Diamond Rio PMP300 - The 1998 MP3 Player Experience

[@DankPods]

I think we got our channels switched this week…

[@nik09865]

Unexpected wholesome shout-outs on KZbin is what I live for. LGR doing it first with RCR, and now with DankPods? Hecks yeah, I'm here for it 🙏

[@beno3481]

IT'S THE PKCELL GUY!!!!

[@autumn_of_thought]

I broke into a fit of giggles at LGR's reference in 28:12 - "other channels of a rather dank appeal", I feel amused to be among the viewers who instantly recognized what Clint was talking about.

[@themod3702]

i guess?

[@jekanyika]

@@autumn_of_thought Surely you heard him calling it a nugget earlier on.

[@xandersthoughts]

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

[@teknonaught]

All that's left is for Techmoan to feature LGR and DankPods somehow, lol

[@jonathanschober1032]

Techmoan puts an SSD in an iPod

[@beegyoshi6525]

@@jonathanschober1032 *walkman

[@Sm00k]

I came here to write this, lol.

[@teknonaught]

@@jonathanschober1032 on a _wood grain_ iPod. Then tests the system with Scarlet Fire.

[@ThrillaDX]

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.

[@dryzenhawk4251]

When 64 - 128kbps was tolerable.

[@TillTheLightTakesUs]

I thought I was saving my cd's life when doing this.. Who knew they'd be so expendable?

[@levyan4718]

I rip everything from the Library for free

[@061Hitachi]

@@kikihugo8280 I Switched from cassettes straight to Nokia 6600 so I never had a dedicated mp3 player. I truly lived in the future, Listening to music on my phone while chatting on MSN and multitasking. I also then had infinite memory, paid 70$ for 256 MB MMC Card which was impossible to fill up. Sad thing is today I don't even have one song on my phone and don't use spotify.

[@061Hitachi]

@Monochromatik I had 6600 smartphone in 2003 and N95 in 2008. N95 was the best smartphone ever, Photos i took with it look great today, stereo speakers, GPS, a lot of apps and games and it's form factor was perfect. Also it had Dual core 332 Mhz and a GPU while n96 and N97 were single core 434 Mhz and terrible.

[@nickbnash]

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.

[@ichigokarasu]

I think BearShare and Morpheus were permanently burned into my old CRTs. Waiting days sometimes for an album or movie.

[@bombswabs3041]

Kazaa

[@tyraelhermosa]

Napster for the OGs

[@Fuzy2K]

My first MP3 player was a Samsung Yepp that was about 1/4 the size of the Rio, took one AAA battery and held approximately *one* album, but it was perfect for me because I had a pair of Sony Fontopia earbuds with a ridiculously short cable, and the MP3 player fit in my shirt pocket. Quite convenient at the time, if you didn't mind waiting to get home from school to replace the album with another one :P

[@oisiaa]

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

[@JeffreyPiatt]

The old 80's /90's executives didn't like a format they couldn't control.

[@Hppyzmbie]

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.

[@IAmKillEveryone]

that's sick. any other cool projects he worked on?

[@nosrepa]

I was a beta tester for Rio and helped with the forge series and firmware testing for a few other players.

[@Hppyzmbie]

@@IAmKillEveryone Nothing this cool. Prior to this he did start his own software company where he developed a sound edidting program called Sound Impression. He was always big into the Audio side computers and entertainment. He is in his 60's now and is mostly retired. He still does some work but it's all on the hardware side of things.

[@wal]

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!

[@AtariBorn]

Agreed. I remember being so stoked, when I finally installed an MP3/CD head unit in my vehicle. I had so many plans for that but I probably burned three discs, total. So much music on one disc.

[@Dwedit]

Had the Rio Volt. 700MB of storage from a CD was much better than the internal memory on something like the original Rio. Of course, this was before iPods and cell phones with MP3 capabilities.

[@johnconnorstopskynet]

It reminds me of my first big stereo system. I used to burn so many cdrs full of MP3s and everybody was always so confused how I had non-stop music in my car

[@AtariBorn]

@@johnconnorstopskynet Yeah, trying to explain the 11 to 1 compression ratio (to people that still owned cassette tapes) was fun.

[@notoriousbig3k]

liek its any cheap this days ....

[@ExperimentIV]

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

[@pafawag5b6b5b]

@@keithsimpson2150 what do you mean? i'm definitely under 40 and i don't notice anything bad about the audio in his videos

[@daemonspudguy]

@@keithsimpson2150 So, I'm 17 and don't get any headaches from his videos.

[@g4mmalotus937]

@@keithsimpson2150 yeah man, what's your deal? I've listened to his stuff on some pretty good audio gear and never had any issues with it.

[@zangafan27]

@@keithsimpson2150 There's nothing bad I can hear about the audio in dankpods' videos. The only bad thing is his headphone recommendations lol

[@MatthewHill]

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

[@anasazmi8554]

"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.

[@lucasRem-ku6eb]

future i replaced it for a 265 mb cheap USB stick, better !

[@MikeLagasse]

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.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

It was pretty awesome, but the successor PMP 500 was the first player that really got it right. Enough space for a decent number of songs and the ability to read the actual track tags.

[@greecoboost]

@@SmallSpoonBrigade Yep! I waited on the PMP 500 because I knew Diamond was gonna release it shortly after the debut of the 300. I bought it with 3 or 4 SmartMedia cards and began ripping and encoding my own MP3's like mad. It not only had a bigger LCD screen for displaying names and track tags, it had an IndiGlo style backlight for playing in the dark AND a much faster (by comparison) USB interface.

[@Lycereon]

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

[@brantisonfire]

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.

[@scottdotjazzman]

Yeah I remember studying music copyright in my 2nd year of college - I was mad when I found out just how much innovation the RIAA stifled just to protect their legalized stealing from musicians.

[@robertt9342]

What difference would the 3 years have made? CDs and analog mixtapes were already a thing. If the DCC was ever actually going to be a useful thing it would have as the DCC would still be viable for another few years as CD burners and MP3 players weren’t going to be available widely for a while.

[@ricenoodles632]

@@robertt9342 I think it's because DAT was released earlier and had the upper hand? That's just my guess.

[@sgomez1981]

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

[@PeteJohnsMusic]

“Nugget” and “dank appeal”…. Adelaide represent. LGR just called you out Wade! So much love.

[@WalcomS7]

9:17 Was waiting eagerly for that line.

[@Heidegaff]

A BRAND NEW NUUUUUUG!

[@Seawolf.Gaming]

I didn't know you watched LGR! How is it that everything that I watch is somehow interconnected on KZbin!

[@ToaOfFusion]

He did it, boys! He did it! He said it!

[@robertcop3736]

The second I saw the topic I was hoping there'd be a dank reference

[@kernaltrap]

@@robertcop3736 haha same

[@m1llie_]

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.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Sadly psychoacoustic cuts only work right for people with normal hearing.

[@Aikisbest]

@@HappyBeezerStudios Well, thats kind of a "Well, sometimes life sucks" moment though, isn't it? I mean, like a photograph only work right for someone with normal sight etc >_< I get what you mean though and I hope Im not giving an impression of hostility >_

[@rotordave81]

Thanks for downloading this video to KZbin, 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 ;)

[@DanH11]

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.

[@Chedmond]

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...

[@lucasRem-ku6eb]

that was 2 years later, Philips MP3 Red Book CD players (fake discman) but all were just called discman

[@H3Vtux]

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

[@jaubuchon28]

KZbintomp3 (may it rest in peace) used to autofill the developers audio if you didn't put a link in lol

[@djhenyo]

Steve Ballmer didn't say the famous "developers, develeopers..." quote until September, 2000 at the Microsoft 25th Anniversary event, and it didn't get widespread exposure until the mid-2000s era.

[@user-dp3jc3mr2j]

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.

[@JakeGreen86]

Encarta was the king back then

[@WrestlingWithGaming]

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.

[@thegardenofeatin5965]

They made a much superior product called the RioVOLT, an mp3 CD player. No internal flash memory; it reads red book audio, mp3s and wmas off of compact discs. So it's still a CD player, but put a data disc full of mp3s and it'll play for ten hours. And it's so well made, mine still works.

[@acdbrn2000]

I had one back in the day. It worked well enough and I got addicted to 13 days of daisy by Ronna Reeves due to it being on the sampler. Also compressing from a CD back in the day was really not fast.

[@elchunkacabra1450]

sameeeeeee with wanting this so bad but i had a sony mp3 player that took the floppy disk version of sd cards lol

[@aserta]

Honestly, outside the skip, the whole process was pretty much the same. That and the fact that these early mp3 devices were plagued by crappy "fast-on-shelf" design issues. So you weren't exactly winning anything outside, mostly, convenience.

[@LKonstantina915]

well its fine you didnt get one. In a few years itd be practically obsolete.

[@tyraelhermosa]

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

[@ChairmanMeow1]

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!!

[@dreed100]

Hah. Remember the review of a game from 97 or 98 and the reviewer was complaining about mp3 being used for sound files. While he admitted it is great and futuristic (or something like that) he wonder if impact on the game performance was worth the move!

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

For listening to on terrible little speakers or crappy nuggetphones it doesn't really matter in quality, at that point the weakest link not the audio file. But about 1/10 the storage needs in a time when drives were small made having actual audio instead of things like midi files a possibility in the first place. Wen your hard drive is maybe 8-10 GB and you also have other stuff on it, there is a difference between 60 MB and 600 MB for an hr of music. And then there is obviously the time component. MP3 had a decade of Headstarter over FLAC, which is an eternity in technology. The only reason other codecs like AAC got even the slightest of market share is due to the labels wanting DRM in their files. And obviously wma, which was the only codec the player that came with the system could rip at any noteworthy quality.

[@vivek_v]

@@ViewpointProd The sad reality is that very few can tell the difference between lossy and lossless compression. And if you don't spoil yourself with audiophile equipment, you will be perfectly happy with MP3 files.

[@Tornado1994]

1999!

[@QuasarEE]

@@dreed100 Pentium & above were great at it but if you still had a 486 you were in serious trouble; my DX4 75 MHz could only keep up with decoding an MP3 if I didn't do anything else at the same time.

[@DaveAdams222]

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.

[@abx1312]

i remember musicmatch just because of my dads old dell inspiron

[@XMguy]

Same. I’m 37. 38 this year too. I never had that player. I did have many Archos MMJBs. Also other software. Hehe.

[@LordOcelot]

The old desktop with WinAmp and unreal tourney/quake did it for me

[@stevesstuff1450]

Hey! I'm 60 but my eyeballs have been repeatedly lacerated by the LGR nostalgia... it was all new; so it was new to us in our 30s too back then!! 👍🏻

[@metfan4l]

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

[@QuintusAntonious]

I also got my first one in 2001. My first MP3 player was a Rio 600. It could only store like 5 songs. I upgraded to the 20gb brick that was the Rio Riot in 2004.

[@DisDatK9]

I remember stealing my brothers first Gen iPod and just the idea of being able to use the scroll wheel and being able to play music without CDs in a unit so small was so amazing back then. My, how times have changed.

[@lancepage1914]

I didn't buy an mp3 player until way later when the memory was expanded to many gigs. But I did spend a ridiculous amount of money on MiniDiscs, deck and player to my surprise still works to this day.

[@ricenoodles632]

@@QuintusAntonious The Rio 600 is a cool looking device. Wish it came with a larger (at least 1-2GB) storage.

[@Belznis]

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.

[@DailyCorvid]

Watch the ten years of back catalog if you've started watching LGR the entire stock is all good stuff :)

[@dwaynezilla]

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!

[@Nilumbra]

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!

[@SpectraParadox]

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.

[@huleyn135]

Clint even called the nugget a nugget!

[@therealneoneddy]

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.

[@therealneoneddy]

@ghost mall Not sure if you're asking, but I'm happy to share what I know. Joint stereo was a setting where the frequencies below a certain range were mono. Commonly 1K hrz and below. I recall many times the Rio would say 128 or 112kbps but I knew it was 96 or lower. Sometimes I was able to squeeze 15-17 songs on it. Another Pro Tip, I later uploaded all that music from my youth to iTunes Match and got nice 256kbps AAC DRM Free files in return. Now I can't imagine listening to 128k.

[@Kalvinjj]

That reminds me I convinced myself around 2009 or so that HE-AAC+ 64kb/s was just as good as MP3 128kb/s, in turn just as good as CDs, to get every single one of my _totally_ legal 2000+ songs I had on my phone with like 8GB of storage. Then I woke up and went mad with .FLACs later.

[@MrDuncl]

@@therealneoneddy "Now I can't imagine listening to 128k". On U.K. DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) radio that is high quality. On top of that it still uses MP2 ! Nobody is prepared to tell the millions of people who bought (back then) expensive radios that they are obsolete.

[@tetsujin_144]

"While convincing myself 96kbps joint stereo was just as good as 128k" Ouch. I am so sorry...

[@zerotonine807]

I owned this one! Great product, had so much fun with it. Great content as always - so much joy for the weekend. Greetings from Germany

[@bluescreenfree]

Me too. I loved it back in the day.

[@Ronsonator]

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

[@MightyMurloc]

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.

[@kintozero3169]

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.

[@adam1984pl]

I got first portable Mp3 Cd player in 2004.When i started college.Then portable flash mp3 player on chritsmas 2005.

[@dano612s]

i used to have a 10 CD trunk mount MP3 CD changer in my car. i had the most epic mind blowing database of music in my car. lol

[@JeffGeerling]

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.

[@mtndewhero]

(literally)

[@p_mouse8676]

Actually back in the day most of those (incl the iPod) didn't make much sense to me. I went for one of these "Discmans" that could handle MP3 with a buffer size of basically one song. Packed a few discs in my backpack and had music enough for weeks!

[@syrus3k]

100% My first MP3 blew me away entirely.. before that we had to deal with U-Law compression and a whole bunch of other codecs which didn't even come close.. it was at least 3 or 4 times better.. you could fit a whole CD quality song on a floppy disk (well, if it was mono..) but that was truly incredible. One of the big changes in computing - up there with hardware accelerated graphics cards.

[@syrus3k]

Btw hi Jeff, love your work :)

[@freedustin]

Ugh I had so many cd-players...16 second no skip buffer, mp3 capable...none of them were as good as this. Sure they held a lot more, but they inherited all the problems of CDs, they get dirty, scratched whatever they just stop working and take up more space. This thing fits in my pocket and doesn't kill batteries in 1 day, its better.

[@jamesherman3750]

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.

[@DanJackson1977]

Well, to be fair.. this was only what life was like in maaaaybe the last 2 years of the 90s... if you could afford it or were a tech geek. The vast majority of people had no idea this existed or how to use it and were still buying CD's. The fact that this is pre-Napster is really saying something.

[@trzy]

Man, this comment makes me feel old.

[@snk7]

I was 21 year old when this was released and bought it, none of my friends didn't even know what this thing was.

[@jamesherman3750]

@@trzy Sorry haha, unlike most of Gen Z, at least I'm knowledgeable about this stuff thanks to people like LGR. I dont mind hanging out with older folk either, I love the tech from the past and quite frankly, my generation is either stupid, toxic, racist or all of the above so its hard to actually find friends who enjoy this sort of thing.

[@ricenoodles632]

@@jamesherman3750 At 21 I think you are slightly closer to the cusp than to core gen Z, those of which only has vague memories of the 2000s, if at all (and/or are even born in the 2000s).

[@zapb42]

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.

[@Robert-un3cf]

I also had one of these, and the battery door broke. I ended up taping it and kept using it for quite a few months until I upgraded. Amazing

[@Vys_Gaming13]

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!

[@haggiswarrior]

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

[@michelanvalo]

I had the special teal one he showed. It had just enough room to put enough songs for me to finish mowing the lawn and not have a repeat.

[@klontjespap]

yeah, you either had a minidisc to blow people away, or that one

[@haggiswarrior]

@@klontjespap Or both in my case 😁

[@techbaffle]

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

[@timmyaucoin]

Throw a pair of jncos on it

[@shukterhousejive]

Replace the lady with a giant CG lizard and you'd get a graphics card box

[@JS-wp4gs]

Of course it could! ....it could advertise coming with a disk of shareware games and a free tye dye tshirt

[@ccricers]

@@shukterhousejive Palit should bring back the robot frog

[@SimonQuigley]

@@shukterhousejive that lady is in a retirement home now

[@singemfrc]

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.

[@sandr6769]

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.

[@KRAFTWERK2K6]

Yup i too only touched MP3 around 2001 when a friend of mine gave me a CD full of MP3 files and i was listening through a selection of different tracks. Some had nasty errors (jumps and glitches) and some sounded SO bad it was ear destroying. But it was nice to have so much music on just ONE single CD and discovering stuff you would have normally never been able to have access too that easily.

[@ConsumerDV]

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.

[@richm3786]

Great video Clint! I had one of these (in fact I've still got it in a storage cupboard, boxed) and at the time I remember thinking it was simply amazing. Loved it! Where I first learned about parallel port modes in the bios to speed up "uploading". EPP was preferable if I remember correctly. Like you said the battery door was grade A rubbish and did break on mine. The only disappointment was the 32 minutes of CD quality tunes and I simply couldn't afford a memory card on top of the purchase price. Thanks for the great video and the joy of reminding me one of my favourite old tech gadgets!

[@seethelittlenuclei]

Would love to see more videos about MP3 players! Great video as usual, Clint

[@SirDexus]

Wow so many memories came flooding back into my brain. I haven't thought about any of this in almost 20years. My dad loved ripping music. We had a box full of about 30 hard-drives all with music on them. I still have them come to think of it!

[@Stego27]

You might want to copy them to a new drive (can probably fit everything on 1 now) as they degrade over time

[@pauls4522]

@@Stego27 yup! Most of my dad's 40gb western digital hard drives from the early 2000s did not work after not using them for 10 years.

[@jbmp1390]

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.

[@bazurk_dot_com]

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

[@polaris911]

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.

[@Markimark151]

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!

[@pedrorotoli649]

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.

[@silversteeldragunn]

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

[@livefreeprintguns]

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

[@Gutnarm]

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.

[@steveofx23]

I know exactly how you felt around the time the first MP3 players released, I don't think I got my hands on one until a couple years later as I couldn't afford one but it was the future and was so cool, I do miss those simpler times! The late nineties/ early 2000's were an awesome time

[@EscapeVelocityStudios]

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!)

[@DrEisenhower]

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.

[@adambrandejs1839]

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...

[@KyoshoLP]

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.

[@currieleo]

Same! Mine is sitting in a box still loaded with the last music i 'downloaded' onto it 20 years ago! My trick was to encode CDs at 48kbps in mono. That way i could get a whole cd into 32MB and it didn't sound too awful... I think it supported vbr modes as well.

[@dryzenhawk4251]

@@samholdsworth420 Oh hell yeah, Dankpods is gonna make a great content out of it.

[@ライコ通信設備]

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!

[@legacyoftheancientsC64c]

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).

[@lancepage1914]

I bought an MD deck and portable player at the time right after i tested a bunch of mp3 players at the shop. Mp3 players back then could store only 1 album, that was the deal breaker for me. But they were onto something because this format is the norm now.

[@xaenon]

Oh dear lord, I haven't even THOUGHT of Babbage's in years.

[@AndyScott]

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.

[@k3ntris]

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

[@RichardBousquet]

This was my first MP3 player way back in the day. It disappeared one day and I spent a lot of time looking for it but I suspect it must have been stolen. Nostalgia bomb as always!

[@SunRedRX7]

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)

[@426baron]

I remember that brief period of time when we computer people gained the ability to bypass the lying guy behind the counter entirely. When I went to the music store to buy my first electric guitar, I was told it was out of stock and production, and unavailable for ever. On the other hand, I could buy anything expensive on display... After an evening of internet search, I ordered the one I wanted, the right color, at the third of brick and mortar price.

[@AThousandPapercuts]

what was the biggest card they had?

[@SunRedRX7]

@@AThousandPapercuts they had a 16MB card. I'm thinking...wow 4 more songs...no sir I won't be buying one here.

[@travis1240]

It didn't take SD - it took SmartMedia. Yeah that's pedantic but there were many early forms of flash cards that are no longer around.

[@AThousandPapercuts]

@@SunRedRX7 did anyone just buy multiple cards and swap them out?

[@pinokotsbeer6453]

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

[@mhoop1]

ha i still have my Rio! kept it in a case and avoided the 'unexplainable sticky rubber' condition

[@GABPower]

I remember getting this player as soon as it came out in Canada. I was an early member of the MP3 scene. It was purchased at Staples. I saw battery latch while testing the player in store and asked if it was covered by the extended warranty they were selling if it ever broke. They told me it was so I purchased it. After a few months it broke and when I got back to the store they told me it was not covered. They lost a customer that day and that was more than 20 years ago and I'm still pissed about it. I remember setting my MP3s to 64kbps so I could fit a decent amount of music and I still have that Parallel port adapter. Thanks for the video!

[@parlinmains]

I love how you could buy technology at Staples even back then.

[@aktimes2]

Oh what a blast from the past. You were using WINAMP in the video.... LOL. These MP3's killed my spending hours recording music from records to cassette tapes.

[@ShayBlez]

Seeing you cover this immediately makes me remember Rockbox, I ran that on my Sansa C200, have you the inkling to install and try it sometime, perhaps? I'm sure you know what it is, but if not: Its an opensource firmware replacement for various older MP3 players, often unlocking features that are standard on many media players today, that weren't thought of or allowed by the original manufacturer, back in the day.

[@Yootzkore]

Rockbox... that brings back memories. One of my friends ran it on a decked-out hard-drive mp3 player (early Archos? Can't remember) in the mid-2000s, gave it the ability to play nearly any format in existence down to Musepack and Monkey's Audio (APE).

[@Yootzkore]

Oh wait, the player was an iriver! Amazing device for its time.

[@daemonspudguy]

I'm gonna buy an iPod Video at some point in the future and install Rockbox on it.

[@PileOfEmptyTapes]

Actually, there are a few at least semi-recent players that Rockbox will run on. Arguably the FiiO M3K provides the best overall experience among them. RB will take a while to set up and customize to your liking, but its functionality is essentially unmatched.

[@Killertypo]

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!

[@rotordave81]

My first player was an iRiver CD MP3 player. Having so much music available to play was great! And it was music I couldn't otherwise find or afford to buy. Would like to see more videos on the topic if you want to do them.

[@onyx8231]

There was a Rio CD mp3 player that shared the design with iRiver. I don't know who had it first. It was called RioVolt SP250. I was able to literally install iRiver's firmware on to my Rio CD player with no problems.

[@okinkurt4000]

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

[@sgu222e]

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

[@sickregret]

This was my first mp3 player. Its crazy to me watching you explain how it works to realize there are lots of people watching your video that have no idea how these work. When did I get old.

[@MrMoogle]

What a perfect way to start the weekend! I had one of these back in the day and clearly remember thinking 32mb was a bit limiting even then. Still, it was enough to keep me entertained while mowing the lawn and I didn't have to worry about it skipping like CDs. Good memories!

[@burgersquid]

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

[@CasperTheGhost64]

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

[@JurisKankalis]

I'm still using Winamp 2.8 player on my Windows 7 now in 2022. Great review - and greetings from Latvia.

[@fernandesbosco]

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

[@aaronfrance6760]

I had the 32MB version of this! My dad got it free in a launch day bundle with Windows ME at Best Buy lol. I loved the thing even though it didn’t make much sense vs. a discman.

[@davidinark]

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!

[@DanaTheInsane]

It took me about 20 minutes to make an MP3 from one song. And I had a fast computer!

[@_boof]

Great video bruh bruh

[@theNWdigital]

Great video and had to watch the flying-in screen at 14:29 multiple times - it's too good

[@Jose_Pointero]

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!

[@Jose_Pointero]

@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Yeah but it also used some weird tiny USB port that I don't think I've ever seen on any other device...maybe it was proprietary? But I always had to keep track of that special USB cable that came with it because I'd be hosed if it got lost.

[@dermarco3933]

The 500 is still in my shelf 😁

[@singemfrc]

Same here, it was also my first, and like you I remember feeling like it was straight up sorcery when I was walking down the street listening to music on this little device with no moving parts! The 500 was the best of the classic devices. The subsequent 750 was crappy quality, I still preferred my 500.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

Mine was a Philip mp3 player/ 1GB flash drive

[@my3dprintedlife]

My friends were amazed that no matter how much you shook the unit it would never skip.

[@fattiger6957]

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.

[@MmntechCa]

I don't recall MP3 players really becoming ubiquitous until I started university in 2003. Even then, most people were still rocking portable CD players. When the 3rd gen iPod featured proper support for USB and Windows, that's when they really started to take off.

[@TheForge10]

My first one was iriver in 2005

[@BirdmanDeuce26]

I only got to discover that MP3s and players were already a thing pre-2000s when I happened on an old Rolling Stone Issue from '99 when I was a high schooler in 2005; even though things like the iPod were already out, they were still sufficiently expensive that CDs (burned or otherwise) and CD Players/boomboxes were still the norm for most kids/teens

[@Derevirn]

I remember looking for an MP3 player at tech shops around 1999-2000, and most people didn't even know what it was!

[@MrDuncl]

Argos is a huge retailer in the U.K. The first MP3 players appeared in their catalogue in 2001/2. The cheapest was £250. In the same catalogue they still had a genuine Sony Walkman for £12 and TDK 90 minute cassettes at £4 for ten !

[@CEzikMaj]

When he said "nugget" all doubts were clear.

[@notoriousshizzane2696]

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.

[@iammerxoxo]

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

[@Aruneh]

I had a Creative Nomad, such an awesome device. 6GB of music on the go! I hope you'll cover it in a video some day.

[@tghidsgn]

So did I! I saved up from my high school job at a grocery store and picked one up in 2000. 6GB was unbelievably massive compared to the ~128MB players that were common at the time. I actually still had it up until a few years ago (after not touching it in well over a decade) but I threw it out after attempting unsuccessfully to get it to power back up. Aside from that HDD munching batteries like crazy, it was a wonderful companion :)

[@frogginator-x]

That's really interesting to hear about the advent of mp3. I was a toddler at the time, so by the time I was old enough to have my own music I already took CDs (then accessible music files on a computer) for granted. I hadn't really thought about how music files worked before that.

[@Poever]

Sheesh, I was in fourth and fifth grade across 1998

[@jasonblalock4429]

And before MP3s, we had tracker music (.MOD, .S3M, .etc), which was kind of like MIDI except with all the samples packaged in the file. It was great for EDM, mediocre for everything else, but with file sizes around 100-200kb they were small enough to be easily transferred over slow modems of the day.

[@JonnyInfinite]

Way to make us feel old

[@kwc2086]

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.

[@marck717]

Hi Clint, That was a great video. I remember when I was a kid, I used to take a 3.5mm cord from the headphone jack of my boombox and connect it to my computer’s microphone jack. Then I would turn the boom box to radio mode and when a song I liked came on the radio, I would record it to the hard drive as a wave file using a program called Audio Rack 32. Then, once I had enough songs, I would burn it from the hard drive to a CD. It worked pretty well, but the audio quality was a little staticky. Back then, everyone I knew in school was doing that.

[@j.harbottle8928]

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

[@LordJazzly]

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.

[@PresidentKony]

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

[@parteibonza]

I feel I missed the boat. I built my library back in Napster days, so it would be a herculean effort to set aside the time to convert my CDs to FLAC. maybe someday, but then again, not likely

[@frankiebee2006]

omg, I had one of these! I worked a second job and put my paycheck into this instead of other, smarter options. It blew people away that you could listen to music and not have it skip at all. To get a decent amount of music into the thing, I remember encoding some of it at 64kbps (and it sounded... terrible, but hey, it was there).

[@MrMeowNow]

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

[@BrassicGamer]

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.