show video and it had more

storage space. Creative Labs would launch an MP three player called the move oh m u v O, which was a small, simple MP three player that used a single triple A battery and had a battery life of twelve hours, which was pretty impressive, and that came in uh both sixty four megabyte and eight megabyte options. It was less expensive than a lot of the other players, and it was fairly popular at the time because people were starting to really get into this idea of the MP three.

A year later, other gadgets started to join the list, including Sony's next attempt at getting into the MP three game. It was another catchy model, The NW Dash MS seven zero D rolls off the tongue. I could just imagine kids writing to Santa, Dear Santa, please get me the n W Dash MS seven zero D, and then they probably end up with some completely unrelated electronic device because the parents couldn't read they were I'm sorry, Santa couldn't read the words properly, and then ended up buying I

don't know, a hair dryer or something. By the way, that device looks really weird. You want to look up an image of this, so one more dying for those of you who want to look up the image. The NW MS seven zero d because I don't think I can really describe it properly. So here here goes. This is just a a wild attempt, but I don't really

think it's going to help you that much. Imagine something that looks like an old fashioned electric razor, and then imagine a cylinder protruding from either side of one end of that electric razor. And then you have that MP three player from Sony. And it was actually a pretty small player. So the had a weird shape, but it really wasn't that big. It could hold two d fifty six megabytes of music, plus it had an additional dwight

megabytes storage thanks to a memory card. This one launched at three hundred dollars and I actually kind of dig the design of this one. It used flash based memory, and so a lot of people like this one, specifically if they wanted to do exercise. Because flash based memory, you don't have to worry about skipping with any physical hard drive like a magnetic storage drive. You've actually got a physical disc that spins, and if you jostle it around,

it can cause the device to skip. So those early MP three players, a lot of them, the ones that had those disk drive based storage systems. They weren't great if you wanted to go jogging or do heavy duty exercise because they could skip around. These other flash based

ones didn't have that problem. Creative continued its push into the MP three market by launching a line of MP three players called Zen and the Zen line could play not just MP three files, but also w m A files, and some could also handle wave files and later others

as types of files as well. Creative built management software called Creative Media Source, which allowed users to synchronize devices to music stored on a computer and meant that, you know, if you added more music to your PC and then you hooked up your device to the PC, it would automatically pull over new songs into your device. You didn't have to do it manually. You didn't have to go in and say all right, I want this one. You

could do that, but you didn't have to. So if you added new music to your computer, it would automatically poured it over to your Zen every time you would plug it in. And my first MP three player was a Creative Zen Touch that actually launched in two thousand four. At the time I chose the Creative Zen Touch, I don't think I got it in two thousand four. I think I got it later, so I got I got it for less. It was a later model, it was less expensive, but I chose that one because I owned

a PC. I didn't own a MAC, and I could at that time get a version of iTunes for the PC. But iTunes for the PC and those days did not work very well. It was a kind of a monster on Windows. It was not a piece of software I particularly cared for. Back in those days. It worked much better on a Mac than it would on a PC, and as a result, I felt discouraged from using iTunes and decided to go with the creative Zeno much and

use their media source software instead. Now, the zen Touch was a pretty solid brick of a device, but I like the interface. It had a touch sensitive vertical bar instead of a scroll wheel, and you use the vertical bar to scroll through your music selection. I held onto that thing for longer than I probably should have, just because I maintained that it was better to have a dedicated device to play music than to use my phone

to play music. If you guys are long time listeners of tech stuff, and you listened way back in the day when Chris Palette was co host of Tech Stuff. You heard me talk about this, how I preferred having a dedicated device for my music so I didn't have to gum up the memory on my phone to hold all my music collection. And these days I do what the majority of people out there are doing. I use streaming services to access music. I have some stuff download

to my phone, but mostly I'm streaming it. So now I don't have a dedicated music player, all right. But jumping back to two thousand three, Apple would continue with its iPod line. It launched a fifteen gigabyte iPod, and then later on in two thousand three, it launched a forty gigabyte iPod. But the biggest news was that iTunes graduated from a music management software program to a full

fledged music store interface. That meant that in two thousand three, you could purchase music through Apple and then transfer it to your handy dandy iPod just directly. This was brilliant, you know, having your your ability to shop, your ability to manage your playlist, and your ability to sink it with your device all in one software package. However, Apple was also implementing a digital Rights Management strategy DRM that

really irritated consumers. The forty gigabyte third generation iPod is the one that I always think about when I imagine an iPod. That's the vision I have in my head. They changed the control slightly so they still had the LED screen at the top. Beneath that, they put the control buttons arranged in a horizontal line below the LED screen so they were no longer around the circumference of the scroll wheel, and below the control buttons was the scroll click wheel. Uh. This one launched at a four

hundred dollar price point. By two thousand four, color screens started to become a feature in some of the high end m P three players. Creative launched the Zen Media Center. That one had a color screen and ran on the Windows Mobile operating system. It could store forty gigabytes music. It cost five hundred dollars. Meanwhile, I Rivers H three hundred series packed a color screen and a much smaller form factor, and it also included an FM radio, so you could buy a twenty gigabyte I River h three

D two hifty dollars. Apple followed suit by launching an iPod with a color screen and a sixty gigabyte storage capacity, costing three nine dollar. So now you've got lots of different players trying to get the edge by adding in these other features. But it was that music store that really gave Apple the edge. By pairing a store system with the management software for an iPod, Apple created a new way for consumers to buy music, and since Apple got a cut of the sales, it became an immensely

profitable strategy for the company. It really propelled Apple into new heights, and Apple was also making a name for the quality of its products. People really liked the quality, they liked the experience, particularly if they owned a Mac. If you were like me and you owned a PC, you were still complaining about the fact that iTunes was not great on Windows. People began to trust the Apple brand more and the iPod would start to make its

mark in other ways as well. Because the popular term for what I do is called podcasting, that was a lot to the brand name iPod. Now some folks prefer to use less branded terms like netcasts, and there's nothing wrong in that, but I would argue podcast remains the popular generic term for what I do, and that's thanks to Apple for making the iPod and taking MP three players mainstream. Now Apple did that not just by concentrating on the iPod line, but also by launching other brands

that catered to specific markets. So you had the iPod Shuffle for example. This was a simplified, stripped down MP

three player. It had no display, It automatically would shuffle playlists, had basic controls that allowed you to skip or replay songs and adjust the volume, and that simplification meant that the Shuffle could be sold for much less money than other MP three players, and the standard one gigabyte model was priced at a hundred fifty dollars and two thousand five, other companies were still trying to get into the game.

Dell launched the DJ Diddy in two thousand five, which had a small display, had an FM radio, and five twelve megabytes of storage space. So it was lagging behind a lot of the other players, and by then iPod was beginning to define the market it and newcomers were having a harder time gaining any traction, so by two thousand six, Dell would abandon the Diddy Diddy Dumb Diddy do.

In two thousand six, Microsoft tried to challenge Apple for that heavyweight championship and MP three players, and they launched the zooon. Do you guys remember the zoom? Do you guys remember what they called sharing on the zoom, Like if you had a song and someone else had a zoom and you could share one zoom song to another zoom. Do you remember Dylan Dylan shaking his head. It was

called squirting. If you wanted to squirt your song, Dylan is a let's say that there's some disbelief in Dylan's reaction, but no, that is in fact what they called it. It was a method of being able to say that I bought a song, I could share it temporarily with you, Dylan, if you had your zoom, just by squirting it right over to you. I just squirt that song and then you would be able to enjoy the squirted song on your zoom. Dylan's give me a thumbs up, and he's, well,

there's at least one finger pointing towards me. Um. Yeah. So a lot of people made fun of that, and obviously I'm still doing it today, despite the fact that the zoon is no longer a thing spoiler alert. Um. But you know, the zoon was an impressive attempt to challenge the iPod in many ways, it just it came a little too late for it to really have a chance. It had a color l C D display, and that

display was gorgeous. I would argue that the original Zoon when it came out, its display was better than what Apple's iPod line had at that time. It also had an FM radio and thirty gigabytes of storage with the first model, and like I said, subsequent models would have these other features. Microsoft would pair this with a subscription based service through the Zoom Stores. The Zoom Store was kind of like the iTunes store, but they had a

different strategy. They said, here's what we want you to do. You'll pay a subscription fee of fifteen dollars a month, and for fifteen dollars a month, you get all the music you can download. Now, that actually sounds fairly reasonable today, a lot of streaming music services depend upon a subscription base. Right, you might not pay the subscription base, but then you're getting lots of ads instead of just an ad free experience. But then if you if you opt in to a

subscription service, then you don't have ads. Well, imagine this. Imagine that you pay fifteen dollars a month but you can download as much music as you like, putting aside things like data caps which obviously and and broadband speeds, which obviously makes an impact on how much you can

take advantage of this. This is the sort of thing I would jump on in a second today because you wouldn't just have access to music, you would actually get to download those tracks, which means if the service ever were to go belly up, you could still listen to your favorite tunes right like, if the service goes away and the service was how you were listening to music, you have to find a different service that may or may not have access to the same labels that you

were used to. This would be a way for you to actually hold on to those music files and be able to listen to them even if the infrastructure went away. But the whole idea came a little bit too early, I think, and Microsoft's attempts to market the Zoo never really captured a large section of the market, and two thousand seven, Apple introduced two products that changed the game again.

First was the iPod Touch, which moved nearly all the controls for the device onto a touch screen interface, which meant that most of the face of the gadget was a screen and it allowed for really impressive video playback capabilities. The base model was sixteen gigabytes and it cost about

four hundred dollars. But they also introduced another product that really disrupted thing, and that was the first iPhone that came out in two thousand seven, and Steve Jobs when he introduced it, talked about the fact that it was a computer, a phone, and an MP three player all in one and had the capability of acting as an MP three player, and it really spelled doom for a

lot of standalone MP three devices. That smartphones became more popular and started to have larger amounts of storage, and the price wasn't ridiculously expensive or was sometimes supplemented depending upon what service provider you were using and where you lived. People started seeing fewer reasons to purchase a dedicated MP three player, and the company that had dominated the market stood poised to kill that market. But that market didn't

totally die. There's still plenty of dedicated MP three players out there, and there are a lot of reasons to buy one. You might want to pair an MP three player with your car, for example, and just have it be like an enormous mix tape for road trips, and that way you don't have to wear down your phone's battery. Or you might want a simple MP three player that you can wear while you're exercising, which removes the need to carry a bulky and expensive smartphone as you jog

or hit the gym. But a lot of people are moving away from those dedicated devices and relying more heavily on their multipurpose smartphones, so they act as a phone, a computer, and NB three player, among other things. Now the NP three players history has a few more stories. I didn't mean to just end with the iPod Touch. That same year, Samsung launched the yp dash P two MP three player, another fantastic name, but this was a really pretty device. It had a touch screen interface, came

out the same year's iPod Touch. A lot of people at the time thought it was a superior device to the iPod Touch. Not everybody, but a lot of people did. It had Bluetooth capabilities, which meant that you could pair it with a phone, and you could even use it to answer calls that were coming in from the paired phone. We also saw in two thousand seven a smaller Zoom

and a third generation iPod Nano. Didn't really talk about the introduction of the nano, but the Nano was yet another very small uh I iPod or m P three player, meant for you know, easy on the go use. And the iPod Nano that came out in the third generation also had a color video screen, so you can watch really tiny video on your nano if you wanted to. For some reason, in two thousand and eight, we saw the sand Disc Sands of Fuse debut, also the Sony

E series Walkman. These were both devices that when a totally different route. They were aiming at the budget market for folks who were unwilling or unable to shell out the big bucks for something like an iPod Touch or even an iPod Classic, which was still around at that point. These cost about seventy five much less expensive than these counterparts.

On the other end of the spectrum where the iPod and Zoom models that included WiFi connectivity, which turned them into something approaching a smartphone, but without the cellular connectivity. This is kind of how it went for the following years until I think something else I should mention in the history of MP three players, and that's the year two thousand fourteen. That was the year that Apple quietly

killed off the iPod Classic. The iPod Classic lasted thirteen years two thousand one to two thousand fourteen, but in two thousand fourteen you could not any longer by the standalone MP three player with that classic form from Apple. And as I said, there's still MP three players out there.

If you go to any store or you go on Amazon or anything like that and you do a search for it, you'll find tons of them, but they are a much smaller niche market, and they're generally aimed at things like the the exercise crowd or stuff along those lines, as opposed to people who are more used to using their devices just to stream music online. But I'm curious to hear from you guys. Did you own an MP three player and what was your first MP three player?

And also what eight songs would you include on your MP man if you had one? You can let me know by sending me an email. You can just use the address text stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also give me a shout on Facebook or Twitter. The handle you can use is text stuff hs W as the handle that you use to contact me not you use personally, you use your own handle. That's just the one I use for the show. Anyway, I'll talk to you again. Release soon for more on this and

thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com