The Strange Story of the Mp3 Player 

Check out LGR, he does a lot of old tech too

Or technology connections

Any advice for a lost Young man?

I had a creative rio but it was basically worthless with 32 mb of ram. I started using computers in 80 and bought one in 82 so I was a early adopter of tech. To me these vids are not history but more of a trip down memory lane as you say.

@@ytgadfly I owned a lot of this early tech as well, if I had only put that money into Apple Stock. Anyway new rule is to stay 2 years behind the technology curve, that way I am not wasting my money on unproven tech

Futuristic videos are nice, but the _historytelling_ ones are awesome! The way he describes how we got here with all our different technologies - and the people who did them - is very fulfilling.

Def one for Futurist videos too.

@Automobile Addict gtfo here

And countless recording artists ripped off gazillions

@Automobile Addict k

Sick misappropriation of Kramer's Intellectual Property rights - probably still worth claiming.

@Μαλακας Κουραδακιας Yes 'mp3 players' were around before apple tried to corner that market for themselves.

L3enc.exe

Wow, is your MPMan still working in 2023?

Nathan Griffith I was gonna post something on similar lines

interesting !

I watch ALOT of RU-vid, and Cold Fusion is among the very best (e.g. Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, Wendover, Nerdwriter, Polyphonic, etc..). Just keep picking solid topics, and doing what you're doing!! Bravo.

Same here. Keep doing what you do, you are exceptionally good at it :)

Lol, welcome to the comments section. Just to let you know, it's _really_ fun down here. There's even a guy that has *100,000+ subscribers without any video content uploaded* because he's in every comments section.

True. true.

I couldn't have said it better.

Yes. This.

I'm just waiting for your audio book at this point

Ikr? His voice is AMAZING. His style of videos is amazing too, and I love his choice of music. I really wanna hear him talk about future urban utopias with that kind of music, I think it would fit

on my old 486 dx4 100, I ran redhat 2.4.x recompiled and optimized for audio. That fraunhofer binary was one of the most least cpu intensive binaries for running mp3s wake up music via cron.

@@coheher i still believe that as a historical fact it deserves more mentioning in a video with this title.

Kannste vergessen, etwas anderes als autos oder wunderwaffen aus deutschland? gibt es nicht. lass uns lieber ueber das bekannteste produkt reden, als das relevanteste oder die ermöglichende grundlagenforschung. mein erster mp3 player kam aus korea als USB stick, und hatte ein FM radio mit eingebaut - jahre dannach kam der ipod von der apfelsekte war deutlich schlechter, ohen radio - und tat so sie hätten es erfunden. amerikaner halt. Korrekte historie interessiert nicht, jedenfalls dann nicht wenn dabei auslaender verdienste vorzuweisen haben.

Nope.

@@tomsaltner3011 no. Fake news.

Exactly it’s a strange world

its almost as if patent law has failed us and china may actually be more free market in that aspect than we are.

@@jimster1111yeah free market of stolen IP

And that ultimately is a good thing. Lots of research, development, analysis etc. When releasing new products and services that are feasible and profitable in todays rapidly changing market. You can complain about e-waste, vapid consumerism and Planned obsolescence etc. But it has lead us to the plentiful amount of choices and freedom to choose from, prices ranging from cheap, affordable and high end, pushing the limits of cutting edge and affordability.

👍😌😌

no such thing as strangx or not, not x's history or lovx, nonerx

It's not that they forget it.. They just NEVER really learn it.

The only problem is it's INCORRECT. PDA's like the popular Compaq iPaq (NOTICE THE NAME) came out years before the iPod and had a color graphical user interface to play MP3's much like today's smart phones!!!

is that a marshal art

Kane Kramer's net worth is over $230,000,000.00 U.S.

aeonjoey if he is worth more than $200 million, why was he portrayed as a furniture salesman who made no money from his idea? Is the video lying? I would not be selling furniture if I were worth more than $200 million.

@@baronvoncalculon486 the man is a Furniture salesman, what this video left out was that the guy was a prolific inventor and was getting royalties for thousands of different types of inventions also he was a fairly good businessman. He had a lot of different tech inventions and was the CEO of multiple companies.

@@lucifaerislifeandstuff5181 it still does not take away from the fact that he got screwed over.

nah, a walkman.

Funny, I don't remember wanting an MP3 player in my childhood... Not everyone is under 30 you know...:p

I didn't, but that's probably because I very rarely listen to music, and never when out and about.

I was probably one of the last people that still carried around a portable CD player when everyone was walking around with iPods. This was in 2006. Having an iPod was a status symbol. And when I got my first iPod Nano in 2007, it blew me away. It felt futuristic to have tons of CDs worth of music in this little device. I still have it today, but I have since gone with my iPod Touch, which unfortunately is going away really soon. For me, having local music and not having to worry about a monthly payment plan is one of the many perks that I wish isn’t being killed off by greedy corporations. Now if I want a device solely for music, I have to spend almost $1000 on a new iPhone.

My first peice of portable technology was an oldish iPod when I was 12; cost me $10, wouldn't power on, turned out the battery needed charging through a non USB connection. The 3rd gen iPod (classic) was incredible, and I've been in constant pursuit of portable innovation ever since.

... no it's not. there were numerous competing ebook formats. PDF is primarily used for pirating ebooks, as someone who's had a hand in writing postscript itself, and have had every major and a few minor brand ebook readers, and read ebooks on PDAs of every flavor before ebook readers were even a product (including cd-based clamshell devices) PDFs have never been used for commercial eBooks.

@@aeonjoey u completely missed his point....

All of our tech is old. The first HD livestream was the moon landing. Before color tv was even a staple. Thats crazy. A lot of the later black in white broadcasting was also much higher quality than color tv up until very recently. A lot of ppl didnt realize that. The internet itself is also older than ppl realize. In the form of private intranet networks the network we now recognize as the internet has existed in a primitive form since the early 80s at LEAST. Nothing is original anymore. Things that come out now are mainly just improved versions of things that already existed in a private sector of society made public like the internet for example.

@@juanmccoy3066 Yup, like Twitter. To me it looks just like an IRC client in a more userfriendly GUI

@@PhoenixNL72-DEGA- That would be discord

Craig Jones ...yes ..he is the best...the way he makes the video is just out of this world

Well said! 👍🏽 Mr. Altraide, keep it up!

I don't like a lot of the pics that are related but not actually them, yet yours was awesome any...

John Browning records are still here, and sold at places as mainstream as Target

Like light bulbs, Planned Obsolescence. Those portable music devices were great for the Time. Just not as great as the transistor radio.. Less great was the CD Walkman...i was not a fan of the CD when they came out, being touted as "lasting Forever"...i knew their construction & i'm like...yeah? Nope. & i was right...Most loose their coherency after a decade, no matter how well it is stored the powder shifts & some falls off leaving tiny holes that can't be read because Nothing is there to read..inevitable. Leaving some of us with Mountains of holographic shiny garbage. Glad i backed everything up on external HDs...& glad for the YT videos on some cool DIY creations we can make from em, lol

Okay

@@NuLiForm What cho mean? I got a what... 1996 CD, plays perfectly.

@@josha254 i am genuinely Glad for ya...Cherish it! To be perfectly honest..it seems only those disks We burn erode.....i have just recently checked my long forgotten stash of movies & records on CDs & see All still play except 4....loss of 4 aint bad...but..all those we burned...literal mountains of therm....unusable.

Not bad.

@@ColdFusion you deserve 10M subscribers

Only because MP3 can't sound good on good cans.

Headphones arent explicitly earbuds... youre trash

Should it be earphones to actually call it buds

"...GET ON IT!"

the reason why the ipod won was the itunes store

I too had a CL Nomad, and I LOVED IT. Drag N' Drop, excellent sound quality. I still have it, alas, it won't turn on. Maybe, just maybe....

Where is mini disk?

you make a video then.... on all the shit he missed

Yes, this! I had a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox months before the first iPod came out. It had the interface that this video claims originated with the iPod. While a little bulky, I loved it. I was a cab driver and spent long hours in my cab, which was equipped with a nice Pioneer cassette stereo with an auxiliary input surely designed to have a portable CD player connected to it. It was a late 90s Ford Crown Vic, and my Nomad sat on the transmission hump on the floor, held in place by velcro. I would periodically update it’s music at home with a third party software that gave it drag and drop support using the file Explorer in Windows 98. At home, I had networked Windows machines in every room with Winamp 2.91 playing music from my main library on one of the PCs in my home office that had a large secondary hard drive dedicated to mo3 storage. I sold CDs on Amazon & half.com, ripping them all to my PC prior to sale, and also regularly got other mp3s trading with friends online via IRC & private ftp servers. I lost all this in my divorce in 2003, but did own an iRiver a couple years later, and loved it. Unlike the iPod, it had a tuner, could record off the radio, had a line input and microphone it could record from, and was simply treated by Windows XP as a flash storage drive, so recordings could easily be dragged to my PC for editing and archiving. While the storage capacity was much lower than an iPod or Nomad jukebox, the device was the size of a cigarette lighter, used a single AAA battery, and was much more useful to me at the time, as I only needed enough music on board to listen while walking or using transportation, and was involved in local music and loved having a small device capable or making high quality live soundboard recordings of local bands.

I remember Apple suing Creative saying their menu system was a copy of Apple's when the opposite was actually the truth.

@David Frischknecht I think that Creative sued Apple and not the opposite. Apple lost the sue and paid 100 million to settle: www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/aug/23/applepays100m

Thanks for the link. I'd heard the same thing years ago. But wasn't sure if it was true or not.

I knew I wasn't crazy, I changed my inn for a ipod nano tho :)

Yes, I bought my first Creative Nomad player in 2000 and then Archos jukebox in 2001 which had more capacity for relatively small form factor, more capacity, had a tiny display to play even mp4 videos and extension port to add hardware modules like video recorder! All these before the first music only iPod came to existence!

Support for ColdFusion Starts at 0:00

Thanks bro, I have no idea who this is lol

Thanks

@@vizionthing you won :)

Noiiice! I was gonna do that too!, I'll just upvote your, smarter well earlier quicker at least. ;]

Not really. At the time it was arpanet that was closed network connection and gave birth to the Internet. Yes home computer's was a thing but it was very early, they started 1975 being altair 8800 first (sort of debatable fact), 1976 Apple 1 and many others started to emerge into the consumer market. But everything was really new at that time and not adopted very well.

Forged by Kimas : Check again. It was open to students and was called “Internet” after 1983.

Its arguable if they are scamming or not, but if people actually FELT scammed by Apple, they would not continue to buy their products. Yet Apple is one of the world's most profitable companies with legions of loyal customers...maybe it would be more accurate to say Apple is good at convincing and brainwashing people into thinking their products are worth the prices they charge for them. This is something every company tries to do, but Apple seems to do better, as you said. It also doesn't change the fact that Apple has changed the market many times with their products, in particular the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Until each of these products, the markets for said products were small to non existent, and they had significant influence in how these products look, feel, and behave after their versions of the products were released. I agree it is a bit annoying when they get up on stage and announce a feature that has already existed for years and tout it like they are releasing a revolutionary new feature. That said, I don't agree with you that they didn't invent anything. I suppose it depends on your definition of the word 'invent', since any idea in the world would have been thought about already. Before Mac there was Xerox, before iPod there was competing players, before iPhone there were other smartphones, and before iPad there were other tablets. But its a strong argument to say none of those alternative 'first' products were a breakthrough success that created or expanded the existing market in a significant way. If nothing else, its fair to say Apple gets credit for inventing some products because they were the first ones to have large market success with those respective products. For example, Apple invented the first mass market smartphone with a multi-touch display (note the LG Prada was not multi-touch...arguably not even mass market...). If you want to discuss scams, try Luxottica, the sunglass maker that makes a great majority of the world's eyewear. None of the Ray Ban or Oakley products (for example) are worth $150 and up, and the marketing fluff about space age material and optics used are just tinted glass, polarization coatings, and standard materials for the frame like metal and plastic. Luxottica own Every brand sold in Sunglass Hut for example, as well as Sunglass Hut itself! They have a near-monopoly and use it to bully competitors out of business then charge exorbitant prices for their eyewear! Meanwhile, they make it seem like competition exists, and that you have a choice to buy from many different companies when you choose sunglasses or other eyewear. Sounds like something closer to a scam than what Apple does to me.

Aaron S. Caught that too. Weird...

wonder if these guys are form Chicago? ;) lol Shellac is a band from Steve Albini the Producer of the first few Pixies albums. ;)

@@stoyanoffice4961 shellac is a hard & brittle coating suitable for finishing furniture -- also audio discs before vinyl

@@jaixzz lmfao

I still have my MPMan and my iRiver... the iRiver is still one of the best when it comes to sound...

Marcel Analbers I still have an iRiver somewhere.

mnd I’ve had several portable MP3 players over the years. I had one of those. Not my favorite, but It was perfect for what I was doing at the time. I prepared legal documents for people, and was able to use it as a flash drive to bring my documents back and forth from law libraries to home, and still had enough space on it for the music I listened to on my public transit commute.

I still have mine and it works perfectly. Single AAA battery powered with drag and drop files.

I had one too.

That's today's money. Adjusted for inflation. Try adjusting other products for inflation and you'll see the the price difference isn't that bad

@@GazMatic But that's exactly the point. Through inflation our money is worth more than ever. We can buy things we could only dream of in the past.

@Gaz Yes of course. I was pointing out that device capabilities will be a world ahead in 20 years.

@@lootbox289 I can only imagine. Augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics all strapped into one device maybe and who knows what else.

@Odysseus I'm excited about advanced robotics in particular simply because I'm a fan of the movie iRobot from 2004. VR, AR & AI all working in conjunction with that. Think of augmented reality support centers which are where people using VR & AR systems control the robots for all different scenarios, from industrial to domestic work. VR allowing normal people to escape into another reality for a while or for their favorite game & AI in every other device because for some reason we have this innate need to talk to our devices.

That was the BBS

Thats absolutely true. They were incredibly slow and controlled environments not open to the general public however. Most of the usage took place in universities and such.

@@lvhdmya4807 Yes! I knew a SYSOP!

Yeah Internet has existed for a crazy long time, a lot of people are getting "internet" and "http" mixed up. http is what we know the internet as today but there is a long history of net use decades before http's invention

Same here

Am curious, what was Fraunhofer's role?

You used to have pay them for a license to use the codec, but not any more. Of course, there were always free ones. www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html

Paul Oomel invented the mp3

My brother saved money from his part-time job and bought a tdk 1x cd burner for our windows 98 pc. We were probably the only ones at our school with a cd burner. It was very slow, but it changed our lives lol. We were able to download songs/albums on napster that weren't released in our state, yet, and burn them to cd. We felt super cool lmao

Yup and also had a Super Wild Card, copying SNES games and downloading/trading them on various BBSs.

jpablo700 now that’s amazing and to me still is crazyyyy! Good job bro!

Not sure this is true. Several mp3 players competed with iPod in terms of capacity: I still have Creative Labs NOMAD Zen Xtra with a 60GB hard drive, purchased in 2003. Plus, it had a replaceable hard drive, so I upgraded to 100GB, and it took 5 years for the iPod to catch up to that. Microsoft's Zune (the main competitor to Creative Labs and Apple) also had a large capacity mp3 player, as did couple other companies. Every serious music lover I knew had at least a couple mp3 players around the time iPod was released. The reason iPod beat the competition so quickly is partly due to the interface, as the video explains, but also that they looked so much prettier, and more compact for the capacity. On the other hand, the iTunes requirement prevented it from squashing the competition right away - I for one would never have switched to iTunes and iPod, and still used my Creative NOMAD even after I got an iPhone (Creative Labs sounds quality was better due to their superior DAC)

*BilisNegra relax. Cold fusion doesn't always make it right. There's not enough research you can do to know the whats and whys.*

lol I just posted almost the exact comment before reading yours

I think this guy is an Apple shill.

Depends on the player, my 2nd MP3 player was a Genexxa portable CD player that would play, of course, 650-700MB of MP3s off an ISO-9660 disc... but I'd have to use a special utility to print off a track list on paper to correspond songs to a track number(!) that would show on the player. A later Kenwood player I had worked the same way. Then I got a Creative Nomad Jukebox, which used the interface the iPod would later adopt, minus the wheel.

Wrong. It was the excellent audio quality but totally unreliable Rio Karma in 2003. Zen touch was 2004.

The hango was the 1st Harddrive based mp3 player. It was developed by Compaq. They were to scared to market it in the US.

Apple throws everyone under the bus after they're done used them, that's their style.

He should has settled for some Apple stock. Could have made him a lot of money.

MacXpert74 : But then he had no active patent anymore. He basically gave up on his “sketch” long before. As an engineer, maybe he was just satisfied that someone actually built this device. He did not need the money anyway...

I really hate these extra commercials. And I instantly thumb it down, we already watch commercials before and in the middle of a youtube video. Well let's add one at the beginning too.

Bless.

Thank you.

Ty!

If u want to support the creator, please watch it.

No, his patent didn't include the encoding or decoding mechanism (MP3), the distribution mechanism(iTunes), DRM (which though a pain in the ass was pivotal in getting record companies on board). He just thought of the concept of a pocket-sized digital music player, but didn't specify how any of it would work, or bother with the logistics and expense of R&D, marketing etc. Imagine you figure out how to make a surplus generating fusion power plant. That doesn't mean everyone who's thought about fusion power before "Invented it". They vaguely conceptualized a world in which it might exist, you made it real. But it's OK to tip your hat to the people who's vision may have inspired some of your ideas. In this case, they used him to undermine a patent troll who claimed they invented it by showing the court "No, this other guy did and had a patent back in the 1970's". And they paid him for his testimony, and gave him credit which could be a boost to his future career. Handing him a free iPod was just a gesture. "Here's the revolutionary device you envisioned 20 years ago... something that's had a greater impact on modern music than the Beatles. It's not a dream anymore, it's a real thing you can hold in your hand." That should be profoundly rewarding. Having an dream and knowing how to realize it are two totally different things. To then both realize that dream and market it successfully is equally challenging. To give him royalties would have massively increased the cost when the product was entering the market. Even a few cents per unit sold would have been profoundly expensive as they were basically selling the units at (and sometimes below) cost, and trying to make their profit in the iTunes store. This was a new concept in music, few record companies were on board at the time, many more were willing to take Apple to court to shut down iTunes, equating it to Napster and newsgroup piracy. To their minds, anything in "MP3" was bad because it could be shared infinitely. It was a risky move for apple. If it didn't pan out, it might have sunk the company. However, I would have thrown the guy a hundred shares of stock. Though in fairness, if he believed in the idea of the MP3 player, he could have bought that stock, or made it a condition of his assistance to Apple in their patent lawsuit. If he didn't do that, it's kinda his own fault. That's a better option than developing the idea himself. Had he not let the patent expire, he would have needed to line up investors (who would take the majority of all profits anyway), spend years in R&D, millions of his own money or equity in the company and then had to market it under a brand name nobody had ever heard of. If he bought stock in apple, he would be invested in the idea still, but with someone else taking the majority of the risk, someone with a massive market presence, legal teams to keep the lawsuits down, who have their own manufacturing facilities... Paying $50k to buy their stock is less than what he would have to invest to start a company himself, with a massively better prospect of an ROI. Again, he doesn't know how to capitalize on his idea. He can claim to have known all along that this would be the future of music, but when his faith in the idea was tested, he failed to take that leap. Ideas are for visionaries, but money seeks the bold. Not everyone can be both of those things, just be grateful if your either of them, lol.

Joseph Miller Also an interesting fact, most sources are saying the style of the iPod design was inspired by a radio by Braun

surfitlive : While they had one or two brilliant guys inventing graphical plus mechanical user interfaces, Xerox totally messed up any real product development for these technologies. They actively decided not to use the technology and locked it away. Good that somebody did use it. I’m not aware of any Xerox fonts. TrueType? PostScript?

surfitlive : And his patent was....gone. Happens every year to thousands of engineers. Where is your point?

Boss_Man_T :Exactly. Jules Verne invented submarines and vehicles to bring people to the moon... ;)

They didn't steal anything. The original idea was merely a sketch. The technology wasn't there yet.

Correct, but it feels like they treated his in a shady manner, though technically they were within their rights. Sometimes, being technically right, doesn't equate with being morally good. I think that is what people are trying to express.

Jezza : No. The patent was run out and not renewed. Talking about it is pointless. You should never buy any tech product. All of them have the same “issues”.

Just stumbled upon this. Fascinwting history, and great production. I recently started using Squarespace myself. I will watch for any new materisl you release.

That would actually be amazing

Ad revenue after Adpocalypse is shit, why would you go through the annoyances of YT ads

Ad revenue helps creators a lot, actually. I doubt that ColdFusion blocks ads on RU-vid.

Adblock plus has been garbage after being bought out. Ublock Origin is where its at. Oh and I'm watching this from an unrooted phone... So not using a form of ad block atm

I don't. Let the websites make revenue.

@@darksidelead yes.. I also use Ublock. On mobile is view ads. No root or repacked special apps.