8. MP3 And Personal Media Players

The Eiger Labs MPMan F10 (originally the MPMan in Asia and on early imports) was the first portable MP3 player, but it was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia that made more impact. Both appeared in 1998 and neither was a runaway success; the Rio had the edge because while both players had 32 MB of storage, the Rio also had a SmartMedia slot (which Eiger added to the second generation F20). More significantly, it was Diamond that the RIAA chose to sue, claiming that the Rio was breaking the 1992 Home Recording Act. The lawsuit brought Diamond plenty of media attention, and the dismissal of the lawsuit opened the market up to other device manufacturers. These included I-Jam, who offered an FM radio and multiple colors; Sensory Science, who added a microphone for voice recording; and Creative Labs, who developed the first dock for charging and syncing.

RCA brought out the Lyra in 1999, which played tracks in Real Network's G2 format as well as MP3s. Diamond was bought out by S3, which renamed the company SonicBLUE. These early players all used internal flash memory (32 or 64 MB) and parallel port connections rather than USB; the battery was a standard AA rather than an internal rechargeable battery. This started to change when hard drive based players arrived.

Apple's first 5 GB iPod, complete with the iconic white earbuds; it was not the first hard drive MP3 player, though.

The first hard drive player was designed by Compaq but produced under license in late 1999 by Hango as the Personal JukeBox; the PJB-100 had an antiskip buffer and stored around 100 CDs on a 4.8 GB hard drive. It was a chunky black player with a screen for navigating through music an album at a time. Creative's 6 GB Nomad Jukebox came out in September 2000; it still weighed nearly a pound, but the case looked like a portable CD player. Creative let you fill up the space by playing WAV files, and a software update let you play Microsoft's WMA format as well.

In 2000, Kenwood developed the DPC-MP727 portable CD player, which could play data CDs of WMA files, and in 2001 Rio introduced the Volt, a combination MP3 player and portable CD drive which could play audio CDs and data CDs of MP3s. You could see a basic track listing and play M3U format playlists, but hard disk and flash memory players had much longer battery life.