I used to work at CompUSA from 99 to 2004, and I remember these on the shelf, I don't remember selling one, but I do remember them. Also, the price tags with just the date indicate it was brought in to the store as a customer owned product, probably returned a few times seeing how many are on the box.
@@juddsandage Cool, thanks for the info, I never heard of it until today. We did not have any large chain computer stores here until the late 2000's. I think we got a best buy in 2008 or 9.
The end days of CompUSA were a wild time. I still have my favorite thing I ever bought from them. They sold everything, the shelving, the racks, even their office supplies. I have a rubber stamp that says "DO NOT BILL".
Here's an interesting thing that I never hear remarked on: when the Walkman came out, the innovation was not that you could play tapes or choose your own music or anything about the tech itself. The big socially revolutionary thing was simply the idea of wearing headphones in public. I'm not sure if the Walkman was the first example of light headphones, but they were pretty new. Headphones had always been big bulky cans strapped to your ears, and never, ever seen on somebody walking around in public. Media like TV movies and such made a big deal out of the implied air-headedness and self-absorption of the new "headphone generation". (Watch the classic "Square Pegs" for a perfect example in a major supporting role. Totally different head. Like, totally.)
I don't think that's really true. Plenty of headphones before the Walkman were small. Most radio headphones that came with AM radios were just earbuds that you'd put in. Plus crystal radio earpieces were the same. So I think it really was being able to listen to music anywhere, with ease, with no ads, and without having to hope the radio was playing something you liked that was the attraction.
@@gregmark1688 Hilarious that at one time some people found it unacceptable and rude to mind your own business 😂 Nowadays, I’m the guy with wireless noise-cancelling ear buds everywhere in public when alone, and I appreciate others doing the same because they’re not yelling at service workers or bothering anyone. We’re just minding our own business, and trying to block out the world.
So that CD, has *quite* the eclectic selection of music. This is like, 75% fact checked, maybe 85%. *The Color Red* was an alt-rock post-grunge outfit from southern California. And whilst their March of 2000 release *_Below The Under_* is featured here with tracks "Greatest Hits" and "Smile", it seems their next release *_Clear_* from 2002 fared a bit better. By that time the band found a bit more direction. That being said "Greatest Hits" has an almost math rock vibe to it, but also goes a little *too* hard. *Hyphen* had to, at some point change their name. Now going by *The Kite Eating Tree* their debut album by that name was called *_Method: Fail, Repeat..._* came out in 2003 and by all accounts was a decent punk/indie title. Very reminiscent of the blossoming Emo scene. Had it come out earlier it might have even made a few more waves. Genuinely the track "Softer Seems The Pavement" is something that might enter my rotation. *Stunt Monkey* claimed to be a Horror Punk/Themed Punk band, and rather middle of the road at that. I am absolutely sure this is a band that did not take themselves too seriously at all. They give off the vibe that *The Butthole Surfers* listened to *They Might Be Giants* and a new band was formed. And with 4 albums over 5 years, they definitely had a run at it. *Kenochamp* was ANOTHER punk/pop band, they seemingly only managed two releases. A self-titled EP and then their debut album *_For Rent_* which contained the track "It Often Has A Meaning I Sometimes Forget" on it, which is by far and large their most popular track. Interestingly they got picked up by SPIN Records, but that went nowhere. They are hard to track down. *Sloth* was a fairly run of the mill alt metal/heavy rock band from the turn of the millennium. Whilst finding a recording of their self-released album *_Acedia_* is not terribly easy, luckily they reworked most of those tracks for their big label debut in 2003, *_Dead Generation_*. With a sound clearly influenced by bands like Tool, or Godsmack, the album isn't a BAD listen. That being said, I am getting the vibe this is secretly a Christian Metal band. *AcidNine* ( abbreviated as A9 on the album cover ) is not a band I can actually track down songs for. Their 2001 release *_Mess With The Bull_* is available on discogs and was even sold earlier this year. So I can't comment on HOW they sound. Only that they got a single release in 2001. That being said, this album was *also* released on SPIN Records, curious. FINALLY we land at *Bluebottle Kiss*, the reason I looked up the rest of these acts. I actually know about this band! They're an Australian indie grunge band formed in the early 90s. By the time they were included on this compilation they were already on their third album *_Patient_*, their sound had tightened up some. I suspect this band was picked up in hopes of repeating Silverchair's meteoric success, though I doubt it worked too well. A few albums later ( including a double CD release to tie it up ) and the band folded _until earlier this year_ when they got back together to re-master old albums, re-release old out of print EPs, and played a handful of shows in October of *this very year*!
oh man honestly I'm getting pretty big Christian metal vibes from that paragraph alone. Naming your band and album after the Seven Deadly Sins? the "Dead Generation", as in spiritually dead, which was a common phrase for "nonbelievers" at the time...yeah, I give it like a 10% chance of *not* being a Christian band.
@@modulusshift Oh I am convinced a fair few of these bands are Christian rock, or adjacent for sure. The most fun one was Hyphen which became The Kite Eating Tree. The producer for their album later went on to produce Finch’s poorly received sophomore release and their self titled EP before the band went on a lengthy hiatus!
My parents are both pretty big deadheads and my dad has worked for the FAA as a programmer (for like... radar software or something, idk) since the 80s, I remember back in 1999-2000 when napster was huge he had access to cd burners (and bandwidth) at his job and was just going nuts with that. Early adopter/right place right time.
I thought the idea of having a dc jack for the soulmate was weird, but having seen the teardown I now understand it. You would want to leave it on wall power so you don't lose its content away from the dock. Those capacitors, if they do exist to keep the memory alive, probably exist to keep the memory alive when switching between power sources: battery, barrel plug, and docking station. Doing so likely involves a short dead period between supplies.
@@RobertHarrisonBlake that would be awkward, as... well: you can leave the thing in the car, because the batteries acting as ram backup would drain. Using it both in the car and to go mean constant pluging and unpluging - and still having to regularly feed batteries and reload songs.
To automatically switch between supplies you'd typically put a Schotty diode in series with each positive voltage rail. The rest of the circuit will pull current from whichever supply has a higher voltage. Downside is a 0.3V drop on each supply. There are alternate circuits that don't have this behavior (e.g. using a P-channel MOSFET in place of one of the diodes) but they bring their own set of issues (e.g. backfeeding the battery).
I worked for a while for Dig Media (pronounced Dig as in "I dig it", not Dig as in "Didgeredoo"), a bit later. I was working on a later product called SoundCast, that was intended to be a HiFi component web radio player, that would display on a colour LCD information on the "station", track, artist info etc. I developed a custom markup language (SCML) that could respond to media events (eg. the start of a new track) and update the display accordingly - at worst simply display the track info, at best show custom graphics authored by the person writing the web "station". Of course, it suffered the broadband problem - broadband simply wasn't common enough for this to be a realistic product. The only people likely to have broadband were students on campus, who quite likely didn't have the budget to spend on it. It was probably the most fun I had on a development project though. I was given a musicstore and soulmate when I started, but to be honest found it so unusable it pretty well sat on a shelf.
Maybe the SuperCaps only supply enough charge to keep the SD-RAM fresh *while the player is off* - LCD and playback surely drains them in milliseconds. (Love your videos btw. Cheers!)
In a well-designed circuit the supercap should only power RAM, not entire board. Though supercaps of the era (and well into 2010s) were losing 20% of their rated capacity in a whopping 1000h at 40°C (yes, that's less than month and a half), thus losing ~85% of capacity a year (at 40°C, with each 10° less doubling and each 10° more halving that). Two 2.2F supercaps is roughly 3.5mAh when new, and that could theoretically hold three of these RAM chips in low power self-refresh mode for 1.5 hours. But it's 15 minutes after one year, 2 minutes after two years, and 12 seconds after 3 years (at 40°C, assuming the same degradation rate). So claims that "supercap retains memory contents for time required to change batteries" are only valid in warranty period. That matches my personal experience with Palm m10x quite well.
Your average music listener back then bought an album for 1 or 2 songs. Those early MP3 players only holding a handful of songs wasn't a that huge issue as that was essentially "a dozen CDs" to that type of average person who only listens to the hits.
The MIX option in the record menu isn't so out of place to me. Back in the day, people would record 'mix tapes', a collection of their favourite tracks to share with a friend... so the record metaphor wouldn't have been so alien at the time.
Yeah, you'd often also have mix tapes for specific settings or moods too, much like you'd have a playlist. They were definitely the precursor of playlists so using the terminology and the association with recording I think made sense.
@@Khorne_of_the_Hill the USB port it's version one USB, but at the time that was it, or nothing, but PC software some much potential missed it looks like proof of concept, or something, feasibility of the idea or to verify that the idea will function as envisioned , and it was just left as that? on polisher version ever released
Ah, yes, I remember the Rio MP3 players. I bought my wife a Rio Sport MP3 player in the early 2000s when the tape player in our car stopped working. The car was already more than 10 years old, and we'd been looking at replacing it, so the Rio Sport with one of those interfaces that looks kind of like a cassette tape (which didn't work because it turned out there was more wrong with the tape player than a loose capstan belt) or a short-range FM transmitter interface (which did work, sort of) made more sense for tiding her over until we got a new car than replacing the radio did. In the end, the Rio Sport proved too fiddly for her, and she just took a battery-powered tape player with her in the car, but I used the Rio Sport to listen to podcasts when working in the kitchen. Pretty much everything you said about the Rio that you showed also applied to the Rio Sport, except that the Rio Sport had a USB interface for the computer. The problem was that it only had 8MB of built-in flash storage, so it couldn't hold a lot of podcasts (or songs). It had an SD card slot that could accept up to a 128MB SD card, but those were relatively expensive at the time, and I never did use the thing enough to justify buying one. Getting content on to the player was way too complicated. Like the Rio you showed, you had to use the proprietary software that came with the Rio Sport in order to put content on it, and while that software was easy enough to use, it was clunky and would often crash, necessitating a Windows reboot to get it to work again. The Rio Sport was also pretty much locked into the Windows XP world. When our XP computer died in 2011, I was able to continue to use the Rio Sport for awhile via Windows 7's XP Mode, but this took a process that was even more flaky and time-consuming than running the Rio software in native Windows XP. Eventually, I replaced our junky kitchen boom box with a nice Bluetooth radio that I could feed from my phone or laptop, which rendered the Rio Sport obsolete. But I got a good 13 years of use out of that Rio Sport. For all its shortcomings, I could've done a lot worse back then for $50.
Man, I loved T9. Even the annoyances where common words had the same pattern and everyone sent the wrong one half the time. Seeing “fox” briefly for “down” brought back a lot of nostalgia.
Everyone I knew used the T9, but I never got the hang of it or didn't have the patience for it, so I settled for hitting the numbers repeatedly, and I never really had a problem sending texts. I am sure if I had more to say in the moment, then it would have been worthwhile to learn, but most of my replies were short or I just chose to talk on the phone instead. I remember my brother trying to teach me how to use it, but I was having no part of it. I know that a large part of learning how to do it would help with texting while driving as it was potentially faster to use T9 for that task, but If I had to text, I would just pull the car over. No reason to get into an accident because of it.
@@russelllukenbill yeah I nearly always disabled it because the dictionary struggled with a lot of local words. But it was still semi common until the smartphones dominated the market making it largely redundant, that said I'm sure there's still phones that use it being used because some don't adapt and others prefer not to use smartphones with their perceived issues real or not (privacy I will give them some of the others are more personal biases).
@@cericat That about sums it up. I have noticed in the last few days RU-vid has also added predictive text. This may have been on here a while and I have finally been updated, or it was a feature I turned on by accident, but I am going to try and remove it as well. It is not nearly as bad though because I can just ignore the suggestions. Cheers.
It recording at 1:1 makes me wonder if the "secure MP3" was actually their way of describing "direct audio recording into our own proprietary format that's kinda based on MP3"
But there is a label from the Frauenhofer institute on the box, MP3 is a licensed format after all. So if they did their own secret sauce codec why pay for the expensive license
Hi, long time fan but just wanted to let you know that your personality is very friendly and energetic that makes these videos a breeze to view. Thank you for making these videos
Reading the Manual and going through all of the grief was really educational and nice of you so as to create this Video . I feel now I could get more use out of one of these if I found one . Thank you for this creation and MP3 0n ! :) QC
MAN I love this channel. I suspect we're roughly the same age (late 30s - early 40s) and got into computers at the same time. I've been around them all my life but didn't start building them until 1997 or 98, so all of this formerly cutting edge stuff is giving me a huge nostalgia buzz. Great stuff!
Wow that's a blast from the past. I had a soul mate mp3 player back in the day. 48mb of solid state storage in your pocket. Enough for two albums if you didn't care about quality. The cool kids had mini disc players.
A great potential add-on for these types of videos would be to have some interviews with people who actually used this thing. It would be cool to hear that experience
I remember owning a soulmate stand alone, my first MP3. I also remember the volatile memory. I remember moding the battery holder to trickle the nicads I used and leaving it on a wall wart all the time when not in use to hold the memory. Supercaps were available at the time and were used in VCRs to back up the clock. I remember changing them. They could not output much current though compared to what we use today. I remember being glad when I got a more modern stick MP3 128mb with proper flash memory and better buttons. Thanks for the video, Daz
The “SP”, “LP” AND “ELP” nomenclature would have been very recognisable to the average consumer back in the day. My VCR had the same settings/options and some blank VHS tapes used to write the same on their packaging (to indicate they were compatible and worked well at the slower speeds).
This is a fascinating product that I would never had wanted to use. It seems like there's literally no advantage to it over the MiniDisc recorder I had in the mid-90s, even down to the labeling and handling of tracks.
when you said the device loses tracks when you unpower it I started smiled lmao. Also fancy fining an fpga in such a chaep products in the early 2000, probably necessary to encode their propetary usb maybe?
There's a chip I didn't mention that appears to be a USB interface, but it's true that I don't know how much intelligence it has, and the FPGA might be necessary to handle most of the conversation
Lol, the intro with the Rio is EXACTLY what I did in High School in 2001. I had some type of Rio variant at the time and it was still so new kids at school would ask me what it was, and I would proudly explain. But YUP, I would swap out the songs to the 64MB memory about once every week or two to listen to some new jams. It sure as hell beat carrying around CDs and having them skip, worth it.
9:40 in the late 90s and early 2000s there was a ton of MP3 tech aimed to the home user, from standalone DVD players to boomboxes and decks you could connect to your home theater.
There is actually somewhat of a T9 implementation nowadays when you open the dialer in your smartphone on the numpad, you can type the name of a contact "T9" style and it will show you the closest matches to dial numbers of contacts quickly!
@52:10 everyone at the time before Apple pay carried coins which were minted in various demolitions representing fractions of a dollar called cents. One coin in particular called a quarter dollar would fit in that slot allowing you to easily unscrew the screw to gain access to the battery compartment. Fantastic video. I was worried you would throw the device out the window.
love your channel dude. Just subscribed. My brother was a big nerd in the 90s and 2000s. He got my parents to buy all of us rio players it was awesome for a while. I do recall going back to CD players for that little period between the Rios creation and the first I Pod. Especially since my brother introduced me to News bin groups back then and I downloaded MASSIVE amounts of music lol. I actually just found all our old Rios and I pods the other day while helping my parents move. It's pretty awesome.
Mini disc was still around at this time and even a fairly basic mini disc recorder would beat this in just about every way. You still had to record from a source at 1x, name songs yourself, but you got better quality compression, more storage capacity, and longer battery life. Still, an interesting device. I would have had fun with it back in the day.
Around y2k, there were several options for portable music. I think this is aimed at that market, not having your music collection available at home. Although the manufacturer said “we may as well make the music playable.” We had cd changers that held dozens of cds by then. I still have my Sony carousel style changer. You had a directory that told you which cd was in slot 24 or 47 and so forth. You even had a binder where you kept the cd liners. There was a big decision to be made about playing music in your car. CDs still skipped and it was a pain to carry them in your car. Minidisc hardly ever skipped and were durable like cassettes. So I chose that option. But making minidisc copies was similar to this device. It sucked. It was weird that an obvious choice of technology wasn’t there until mp3 cd capable radios showed up in cars. But that technology was obsolete when iPods came out and aux ports were standard.
I stayed with Tape for a LONG time, I listened to music on motorcycle rides and I rode a Lot, both for fun and work. Using MP3 was so amazing, but yes it was not seamless, I frequently got roped into making music libraries for family members.
A very comprehensive video, very detailed and I found it very easy to follow. I remember using MusicMatch Jukebox back in 2000, wait for it, to digitise my cassettes. That was an interesting project, I wanted to digitise some tapes and copy them to CDs on my family's new PC. It took a bit of trial and error, but I did it. Regarding the DigMedia products, pretty much everything you said agrees with the review of the product I read back in 2002. I do have a few questions. Is the operating software on the MusicStore stored in ROM or on the hard drive? If it's in ROM, you could theoretically replace the hard drive should it fail. If it's on the hard drive, well, then you're probably going to have a very rough time. Also, can the MusicStore play MP3 CDs? You didn't mention MP3 CDs at all during the introduction.
I don’t think it can play MP3 CDs because it doesn’t use the data bus to extract the data which would be needed for MP3 CDs, but only uses the IDE bus to control the drive, audio is read via the SPDIF out.
I will note that the "Download to MusicStore" window in MusicMatch Jukebox seems to have "Reformat" and "Refresh" buttons. I'm assuming CRD here at least tried to hit "Refresh" as that would be the button I assume would read all the tracks off the disk, and he certainly complained enough about the lack of such a feature, but "Reformat" sure seems like it would set up a new hard disk for you if you needed it, or clean out one that happened to get borked for whatever reason. Who knows if that actually is just a reformat aka zero out or if it loaded up some firmware as well...but I'm gonna guess it's a zero out and the firmware is entirely in ROM. Just educated guess based on how snappy and basic the interface is, like it was coded to a strict ROM size limit. Alternatively, maybe "reformat" does zero it out, and "refresh" actually reloads the firmware? Sorry for not having more than guesses here haha
I was in what was probably close to the target audience for that device back in the year 2000 and I could see someone buying it for their teenager that had a modest music library but also didn't have a computer or broadband internet at the time. At one point in 1998 I had a pretty massive audio collection of close to 1000 CDs but I also had a computer and in the summer of 99 got my first cable internet connection (1.5 mbit down/ 128 kb up!) so I ended up ripping a lot of CDs to my computer and selling almost all of my collection in the early 2000s while CDs were still quite popular. Anyway, given the history of the device and the companies involved with it during that time period what probably happened to DigMedia is they got funded as part of the dotcom boom on the late 90s (after the 1st company went bust) because of the potential some venture capitalist saw in the device (and anything tech or internet related practically had money thrown at it then!) and were an early victim of the dotcom bust of the year 2000-01. I bet they only existed long enough to get all of the packaging done, do some marketing at a few trade shows. send kit out to a few magazines and convince one or two retailers to carry it just long enough to get it on the shelves for a couple of months. I'm guessing the VC investors REALLY liked the whole "RIAA proof-ness" of the device and threw money at DigMedia after the RIAA got bent out of shape at Diamond. Things were happening REALLY fast in the tech world at that time and there were a number of blink and you'll miss them companies that no-one ever heard from again.
9:29 when Musicmatch came out it simplified the process of ripping music from CDs. It came bundled with iPods but had been around for a bit before that. I can't remember if Winamp or one of the Real Player softwares already could rip CDs but Musicmatch was faster BY A LOT, it could rip a CD in two minutes or so while AudioGrabber, JRiver and others would take at least double the time. Musicmatch displaced them when they added FreeDB so it would add all of the info automatically for every MP3.
I thought the Kenwood 100-disc CD changer my dad bought around 1996 was bad. You could at least hook up a PS/2 keyboard to it, although if you typed any faster than about 1 character per second, it wouldn't register. I think I managed to type in about three disc's worth of album info before I said "screw it."
Static ram is actually usually faster than DRAM of the same era. Partially because you don't have refresh cycles using up time you could be accessing the memory, but also just because of the nature of doing a read from them. For example back when CPU caches were external one of the the ways that the cache was different from the main RAM was that it was very expensive fast SRAM. This is still true, caches inside CPUs are generally SRAM and even the registers within the CPU work basically the same way SRAM does. Modern PC DRAM can also self refresh. Another fun fact the original IBM PC didn't use a dedicated memory controller to refresh its DRAM, it had an interrupt on a timer that used the CPU to do a read/write.
52:55 I suspect a DC port is for car use mainly, whereby you can simply plug it into the cigarette outlet, a lot of devices had these adapters. (gamegear is my experience with that. And no I'm not old enough to have had a game gear, I had one when the GBA was out haha.)
I was designing embedded electronic products from the 1980s through the late 1990s. Self-refresh DRAM was actually common for embedded products. It was available at higher densities and lower cost than static ram, and flash was slow, difficult to use (block erase/write) and crazy expensive into the early 2000s.
one of the first mp3 players i got had 40gb hdd and so chunky it slightly bigger than Walkman. But looking back it was ahead of its time in early 2000s.
I owned a Rio in the late 90's and it was extremely practical. The device was intended for use on the go, and as impractical as loading up music through parallel may have been, CD-R's weren't REALLY an option, and the Rio made keeping a LOT of my favorite music at my fingertips a reality. Add to that the lifespan a AA battery had on the thing, and you have a really useful device. I remember showing it off in Middle school, and kids were interested then. Also, you mention swapping out CD's which is valid, but consider that when you brought a portable CD player along with you, that to swap music, you'd have to bring the CD's too. If you only REALLY like 2-3 songs on those CD's, you'd technically bring a Walkman that ate batteries, and a 6 disc CD travel case to get the same enjoyment out of what you could curate on the Rio. It was really a comparable experience, but with better battery life, and it was easier to curate a custom mix than other options available. I graduated to a Nomad MuVo a few years later, and never really looked back. Some insight into the mind of someone who actually used the device when it was sold. Still have it somewhere in the box. Never did get the expandable flash storage for the reasons you mentioned, but it didn't stop me from using it. And I MAY be mistaken, but I was a prude for 360kb/sec music, and I think I remember being able to listen to it on the Rio. That may be false memory though, I'd have to dig it out.
I had a 128 gb MuVo and loved it. I worked as a freelance legal document preparer and it also doubled as my flash drive for documents I was working on.
For a device built so cheaply, it sure is incredibly modular, and all parts seem to be off the shelf! There are very little, if any, custom parts. You could very likely, for example, take out that disc drive and use it on any computer, as well as repurposing that display, which is a very standard 20x4 programmable character display! You would expect this kind of device to be extremely integrated into a couple of proprietary chips, but it isn't. That's actually impressive.
The cheap way to add cd to your car was to plug a CD drive into the cigarette lighter and the audio output into a tapedeck adapter. Boom CD in the car!
I'm not one-hundred percent certain, but I believe that SP, LP, and ELP are related to the jargon of record quality related to tape-based media. I remember having a VCR that had the same options for recording to a blank VHS. If I remember correctly, they meant Standard Play, Long Play, and Extra Long Play. As counter intuitive as it seems, Standard Play is the best quality, thus taking up the most physical space on the tape, Long Play is the Middle ground which isn't as good a quality, but allows you to record slightly more data before running out of tape, and Extra Long Play is the worst quality but the largest amount of recordable data. I have no idea why they would use this jargon for digital data, other than perhaps the fact that people at the time would have been familiar with it. Again though, I could be wrong.
As someone that has multiple TBs of music this thing is my nightmare. To be fair 95% of my music is now lossless and a good portion of it is high resolution. Thank goodness for Foobar2K and it's many plugins to make music organizing and playback effortlessly once you get everything setup properly. Nice shout out to EAC! About 1:15:40 seconds in you made a small error though in the audio signal chain! The audio signal isn't relayed to the speakers it needs to go through amplification even if it's those mediocre Logitech computer speakers from way back then since they had built in amplification.
Oh yeah, I was just saying that there's no *processing* going on in the PC. The soundcard might touch the audio in some way, but probably entirely in the analog domain.
@@CathodeRayDude Gotcha! My bad! One *very* minor thing I like about it is how it just uses dance as a broad style instead of trying to use the popular terminology at the time (electronica, "techno"). I don't even like the contemporary EDM because disco which is the grandfather of all contemporary dance music can be totally non electronic one hundred percent. And considering disco is coming back quite a bit it seems short sighted. Call it dance or dance music folks not EDM! Pedantry is important for music!
On another note, as an electronics enthusiast I do wonder how challenging it would be to upgrade the hard drive in this thing with something(a lot) bigger than 5gb. Cheap as it is, having a library of 300gb worth of MP3s would still be pretty slick.
It really depends on how it was setup to work with the drive, if it was specifically targeted at that model of Travelstar you probably couldn't upgrade it much if at all. The joys of physical addressing.
I actually had the standalone Soulmate MP3 player back in the day (around 1999 if memory serves) before upgrading to a Rio PMP-500. I don't remember ever having an issue with the device losing its' contents when changing the batteries, so my guess is that those capacitors you mentioned have failed over time. My Soulmate player came with the parallel port adapter, and it took _forever_ to transfer music over from my PC.
Oh man that brings me back. I think my first MP3 player. I think it could hold about 35 songs. I remember mornings, running late, desperately trying to sync new music to it from Windows Media Player so I could have something fresh to listen to on my way to school LOL. It really was just simpler and faster to grab a CD from my case and stick it in my discman! Most of my music back then wasn't downloaded, it was ripped from CDs. Because yes I tried out Napster, but it was a pain in the ass downloading music over dial-up. So I'd go out, buy a new CD, bring it home, spend like half an hour ripping it to my hard drive, and then another half hour syncing it to my MP3 player, really not ideal. But I was a geek and MP3s were cool new tech so I put up with it!
Recording a mix makes sense in the context of audio tapes, which would probably be the only way the people this was targeted at had ever made mixes before. The battery pack in the portable player was probably designed to have been a rechargeable pack, or at least the option for one, but got cost-cutted out. Still, I think a wall power option of some sort would've been handy for times where you're not at home but needed more playtime than the batteries, like in a car or waiting between classes in a student union. Especially given you lose all your music if the batts run out. The super caps have likely died, at least given there's a massive problem with original X-Boxes (that are a few years newer than this) have a huge problem of the super cap it uses to save the clock time leaking on the motherboard and damaging it.
Here's a bit of completely pointless and highly specific trivia: If the picture of the blonde lady at 1:37 seems at all familiar, that's because you may have seen it before. Almost the exact same photo graces the cover of the O'Reilly software design book Head First Design Patterns.
Yes, I noticed that, too. It almost looks to be the very same picture, although on the book, her right arm isn't in the air. Maybe both photos were taken within seconds.
Just wanted to mention that in my country, the iPod was mostly irrelevant because it was SO expensive. Most people had all kinds of Chinese made USB sticks with embedded MP3 players.
I always felt the iPod was overpriced and overrated, and as an old-school Winamp user couldn’t stand iTunes. I had several different portable mp3 playback devices over the years, and the two I look back on most fondly are the 128 gb Creative MuVo and the 256 gb iRiver. The MuVo doubled as a flash drive which I used for work, and the iRiver doubled as an audio recorder and also had an FM radio which it was capable of making good quality recordings from. An iPod couldn’t do any of those things.
Awesome! As always. I hope someday you do some "CD ripping extravaganza", if you didn't already, with different approaches and devices from that era. Jeez, I'm having nowadays problems for ripping digitally my audio CDs and making backups because everything is "too fast" or not totally compatible. The ASPI drivers, software used to rip, the O.S. version... I'm using up to date software and, however, a combination of Audiograbber and LAME works better, faster and with less errors. But I need to investigate other modern options different from the ones I'm using.
Creative's Nomad jukebox released in September of 2000, so depending on the Musicstore's date of release, the "predeccesor" to the iPod could've been around.
I find the electronics design quite elegant given the obvious guidelines they had (No piracy!) and the way the general population was handling music at the time. They did the best they could with components available off the shelves. Had they nailed the UX/UI and hired a competent industrial designer, it could have been a smash hit. But I guess they were pressured to release as early as possible given the insanely fast moving market & the huge shift brought by the Internet. Remember, copying a CD to Compact Cassette was also a 1x operation and it was a very popular activity. Only us nerds didn't have that kind of patience with digital formats since we knew it was only a matter wrangling bits, something computers were already doing at insane speeds!
The late 90s such fun times, had a broken screened 486sx laptop hooked up to my stereo and TV via composite output to play my mp3s and midi files with winamp and use the visual plugins could rip my cds at 16x speed with my mates dad's 16x pcmcia cd rom drive he would also bring cds full of Mp3s and early video at like 160 x 120 12fps fun times, from memory it had an 500mb hard drive windows 95 and 8mb ram
I'm not sure whether to be proud or ashamed to admit this...but during the heights of the winamp craze, I was a musicmatch fan and that was my MP3 player of choice. This was prior to their purchase by (I think it was Dell?) a computer company and all the extra bloat was added and I continued to use an outdated version of musicmatch for years afterwards. I moved over to XBMC from there. Funnily enough, Musicmatch is where I first got into music streaming before it was even a thing and I paid a small amount each month and was quite happy with it. I think it would be a decade before streaming would even take off in the mainstream but they were doing it LONG before a lot of other players today were.
Record makes total sense if you were used to a boombox with CD and tape deck: you record from CD to tape. Similarly, if you want to make a "mix (tape)" you would also need to record, you'd just do a track at a time. (And you'd always have to start the search for your next CD with a track to include in the mix tape) It's very much trying to be a super tape deck except with internal storage... The 1x ripping has me horrified that it's possibly doing analog ripping...
Oh that soulmate "storage" solution. Oh, they had that in some early Photo Cameras too... and boy it only took one bad battery or forgetting to unload it and they were gone.
I think having the "mix" in the record menu kinda makes sense. I mean, how did you make a mix before things like this existed? You recorded a mix tape.
For me, it was quite the opposite experience for music in the late 90s/early Y2Ks. I couldn't afford my own CDs as a child and my parent was squarely in the CD space so we had no home tape deck. I was really left with whatever CDs they (mother and the relatives) liked and sometimes getting one for myself. I had maybe four or five of my own and I could choose one of theirs if I liked it. I also had my own user on the family computer and when we got a new computer I got the old one (it was Windows 98). So ofc I downloaded tons of MP3s from all over the web. But we didn't yet have a CD burner (my uncle did for his business but it was Firewire) So for my 11th birthday I wanted some cheap MP3 player with an SD slot on it and that is what I got. This was 2003-ish and the MP3 player I got had 64mb of memory and had a screen; I didn't get an SD card for it until later. I also only took a single AA as opposed to my old CD player that took four. Yeah the iPod was out but the cheapest option was the shuffle and I really wanted a screen and expandable storage so that was out of the question. So the way I listened to my music was a bit jumbled due to just downloading it and not having the original album order. ( I downloaded what sounded cool to me) So it was more like a digital mix tape than ordered albums. When I got multiple SD cards I kinda treated them like mix tapes. Even 128mb can only get you so far with music back then, it is a reason WMA was popular at all, smaller size and sounded almost the same as a similar encoded MP3. When stuff could play WMAs back then it mattered, Lol. I hated T9 and I just texted normally, I can see how T9 would come in handy for songs though. I never used MusicMatch, I just drag and drop and I had to do all the MP3 tags myself. I still listen to music that way, playlists of my own personal curation. For my 13th birthday I received a brand new first generation iPod Nano, 4Gb. I still bought more non Apple MP3 players later on in HS. The SanDisk Sansa e250 will always be my favorite, with the 'new at the time' RockBox firmware it was pretty killer. I still use it in the car to this day. Lol the SoulMate uses RAM. This was a bit common back then due to flash "ROM" being so expensive. It is what old PDAs used as storage. Yes that super cap is meant to change batteries fast and not lose everything. PDAs did the same thing and many of those caps are also dead on the old stuff.
I bought and still have an Archos Jukebox Recorder 10, an MP3 recorder player with a 10Gb hard drive. I used it for live recording at folk music clubs using a small mixer and 3 mics, and for MP3 recording vinyl records. It was good at both. I'd then use a computer to edit and slice albums into tracks. I could output burned CDs from the computer. Archos discontinued it in 2003 and never produced Win 10 drivers or software.
now your mobile phone is your personal media player, video player, music library (connected to iTunes or whatever) and surprise, it still makes phone calls.
Interesting product indeed, it could have been great but... eh. Just imagine, someone likely did record all their CDs onto this thing.... Super caps have been around a surprisingly long time, I found some in a Yamaha equalizer from the 1980s (specifically a Yamaha EQ-1100; the super caps would keep the micro controller alive after power was cut). SPDIF can actually send track change flags. I've seen it used to mark new tracks on DAT and MiniDisc when recording from a CD players digital out, so this thing *might* only be using the IDE for control purposes.
I had an original Creative Nomad MuVo. I believe I had the 128mb version. Best little player. It was basically a USB thumb drive with a harness that gave you a battery to power it (Jack and audio controls were on the USB drive portion). This little thing blew minds back in 2004ish when I used it in college to save my C++ Programs and hand them in to the teacher. I had to explain how it worked to the teacher who had never seen them before. Even then we were required to have ZIP Disks to save our programs, and at this point ZIP Disks were well obsolete and disks were expensive as hell. I kinda sorta started the revolution of USB drives at my school, as they were cheaper than ZIP disks and way more convenient since you didn't need a special drive. I love the non-ipod mp3 players, lots of neat stuff.
I had one of those between 2004-2006. I loved it. I was doing freelance legal document preparation and used it to keep all the doc files I was actively working on and pdf files of relevant minute entries and images of other documents as well as enough music to listen to on my commute.
1:10 - I think your first assumption of them being cells would be correct as whilst supercaps have been available for quite a while they would have been not only cost prohibitive back in 2000, but that form factor would not have been possible at that time.
I remember seeing a version of this in the Skymall Catalog during a flight in December 2001. Branded under Sharper image if I remember correctly with the finish being black.
One possible use-case could be parents (or an institution) creating an approved MP3 repository for their kids-- whoever's managing it gets/buys/approves of CDs that get added and kids each have a soulmate so they can have a (heavily controlled) MP3 player that only works with a set local library. A literal library (maybe a private school?)_could use this to loan out audio! The idea of a single user with a single Soulmate somehow seems unlikely to me, especially since the soulmates were sometimes sold separately.
I had a soulmate as a standalone product.... I bought it second hand from a CEX store here in the UK. It was my main mp3 player for about 6 months back in the day. Don't really remember much else about it except that I think I still have it in a storage unit somewhere.......
Regarding the super capacitor. In the mid 90ies I had a Philips Walkman which also had a gold cap with 0.47F built in iirc. It was to backup the clock during changing the weired rectangular NiCd batteries.
Back then, Flash memory was expensive, very slow and can’t be rewritten too often before it fails. S-RAM was the first kind of solid state memory and is basically a bunch of Flip-Flops using at least 2 transistors each - one for the ones, one for the zeros. D-RAM is made out of one single transistor per bit which has an artificially inflated electric capacity. To keep the state, you can either write it or read it. This is much cheaper and you can put in a lot more bits per chip surface area. So you get at least 10 times more data capacity for your money! The refresh isn’t that hard. Internally, the chips are organized in sectors. The MSB (Most significant bits) determine the sector and the LSB (least significant bits) determine the position in this sector. If you address a sector of the D-RAM, you refresh the entire sector. So you don’t have to refresh that many times until you have fully refreshed the entire chip. Inside the Commodore 64, the video chip needs to read the RAM in order to draw the screen. The positive parts of the clock cycles belong to the CPU, the negative ones to the video chip. So by drawing the screen, the video chip constantly refreshes the entire RAM even if it is just reading a small part of the RAM containing the screen data. This is why they originally went with eight individual 1-bit D-RAM chips. Read a byte anywhere and you have refreshed the entire memory. The entire RAM chip is a single sector. Each chip is a single bit out of a byte. There were many PDA devices which had a super capacitor built in. The first so called “Goldcaps” came up in the mid 1980s. It was not uncommon to store the data of your digital calendar and address book in RAM. The Goldcap did a good job of giving you enough time to swap the batteries. Usually around 3 minutes! But you had to switch off the device or it would deplete the capacitor almost instantly. In the demonstration, the Soulmate was still powered on so the capacitors were drained almost instantly! * * * Reading an audio CD was really hard for a computer, this is the reason why it was done analogue back in the days. The sector size of an Audio CD was larger than the size the IDE controller could handle. So you had to read a part of a sector instead of a whole sector. Then you had to tell the drive to get back to this sector so it had to skip back. And then the computer had to grab the next part of the sector. But there always was an error in the position. To make sure to grab everything correctly, you had to split the chunks of data even smaller and overlap. Then a software could detect the overlap and reassemble the sector. So reading an audio CD using the IDE interface was a lot slower than just playing it, even if you had a fast drive. It took a while until a PC was fast enough and the new ATA standard (now known as PATA) was introduced. CD Audio uses 2,352 bytes per sector, a FDD/HDD is organized in 512 Bytes. A data CD is the same but divides a sector into 98 Frames so the PC can manage reading the data just fine. Back in the early 1990s, it was really hard to make a 1:1 copy of an audio CD using a CD burner. Even after managing to extract the WAV and storing it somewhere, you had a high failure rate burning the CD due to the massive sector size. On the fly, using a CD-ROM and a burner drive was not possible and in the early 1990s, a 500MB HDD was considered “huge”. So just playing the CD and let the drive do the error correction is much easier and less prone to errors. A lot of CD to MP3 devices back in the days even did it analogue, even in the early 2000s!
