How I bought a solid-state MP3-player and stopped worrying about CDs.
In 1998 a Korean company Saehan Information Systems changed history, creating the first portable solid-state audio player.
The MPMan F10, that is what it was called, came with 32 or 64 Megabytes of non-expandable internal memory and was powered with rechargeable gum-stick batteries, common for Asian market. Its variant, the F20, used more common AA batteries and had a slot for a SmartMedia card.
To put this into perspective, the Apple’s iPod was three years away, and when it came out it had a conventional hard disk drive inside. This does not necessarily indicate bad technical judgement on the Apple’s part. At that time, using a built-in hard drive allowed Jobs to claim:
The biggest thing about iPod is that it holds a thousand songs.
Steve Jobs rebooted the legal music market first by selling songs a-la carte for $0.99 per song, and then by building in the synchronization with iPod into iTunes. He created a new system to sell, distribute and store music.
The MPMan, on the other hand, was just a humble device that played whatever files were loaded into it, DRM-free, no questions asked. So, it was not surprising that Frank Creighton, associate director of anti-piracy for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said:
The MP3 player has no function other than playing material that was stolen from record companies.
He was appalled by the fact that people who share music files would rather spend upwards of $200 for a player instead of paying for the music they share.
The weird-looking F30 came and went unnoticed, but the F35 was a real deal: smaller than prior models, expandable with SmartMedia cards, powered by a single AA battery, and equipped with built-in radio and a voice recorder, it came with earbuds and a wired remote control.
The F60, which I have, is a further development of the F35: it has similar size and shape, but different button arrangement. It is surreal that the website I bought it from is still online and shows the same exact page that appeared on my computer twenty years ago. The price shown — $129 for the T6 variant with 64 MB of built-in memory — is exactly the price I paid back then.
I had been looking for a digital audio player for about a year before zeroing in on the MPMan. I was not impressed with CD-based MP3 players: like regular CD players, they were bulky, had mechanical parts, and despite great improvements in buffering they still would occasionally skip. I wanted a device that had no moving parts whatsoever.
The F60 seemed perfect, so I bought it.
Like the F35, the F60 has built-in microphone, so can be used as an audio recorder. And it also has built-in radio. But I really haven’t used these functions much.
It is about as thick as a cassette case, but significantly smaller in two other dimensions. The unpainted aluminum body can withstand some rough handling, it does not crack, but bends easily. The power comes from a single AA battery, located at the bottom.
I’ve tried different MP3 files with bitrates from 24 kbps to 320 kpbs, and the player has no problems with any of them, although it does not show the bitrate correctly for VBR files.
The most popular bitrate for MP3s has been 128 kpbs. This rate is good enough for casual listening, and is convenient for calculating the required storage size: one minute takes about one megabyte.
The player uses SmartMedia cards, which were popular twenty years ago, but failed to capture the market because their capacity was limited to 128 MB, so these are the highest-capacity cards I could get. They were sold for about $50 twenty years ago, they are still sold for the same price now on eBay, because they are not made anymore. People who sell them probably pull them out from old digital cameras, which also used these cards.
The monochrome screen 3 by 2 cm in size with resolution of only 128 by 64 pixels shows tons of information: battery charge, equalizer preset, free space available in the built-in memory and on the card, volume, the number of tracks and the current track’s number, track time played, the file’s encoding parameters, and the track name at the bottom. If ID3 tags are properly set, then the player uses “Track Name — Artist — Album” pattern. It supports non-English letters including Western European letters with diacritical marks as well as Cyrillic letters. There is no backlight.
Sadly, there is no cross-fade and no gapless playback. With the original firmware there was an audible click at the start of each file, a later firmware update fixed it by adding a quick fade-out/fade-in between songs. This is not ideal, but the developers said they did not have enough built-in RAM to implement seamless transition between songs.
The World’s First, and the World’s Best MP3 player, as it was advertised, came with its own file manager and its own device driver, which is why I am using an ancient Sony Vaio machine, built for Windows 98, but running Windows 2000 now. 256 MB of RAM, the hard disk has been upgraded to 40 GB. I tried capturing the screen, but the tools I use require at least Windows 7.
The player stores files in a proprietary format, moreover it does not allow to move the files from the player onto the computer. No doubt, this was done to appease RIAA bigwigs.
The MPMan file manager allows to drag the files from a computer to the MP3 player. For someone who uses Spotify or Deezer, this should look almost as old-fashioned as recording a mixtape on a cassette. But get this: it takes 90 minutes to record a 90-minute cassette, but transferring 2-hour worth of music onto a 128 MB card takes only about 4 minutes. Clearly, we have progressed.
After uploading athe files, disconnect from the computer, insert the headphones and play some music. There is no Bluetooth.
The controls are pretty standard: play/pause button is in the middle, skip forward, skip back. It powers off and starts up very quickly, and it can resume from the last played position— great for audiobooks and long albums.
How long? A 128 MB Smartmedia card fits about two hours of audio encoded at 128 kbps.
I think two hours per card is a reasonable capacity, convenient if you want to change the cards from time to time. This is what I was thinking of doing. This pattern hearkens back to the olden days of physical media like cassettes and CDs, and it proved outdated. No one replaces or exchanges memory cards.
Steve Jobs’s idea of synchronizing a digital player’s content first with you computer, then with the Apple’s servers had won:
When you connect your iPod to your Mac, iTunes is launched automatically, and all of your iTunes songs and playlists are automatically downloaded into iPod.
In the last decade, this pattern has been replaced by streaming, no one stores files on device anymore.
Ultimately, both the MPMan and the iPod have lost to streaming.
