One Churro, Please.

My Life: The Mp3 Player Turns 10 Years Old Today

When I was 15, the year was 1998, I was a sophomore in high school and my cool parents got me the second mp3 player ever made: The Diamond Rio. [Pictured below. Photo by: Minuk]

$200 bought you the player and an installed 32 megabyte solid-state Smart Media card which could hold about 12 songs if they were encoded at 128 Kbps… Which they were because 10 years ago, 128k mp3s were not only acceptable, but preferred. I didn’t get broadband until 2000 so higher quality mp3s weren’t worth the extra download time.

The software that accompanied the player and the drivers were mad buggy. The transfer program was QA’d poorly and rushed to market. It usually, at the very least, crashed about three times while trying to remove twelve songs and add twelve in their place demanding lengthy Windows 98 reboots. Gaahh.

My fellow students didn’t know what to make of it. There was only like two other kids at my school who had one (and I went to a technology magnet school). I think a lot of people just assumed it was a very slim cassette player and didn’t think much of it. When I tried to explain to those who did inquire, they would usually follow it up with, “So… it’s, like, a Mini Disc?” Then I would let out an audible groan and feel superior to them thinking, “Philistines! Listening to your clumsy optical media… LIKE DINOSAURS!!”

But looking back, keeping a slim cd player and a case of 15 or 20 CDs would have been much more efficient. I mean this thing barely held the amount of music that one CD could and, with Smart Media cards being pretty costly ten years ago, you weren’t able to keep many cards on you to switch in and out. Furthermore, CDs sound way better than 128k mp3s.

For something that even I thought would just be a fad, it’s crazy to think that now, I hold 60,000 megabytes of music in my pocket rather than 32mb… only about 19,000 times more. So happy 10th birthday, mp3 player. I really didn’t think you’d make it past your 3rd.