Diamond Rio PMP300 - The 1998 MP3 Player Experience 

I think we got our channels switched this week…

Dankpods talks about calculators and LGR talks about an MP3 nugget all in the same week. Fun times all around.

That "magical" feeling from ripping CDs was legit. I remember the first CD I ripped was The Slim Shady LP and it was freaking mind blogging that I was listening to the songs while the CD was sitting next to me in the case.

Ahhh, love hearing the 1990s RIAA story being retold. The RIAA were just insane with their lack of vision and desire to control.

dankpods makes an extremely LGR video, LGR makes an extremely dankpods video. the world is in balance

You gotta love when the stars and time align, LGR makes a DankPods video with the Diamond Rio, and DankPods makes a LGR video with the calculators.

Thank you for capturing the nostalgia of this time. I spent so many hours ripping cds and trying to organize digital music files. I remember leaving downloads going all night on a P2P program, then waking up in the morning to see what actually downloaded. Thank you for putting this together.

When mp3s first came out I remember just being blown away by it. We went from huge wav files to mp3s seemingly overnight. Game changer!!

My dad was one of the Lead Software Engineers that worked this player. We had drawers full of these all over our house when I was in highschool. My dad would let us play test them. I remember my teachers being blown away when I showed them this. If I remember correctly he has several patents in his name pertaining to his work on this. It's crazy to see these showing up on a YT video so many years later.

The whole RIAA thing they posed against the Rio is how they kept the Philips DCC (digital compact cassette) from becoming commercially viable. They kept Philips wrapped up in legislative road blocks and it was released in like 1992, having been ready for prime time in 1989. At that point is was a technological curiosity at best.

That alliteration of the Rio’s size relative to it’s cost. Precise practical perfection!

"Of course, that's all history for the history books." And I appreciate your time and effort into gathering it, Clint. Always nice to know how the device came to be and how it's affected the future.

Dankpods does a calculator then Clint does a mp3 player

Gotta love the packaging - it couldn't look more late 90's if it tried 😂

I'm so jealous Clint gets to relive days through new-old-stock, but then again I can't think of a person or RU-vid channel more deserving of it.

Yep, I bought one of these on release back in the day. It was pretty amazing at the time, you could actually play back entire CDs on this thing! You have to understand, we were in an age where CD walkmans were pretty new. But THEN.... CD walkmans that could read MP3s came out...

My 1990s mp3 experience: will this be the song I wanted, that clip of bill clinton apologizing, or "developers developers developers!"

9:17 Was waiting eagerly for that line.

tbh I remember embracing mp3 in 2001 and it was a huge step-up. Up until that time, the music was either on radio or cassette tapes. what's interesting, I remember there were legit online sources of mp3s, even freeware, mostly independent hip-hop, punk and techno - it was a gateway to many different stuff I was introduced to as a young kid.

Outstanding video - I remember buying it when it launched....and it replaced my giant CD player that took 6 AA batteries - this was magical...I was stuck with about 6-8 MP3 songs I could play over and over but it was worth it! Also, every kid in high school was like "dude...how is there music coming out of there with no CD? What is an Mp3?". It wasn't until 2000 when everyone realized what an MP3 file was! I still had my original Rip PMP that I fired up back in 2015: it had tracks from the early 2000s era! (ended up donating the player The 8-Bit Guy along with a fully working Creative Nomad Jukebox!)

9:18 “it sure is a nice little nugget”

im 100% here for this dankpods/lgr bromance arc. Next thing LGR is gonna switch from smooth radio voice to yelling, and Dankpods will be trying to run Duke Nukem on an ipod shuffle

Oh man this takes me back. I saved up and got one of these because I thought it was the cutting edge and I felt so cool walking around high school listening to music on this thing. The battery door broke on it and I can't remember if I got it replaced or did some kind of a fix for it. I ended up using it for quite a long time actually.

This entire video just sent me back to the 90s - seeing Winamp just bought a tear to my eye.

Man really need a dankpods and LGR colab now cuz I’m pretty sure he will watch this video lmao, both amazing content creators

OMG, I almost cried when you said Musicmatch Jukebox . . . duuuuuuuuude! I'm encroaching on 38 years old this year and these LGR videos always stab me in the eyeball with nostalgia.

Your videos are always such a trip, man. I love them. Thanks for making them :)

I've been watching for years and I just wanted to say that your editing has improved tremendously in that time. This was a particularly well-made video.

I saved, saved, and saved to buy a PMP300 when it was released and it was truly one of my treasured possessions for many years after. Seeing one in new old stock condition- every pamphlet and CD, and especially the software just absolutely floods me with nostalgia.

Got one of these in the summer of 1999. I very clearly remember going to Best Buy to get it, and they had it in a glass display case along with other small high ticket items. I guess because they were easily stolen? I still have it, actually. It is still loaded with the last songs I put on it in the late 00s. That battery compartment door, oooof. Also the belt clip's plastic was brittle as hell and mine snapped off of mine pretty early on (just like the battery compartment's nub). I always taped the battery door shut. Also, for anyone wondering, it CAN play higher bitrate MP3s. 192kbps and even 320kbps work fine. 160kbps, however, does NOT work. I remember reading an article on how just bumping up to 160 from 128 was a noticeable improvement, and it had sample mp3s for you to listen to. I was hyped, and ripped a whole CD at 160, which was NOT FAST, back then. Only to find out they wouldn't play on my PMP300. It was infuriating. Haha.

The first three seconds of your videos are like a warm blanket to me.

I remember having one of these and despite it's small storage capacity, it wasn't a bad little device. Not to mention it was just cool to think about how far things might go and the fact that this thing was basically the beginning for portable players of digital formats. Rio was actually a pretty great company for a while. After owning the pmp I just kept buying more Rio devices as time progressed. Definitely owned more Rio devices than Ipods or zunes. Great piece of technological history here.

Media was so expensive back then, I waited for the CD/MP3 versions, easy to burn those mp3's to inexpensive CD's and enjoy hours of playback per CD. Great vid as always!

The perceptual models used in MP3 encoders have improved *heaps* since the early days. If you encode the same audio at the same bitrate with a 90s build of LAME vs a modern build you'll notice an enormous difference in quality, despite both files being the same size and being playable on any mp3-capable device. We have a much better understanding nowadays of which parts of sound are important to human perception, so audio encoders can make far better decisions about what to keep and what to throw away when encoding a file, even when working within the same format and bitrate constraints.

I had one of these, thanks for the nostalgia. I absolutely love your content brother. Thanks for the hard work.

26:35 To be fair, there was a good reason for that wariness about sharing anything personal - a lot of the early internet was built on plaintext communication protocols, so depending on how your connection worked, anyone from your ISP to literally every node between you and the endpoint you were connecting to, plus everything directly connected to all those nodes, might have seen what you were sending. Literally just strings of ASCII text sent across the wires. It was actually built less for privacy and security back then than it is now, if you can believe that.

I use to be strung out on mp3's then I tasted FLAC for the first time. Still freebasing audio daily 2 decades later.

My first digital music player! Blew my friends minds with this thing back then.

your channel is very good seeing the past equipment and games refreshes my memories thank you

Had one of those, what a nostalgic video!!! Thank you :)

Portable MP3 players were too expensive for me at the time. I used to record my music onto cassettes & listen portably with my walkman all throughout college until around 2003 when I got my first MP3 CD player. By then, the prices on those had come down to the $30-$50 range. MP3 CDs were appealing to me because you could burn an MP3 CD with 700 MB of MP3s & listen to it on the go, and swap it out for other MP3 CDs. I think I went through 3 of them, each lasting around 2 years, until I finally got a proper MP3 player around 2009. I think I have owned 6 MP3 players & still use one to this day! I like listening to my favorite tunes on shuffle, and remove songs if they ever get annoying or tiresome.

Man, I wanted one of these so bad when I was 17. But $200 was just way too much. I think I stuck to my portable CD player for a while. Sadly, it wasn't a DS9 Defiant CD player.

Your retro gadget videos are my favorites. I'd love if you'd keep doing some more for a bit

The tie-ins on what you're narrating with what you're filming is really _nice_ I mean beyond what narration is. Like planning a gag, then timing the video for it, and then doing narration later on top of it!

What a neat little device. I also remember getting my first mp3 player around 2001 and playing the absolute crap out of it.

As a 21 year old, I love looking at old tech like this. Thankyou so much for what you cover LGR! It gives people like myself a glimpse into the past to see what it was actually like in the 90s.

Another layer to the Diamond Rio madness: You could play Diamond Rio on a Diamond Rio player in a Diamond REO truck.

man brings back some memories. I had a Rio and loved it!

Oh man, I had one. Returned a CD Burner to Best Buy in exchange for it plus some cash. Used it regularly until it broke or I lost it in 2002 or so. I learned about joint stereo MP3 encoding to squeeze every bit of playtime I could while convincing myself 96kbps joint stereo was just as good as 128k . It was my first loved music player for sure. Great video.

I still have my diamond rio, the rubber turned into sticky stuff but i keep it forever. Epic piece of history

A pitifull pair ! I love it, great vid as always....

I remember getting my PMP300 as an added bonus for buying a CDR4x drive from Best Buy in 1999. Thanks for doing this review...tons of nostalgia.

You and DankPods really crossing the streams this week huh

I remember when I found out my CD player could play disks full of MP3s. I seriously blew some peoples minds with a single CD that held like a hundred songs.

I Loved my Rio and I still have it! Thank you. this brought back a lot of memories. So so many memories of watching that animated gif of the cd flipping while my computer slowly filled up the rio over the parallel port lol...

MP3's a gateway drug to FLAC with the vapor/smoke in the air around the RIO is an amazing shot! Really clever. Keep up the great work!

We need an LGR and Dankpod collaboration

The Rio 500 was my first MP3 player and it was frickin awesome at the time. My classmates were mystified by it as if it were some alien technology. Still have it, and it still works!

So many memories from those times! Feels old man

This was so nostalgic. Thanks for taking us down memory lane.

Thanks for downloading this video to RU-vid, Clint! I remember the first MP3 I downloaded in ~98 - House of the Rising Sun - I couldn't believe the quality. I thought it was magic. And at 3:00 - that looks like a typical set of mp3s of that time. Who didn't download CCR or Weird Al mp3s?! IRC was the best way to get them. !serverlist ;)

I remember buying this at Babbage's in 1998. I went from a MiniDisc player with great audio quality and tons of music to an mp3 player with space for around 10 tracks which vaguely sounded like they were underwater... it was a glorious. BEST PURCHASE EVER (at least that was what I kept telling myself).

I vaguely remember seeing these still in stores in like 05 or 06 with every box still on the shelf because no one wanted one by then. Wild.

ok that RIAA statement that copying/playing an mp3 constitutes a new recording is simultaneously the funniest and scariest thing I have heard, I had a class in law school called "internet law" and every case from the 80s/90s could basically be summed as "you and your sister are fighting over who gets to play on the computer, your grandfather is the only one allowed to settle this argument, he has absolutely no idea what a computer is". The scary thing is that kind of an argument totally could have worked when you look at the sort of decisions people were getting away with at the time, judges had literally no clue what was being discussed in the cases and relied on lawyers who were incentivized to make misrepresentations making metaphors about fax machines.

There was a sense of discovery at that time, getting music from friends, hunting for new stuff and such. I used to enjoy and appreciate music much more at the time, instead of having everything available all the time, the limited availability made me enjoy music much more, and I feel it's the same with games.

I had one of these! I still remember going into Computer City to get a 64MB SD card for it and the sales guy laughed at me and said such a thing would never exist...so I bought it online that evening, starting the end of brick and mortar stores for me. I ended up years later trading the Rio for a Chicken Finger Sub. I still have my Diamond Rio 500 somewhere around here.(correction Smart media card)

Your awesome alliterations are always astounding and acute

This video makes me thankful for what I have right now... PS4 & phone & MacBook pro to enjoy😌

thank you for these videos. the opening shot of the shelving with all that 90s-2000s era stuff and boxes with those retro colors and designs - really hits me in the feels. we truly did live through an amazing time where analog transitioned into digital. external modems, aol, sim city, shopping at frys for 3rd party parts for my desktop, doing school projects using info from Encarta...good times. thanks again for your channel. definitely a high point in the entertainment/media that i follow. i like these retro reviews more than most of the 'tv' shows i watch streaming.

13:49 is exactly how my desktop was back in 1998-2000, all those classic games, so nostalgic.

I love your videos, thank you.

I love when my favorite youtubers cross streams! Dankpods mentioned you the other day, and now you call an old mp3 player a nugget! I love it!

Haha, I remember when this came out. I was a country radio DJ in college long before the Rio MP3 player came out and when it did, I wondered if the group would sue Diamond for the naming rights. I also remember the horrible early days of MP3 when you had to COOK and UNCOOK the files in order to get them to play. You young kids have no idea what we went through... Hahaha!

OMG the memories hit hard! I got that thing when it hit the shelves over here, paying something around 2500 Austrian Schilling for it iirc (that's about 175€, or ~350€ adjusted for inflation). I used to encode my mp3's at a lower bitrate so I could fit more than half an hour worth of music onto it's 32mb storage... crazy times.

Damnit, was just watching an informative video and you had to go and have the smoke blow by XD earned a like from a long-time sub, keep it classy Clint.

I remember on Linux there was plenty of open source CD rip programs you could download and compile which used extended capabilities of the CD-ROM-Drive to actually read useful data from totally scratched audio CDs. ;-) And for the RIO Diamond it took a VERY short time to actually have people code programs to use it on the command line to move files onto the Rio.

The very first digital music player I remember hearing of! This thing was the stuff of legends back in the day! When I got a Rio 500 it felt absolutely magical! Then I got the 750 and it felt cheap after the really high feeling quality of the 500 despite the better specs.

I remember wanting this so badly. I was 15 and we had dialup internet. It'd take half a day to download a single song (assuming nobody picked up the phone and disconnected me). I still wanted one, practicality be damned.

Clint, one thing that I'm sure goes unnoticed, is your effort in the subtitles, thanks for buying me peace at night when I can't sleep and daren't wake my sleeping girlfriend.

I don't comment on your videos much, but I have to give you respect for putting in your own subtitles "Goofy Laugh". Bravo!

Hello RIO my old friend. My first digital music player gave me years of music pleasure... 😌 Edit: Another instance of me regretting barely ever keeping these old and great devices from an era gone by. Be damned, young self! 😑

what a blast form the past. My dad was one of the engineers who worked on the hardware and software for these at Diamond. We had about 20-30 of these devices around the house in various stages of production!

hearing dankpods reference you directly is wild after being subscribed to you for years, so hearing you make subtle references to dankpods yourself is equally delightful

I have no prior knowledge of most of what you talk about, despite often being old enough. I was from a very Slow To Adopt family when it came to 90's/Early 2000's tech, but you're so goshdang enthusiastic about every tech memory you revisit. It's utterly infectious.

I remember playing random files, not having internet made me love those magazine CDs and also random CDs you could just buy for cheap. While I did not have an MP3 player, I did enjoy the tape walkman and later on the first phones where you could upload a few mp3 files. Yes, this kind of thing is fun, your reviews of odd hardware and wares is really fun. Do it, you have a knack for reviews, even if it is not that indept, really fun to listen.

I didn't even know MP3 players were around in 98. I got my first one (RCA Lyra with 128mb for about $300) around 2002 and they were still pretty uncommon at the time.

This is a nicely made video! I passed on the Rio and bought an MPMan F60 a couple of years later. 64MB built-in, expandable with SmartMedia, full ID3 support including non-Roman characters, built-in radio and voice recorder.

Great video, as usual. I've still got my jazPiper, that was released about 6 months later, trying to stand out with features like voice memo recording, portable hard drive and 'telephone book' lol.

That thing was (literally) my jam for a few years until I could afford an upgrade to an iPod. I remember shuffling around MP3s all the time since it couldn't fit more than a couple albums' worth of songs. I also remember 'magic' of being able to listen to high quality "digital" music without the constant skipping I encountered with my cheap old Discman.

I had one, it was amazing you could get the music OFF the computer and bring it with you. Now I have a Fiio X1 (1st gen) which borrows some of the design elements, but with exponentially more storage, 128 GB. It's incredible how much solid-state storage capacity has jumped over the years.

Nicely explained, thanks for sharing :)

I still have my Diamond Rio, and was thinking you should do a review... and here it is.

I love how it has the bit rate for the current file being played, what a neat lil player.

I got one of these for my birthday in the summer of '99 and it truly felt like the future! The rise of Napster alongside it and the whole mp3 era was truly special!

9:17 I am not embarrassed to say I almost cheered when I heard you say that. You had to say it at least ONCE, that's all we could ask for. Thank you.

Tbh MP3 players are still a big fact today, I love them just like this one. Great job Clint!

I remember this was the first MP3 player that I experienced in school, one of my friends had it. The Diamond Rio was mind blowing that you could listen to full length songs without any physical media at the time!

When he said "nugget" all doubts were clear.

This brought back so many memories I had to break out my rio 500 with some mods and some 90s music still on it! Thanks!

My PMP-300 that my father purchased when it was new has no button degradation, I imagine that was due to the bag it was stored in or the environment that it created.