An MP3 Jukebox for Everyone (Including The RIAA)
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- čas přidán 15. 06. 2024
- In the year 2000 you couldn't buy an iPod - but even if you could, they weren't very good for use in your home. What if you could buy something that was?
Musicstore HDD image:
archive.org/details/musicstor...
Jeremy Blake's music:
/ @redmeansrecording
Support me on Patreon: / cathoderaydude
Tip me: ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude
Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:03:00 The Problem With MP3
00:10:20 DigMedia / Unboxing
00:14:12 The System
00:17:45 MusicStore overview
00:21:10 Using the MusicStore
00:41:05 PC Interface
00:47:00 Complaints vs Reality
00:51:30 Soulmate overview
00:56:50 Soulmate + MusicStore
01:00:00 The Speed Mystery
01:03:38 Soulmate teardown
01:11:56 MusicStore teardown
01:20:30 Conclusion
01:23:45 Outro - Věda a technologie
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YYAVrLBKavM/mqdefault.jpg)
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](/img/tr.png)
![I bet YOUR photo printer couldn't do this! [Olympus P330]](/img/n.gif)
I used to be the assistant IT Support for a company back in 1996 - 98 and I remember creating a massive “jukebox”out of 20+ redundant laptops using WinAmp and a plugin. Whenever someone got upgraded to a new laptop I would add it to my pool, loading up the usually found 20Gb hardrive with more albums from home and sharing it to the WinAmp pool. They were all stacked under the desks and we never ran out of anything to listen too.
I trust you bought carbon offsets recently to make up for your youthful indiscretions 😐
@@idadru Just to add to my madness, I still have copies of some of those files - not all. When I resigned I copied off my most favourites which are now on my TrueNAS build.
By watching this video I have thoughts that if other brands would have such not really legal instruments like Apple - they would be too successful, but...I kinda made current Apple so rich, of course it was a "cheating" of system, not paying taxes for certain countries. We bought in USA with cash ipods usually not openly at Apple but official resellers and shipping them to 3rd world countries as grey import to resell. Hype was already made so reselling them foreign not only compensates price of ipods but even worldwide shipping, of course cheating with customs docs.
So, it was a "money loop", we manipulate sales in USA, which inflating statistics (famous Jobs words about 90-100 millions items sold), which is reports=inflating stocks prices, which kinda fueling the hype because sales are real, but in fact not so many Americans bought them, it was worldwide sale, but American market are most important to manipulate. Apple are famous with tax avoiding. Yes, you can't make first million without some crime, it's a rule of life. Making so many billions as some "player maker" without oil (I don't believe music stands anywhere near oil) honestly is just impossible.
@@idadru Sometimes I like to pit my air-conditioner against the heater in a fight to the death.
not “20 Gb hardrive”, dolt
The dream of the Cinco MIDI Organizer, finally realized.
just use the T9 Toggle to input the album's UMRN - Unique MP3 Routing Number
Oh God I only knew about the Cinco phone. I had to look it up and it was exactly as expected lol
@@toxicfem69 when i saw the keypad i thought for sure it would generate something like that
love cinco products, i use the innernette to surf music
Needs more 4d3d3d3
i get a genuinely giddy reaction when i see the "two of them" bit. its always in the back pocket. love it.
I get sad whenever any other youtube channel *doesn't* use it. :(
At this point it's basically in a holster lol
I used to work at CompUSA from 99 to 2004, and I remember these on the shelf, I don't remember selling one, but I do remember them. Also, the price tags with just the date indicate it was brought in to the store as a customer owned product, probably returned a few times seeing how many are on the box.
Oh wow that is really quite a detail, it would make perfect sense that this thing made a few trips there and back. thank you!
Was that a big retailer? I live in Montana and we did not have a CompUSA here at that time.
@@russelllukenbill thy were fairly large, as I recall over 200 stores in the US, they even had two in Hawaii.
@@juddsandage Cool, thanks for the info, I never heard of it until today. We did not have any large chain computer stores here until the late 2000's. I think we got a best buy in 2008 or 9.
The end days of CompUSA were a wild time. I still have my favorite thing I ever bought from them. They sold everything, the shelving, the racks, even their office supplies. I have a rubber stamp that says "DO NOT BILL".
Here's an interesting thing that I never hear remarked on: when the Walkman came out, the innovation was not that you could play tapes or choose your own music or anything about the tech itself. The big socially revolutionary thing was simply the idea of wearing headphones in public.
I'm not sure if the Walkman was the first example of light headphones, but they were pretty new. Headphones had always been big bulky cans strapped to your ears, and never, ever seen on somebody walking around in public. Media like TV movies and such made a big deal out of the implied air-headedness and self-absorption of the new "headphone generation". (Watch the classic "Square Pegs" for a perfect example in a major supporting role. Totally different head. Like, totally.)
"I WANT TO FIT IN"!!!- Patric Baitman, "American Psycho"
I don't think that's really true. Plenty of headphones before the Walkman were small. Most radio headphones that came with AM radios were just earbuds that you'd put in. Plus crystal radio earpieces were the same. So I think it really was being able to listen to music anywhere, with ease, with no ads, and without having to hope the radio was playing something you liked that was the attraction.
The MIX option in the record menu isn't so out of place to me. Back in the day, people would record 'mix tapes', a collection of their favourite tracks to share with a friend... so the record metaphor wouldn't have been so alien at the time.
Yeah, you'd often also have mix tapes for specific settings or moods too, much like you'd have a playlist. They were definitely the precursor of playlists so using the terminology and the association with recording I think made sense.
@@Khorne_of_the_Hill the USB port it's version one USB, but at the time that was it, or nothing, but PC software some much potential missed it looks like proof of concept, or something, feasibility of the idea or to verify that the idea will function as envisioned , and it was just left as that? on polisher version ever released
I thought exactly the same. It makes absolute sense!
Beach tunes 87'
So that CD, has *quite* the eclectic selection of music. This is like, 75% fact checked, maybe 85%.
*The Color Red* was an alt-rock post-grunge outfit from southern California. And whilst their March of 2000 release *_Below The Under_* is featured here with tracks "Greatest Hits" and "Smile", it seems their next release *_Clear_* from 2002 fared a bit better. By that time the band found a bit more direction. That being said "Greatest Hits" has an almost math rock vibe to it, but also goes a little *too* hard.
*Hyphen* had to, at some point change their name. Now going by *The Kite Eating Tree* their debut album by that name was called *_Method: Fail, Repeat..._* came out in 2003 and by all accounts was a decent punk/indie title. Very reminiscent of the blossoming Emo scene. Had it come out earlier it might have even made a few more waves. Genuinely the track "Softer Seems The Pavement" is something that might enter my rotation.
*Stunt Monkey* claimed to be a Horror Punk/Themed Punk band, and rather middle of the road at that. I am absolutely sure this is a band that did not take themselves too seriously at all. They give off the vibe that *The Butthole Surfers* listened to *They Might Be Giants* and a new band was formed. And with 4 albums over 5 years, they definitely had a run at it.
*Kenochamp* was ANOTHER punk/pop band, they seemingly only managed two releases. A self-titled EP and then their debut album *_For Rent_* which contained the track "It Often Has A Meaning I Sometimes Forget" on it, which is by far and large their most popular track. Interestingly they got picked up by SPIN Records, but that went nowhere. They are hard to track down.
*Sloth* was a fairly run of the mill alt metal/heavy rock band from the turn of the millennium. Whilst finding a recording of their self-released album *_Acedia_* is not terribly easy, luckily they reworked most of those tracks for their big label debut in 2003, *_Dead Generation_*. With a sound clearly influenced by bands like Tool, or Godsmack, the album isn't a BAD listen. That being said, I am getting the vibe this is secretly a Christian Metal band.
*AcidNine* ( abbreviated as A9 on the album cover ) is not a band I can actually track down songs for. Their 2001 release *_Mess With The Bull_* is available on discogs and was even sold earlier this year. So I can't comment on HOW they sound. Only that they got a single release in 2001. That being said, this album was *also* released on SPIN Records, curious.
FINALLY we land at *Bluebottle Kiss*, the reason I looked up the rest of these acts. I actually know about this band! They're an Australian indie grunge band formed in the early 90s. By the time they were included on this compilation they were already on their third album *_Patient_*, their sound had tightened up some. I suspect this band was picked up in hopes of repeating Silverchair's meteoric success, though I doubt it worked too well. A few albums later ( including a double CD release to tie it up ) and the band folded _until earlier this year_ when they got back together to re-master old albums, re-release old out of print EPs, and played a handful of shows in October of *this very year*!
oh man honestly I'm getting pretty big Christian metal vibes from that paragraph alone. Naming your band and album after the Seven Deadly Sins? the "Dead Generation", as in spiritually dead, which was a common phrase for "nonbelievers" at the time...yeah, I give it like a 10% chance of *not* being a Christian band.
@@modulusshift Oh I am convinced a fair few of these bands are Christian rock, or adjacent for sure. The most fun one was Hyphen which became The Kite Eating Tree. The producer for their album later went on to produce Finch’s poorly received sophomore release and their self titled EP before the band went on a lengthy hiatus!
Thanks for writing that up, interesting stuff!
An incredible mix of jank and genuine usefulness, wow
Jank and dank
“Y’know, it feels like we’re due for a CRD episode any day now.“
*an hour 24 minutes is uploaded* “…and that day, today, is a good day.”
This is the kinda thing i would see dankpods have a giggle at, nice to see such oddities on CRD
It's got a built in Lucky Dip feature and comes with the most janksome nugget ever seen. What's not to love?
Big nugget
@@carpespasmProbably only the fact that he wouldn't be able to pull any of the previous owners tracks from the Soulmate, at least if he got the device by itself, since it would likely have dead or no batteries.
As a youngling, I took a digital camera on a field trip. Only after I got back I realized that all the stored pictures went away when I messed with the battery compartment. I felt like I had gone crazy.
What a horrible experience!
The computing industry has a term for that type of bug. A 'showstopper', a deficiency in a device or software program that makes the implementation effectively unusable. Something that must be fixed right away before development can go on. Kind of like having instant photography that didn't work in the Summer, or a WiFi router that couldn't send internet faster than a 28.8 kbps phone modem because of a software bug. Or a car where the air conditioning blows stifling hot air for a few seconds while your mobile phone gets a notification sound...
I remember those, they were more like Webcams with AA batteries that could „store“ like 20 photos..
@@brentfisher902 I need to hear more about these.
Adorable icon owo
Sony could've have so much opportunity to really have MiniDisc be a viable competitor to huge clunkers like this, if only they hadn't insisted on trying so hard to make their proprietary ATRAC codec a competitor to MP3, instead of just adding an MP3 decoder chip to their players.
Curious why you think it matters? They obviously had to play the same games re: not allowing the random import/export of files w/o tracking entitlement, so in a closed ecosystem, I'm not sure it matters what format the audio is encoded in if you can't get to it anyway.
In theory, a portable MD player could play a data disc with MP3 files instead of ATRAC3-encoded tracks, but you would have to be able to get those files onto a disc, and Sony really tried to prevent having a MiniDisc-ROM drive ever exist where a consumer could get at it. I think they feared the inevitability of exploits that allowed unprotected access to the disc contents. Probably rightly so.
@@nickwallette6201 Even beyond MiniDisc, Sony was really trying to push ATRAC as a competitor to MP3. For example during their debacle of making "copy-protected" CDs with a rootkit on them in 2004-2005, the software they put on the CDs gave you a choice of only using either ATRAC or WMA -- no MP3. (The MP3 format does have a "copyrighted" flag that could have been employed to prevent unauthorized copies of files from being played, but virtually no software or hardware ever paid attention to it.)
@@vwestlife Well, ... yeah. The copyright flag is an informational bit in a bitfield of the MPEG frame header. To overcome that, you could just look for frame sync, mask that bit in the header, and re-write the file. :-) So, _of course_ they pushed ATRAC and WMA instead -- both had legit protection mechanisms. Why would they go to the trouble of preventing CD ripping, and then allow you to export to a format that didn't have copy protection, that they would have to pay license fees for?
The fact that they even allowed export into WMA is a little surprising. Usually, Sony's gonna Sony and use the format they invented. heh And, to be fair, they were there first, with shipping products when nobody had heard of MP3 yet, and WMA wasn't even a twinkle in Ballmer's neanderthal forehead-shadowed eyes. I guess they knew that it was never going to be the dominant codec, but couldn't resist trying anyway. Bless their heart.
@@nickwallette6201 The MPEG audio compression standards were approved in 1991. Sony could've gotten on board, but decided to go their own way. Philips used MPEG Layer I (MP1) on the DCC digital tape format introduced in 1992, and to my ears it sounds better than the older versions of Sony's ATRAC. And MP2 is actually higher-quality than MP3, because it was designed to be broadcast-quality, while MP3 was only supposed to be "Internet streaming quality".
@@vwestlife Sure. But, look at it this way.
For one, MD was released in '92, and assuming it wasn't a fully-formed product on day-one, that meant they had spent some time in R&D. So, the year lead wasn't that meaningful. Now, of course, an approved standard means they also were working on it for a while before that, so Sony was probably aware of it. But it was still pretty young, so it's not like they were selecting not to use an established standard.
So.. (and this is what I meant by "nobody had heard of MP3" ...) there wasn't any compelling reason to use an existing codec. Nobody was expecting them to. The physical media was brand new, so there were no backwards compatibility concerns. Digital audio transfer was done via PCM over SPDIF, so nothing outside of the deck needed to be aware (much less compatible with) the codec. And to adopt the MPEG standard-in-the-works would mean getting onboard with an entity that would want royalties for its use, vs. a home-grown codec that they could use at their leisure. In the words of a wise man, "Homie don't play that." Undoubtedly, this is the same motivation behind WMA -- with a little bit of Dolby envy thrown in for good measure.
Early ATRAC wasn't stellar, but neither was early MPEG. Is ATRAC at ~300kbps comparable to MPEG1 Layer 1 or Layer 2 at ~300kbps? I dunno. Never done a shoot-out between them. Luckily, with perceptive coding techniques, your hands aren't tied to the original reference encoder anyway.
What about processing efficiency? For a portable player with the ability to record, that would be relevant too.
BTW, each layer of MPEG1 is progressively more complex. Assuming, by "MP2" you still mean MPEG 1 Layer 2, rather than MPEG 2. Yes, L1 and L2 can encode at higher _bit rates_ than L3, but there are more coding features at each layer, too, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. I don't think it's fair to say at all that L3 was lower quality and meant for Internet streaming. That's certainly the niche it fell into, but I think that's more of a coincidence due to the computing power having gotten sophisticated enough to handle the significantly more complex codec, right at the point where users were first starting to find ways to compress audio and distribute it. (Though, it was still a _considerable_ chore for my Pentium-class PC to encode MP3 files! It could at least play them in real-time, purely in software.) I don't think the MPEG group intended to be the means for the recording industry's demise. ;-)
My parents are both pretty big deadheads and my dad has worked for the FAA as a programmer (for like... radar software or something, idk) since the 80s, I remember back in 1999-2000 when napster was huge he had access to cd burners (and bandwidth) at his job and was just going nuts with that. Early adopter/right place right time.
I thought the idea of having a dc jack for the soulmate was weird, but having seen the teardown I now understand it. You would want to leave it on wall power so you don't lose its content away from the dock. Those capacitors, if they do exist to keep the memory alive, probably exist to keep the memory alive when switching between power sources: battery, barrel plug, and docking station. Doing so likely involves a short dead period between supplies.
I was guessing potentially for a car adapter.
@@RobertHarrisonBlake that would be awkward, as... well: you can leave the thing in the car, because the batteries acting as ram backup would drain.
Using it both in the car and to go mean constant pluging and unpluging - and still having to regularly feed batteries and reload songs.
To automatically switch between supplies you'd typically put a Schotty diode in series with each positive voltage rail. The rest of the circuit will pull current from whichever supply has a higher voltage. Downside is a 0.3V drop on each supply. There are alternate circuits that don't have this behavior (e.g. using a P-channel MOSFET in place of one of the diodes) but they bring their own set of issues (e.g. backfeeding the battery).
Would that have even worked? You'd have to remove the battery pack to change the batteries, and the DC jack was in the battery pack...
That's faster than yelling at Google home to play an album, especially as Google home will often get the wrong thing.
You wanted a really badly mastered live version of a cover of the wrong song? Coming right up!
Occasionally, it got it right ! :) lol
Definitely a product of its time. And I don't even mean from a technology standpoint, I mean from a business standpoint. Anything with a URL gets green-lit.
So, sure, the software has some rough edges. But you can see that the engineering here was actually pretty sophisticated, and the people developing this thing really tried. They were let down by the one who designed the enclosure, and, as much as we sometimes lament that the bulk of the money should go toward engineering, this is a case study of how things like product aesthetics and marketing _really matter._
Think about how ambiguously this product is marketed. The "Music Store"? So.... it's a device to buy music? Anti-piracy? Is it a CD-player or a kiosk? Does it require a computer to download music that I purchase? It's not very clear what this actually _does_ unless you're already familiar with MP3 ripping -- in which case, you don't need this. And nobody's going to spend $450 to find out, particularly when the shelves were _littered_ with boxed disappointment during that era.
If they had worked out the tech, and sold this as a legit HiFi component -- with a standard-size chassis, and a brushed metal faceplate and vacuum-fluorescent display -- they probably could've asked nearly double the price. Sell the portable player separately, for another $200, and make it feel like .... at least something Aiwa would've made.
It needed a round or three of feedback from consumer focus groups, and I'm guessing they didn't get enough funding to iron out the quirks. I'm sure they were operating on a shoe-string budget, hoping to get their vision produced and on store shelves. And this is what you get when you don't understand how average consumers experience your product: Technically, it's actually pretty good! UX is a total disaster, though. And it looks like the kind of landfill fodder that I would've seen, and walked deliberately around to avoid sullying myself.
Back in 2008 or so, i built an MP3 player for my stereo. It was an old pentium pc with a 100mhz pentium, 32MB of ram and an cheap soundcard, and a 10Mbps network adapter. I used open source plugins for winamp on windows 95 to drive a 2x20 LCD and soft touch interface over parallel port. It allowed browsing though the library by artist, had an 8GB hard disk. I crammed it all into the shell of a compact disk player deck, including the pcb from gutted power supply and routed the 3.5mm line out from the sound card to a pair of RCA on the back of the cabinet. The down side was I had to pull the hard drive to update the library, never got win 95 to allow file transfer over the network with windows XP. Considering i literally slapped it together with junk parts i ha laying around, it worked surprisingly well. Even got an old RS232 media centre remote working with it at one point.
That sounds awesome. In 2000 I used a similar Winamp plugin to use an old Atari 2600 joystick plugged into the DB9 serial port as a controller for it that was always active no matter what other software I was using. Fire button was play/stop, right and left were next and previous track; and up and down were for volume.
Back then it really was amazing to just click on a song, any song, and *instantly* hear that song playing. For decades we had been pulling out tapes and LPs and manually doing something to get to that one song we wanted to hear. I still get a little rush when I see old products like this.
Us nerds had done that a bit longer already, (the PC I used as a teen in 1990 could do that, although not with mp3, but with more simple MOD files. then a few years later I went to university in 1994, and we found this new mp3 craze that just took off in those areas with better internet , like an university would have ( for scientific reasons... sure.... (90% was music and pictures of naked ladies)
@@Blackadder75 How did you convert your CD library into MOD files?
@@Blackadder75 July 1, 1998 was when I discovered MOD files...I listened to that like crazy...I have over 450 of my favorite songs on my phone with the XMP MOD player and it uses less than one tenth of a percent of the 380 gigabytes of storage.
@@Blackadder75 In those days, they should have used the acronym T.O.P. G.U.N. for the Internet. Trans-Oceanic Pathway (for) GIFs, Usually Nudes.
@@brentfisher902 - I still listen to MOD files (XM, IT and so on) and several of my devices have XMP installed, along with several of my Ubuntu-powered machines, which have some derivative that plays them. Can't help but still be amazed at how great they sound when using ModPlug player in various places, and use the "enhancements" to beef up the sound a bit - then write out a MOD to WAV, to create an mp3, with reverb and awesome stereo sound for good measure. DOS isn't dead when you can have it all on a microSD, plugged into a Ras-Pi, and shrink your PC down to quite a miniscule size (then be able to hide it behind a monitor, as well!). :)
'Music Too Long' is totally gonna be a title on a track in my studio sometime in the future....or perhaps 'Erasing Soulmate'
Maybe the SuperCaps only supply enough charge to keep the SD-RAM fresh *while the player is off* - LCD and playback surely drains them in milliseconds. (Love your videos btw. Cheers!)
Yeah a few people have suggested this and I feel boneheaded for not testing it - gonna try later today
In a well-designed circuit the supercap should only power RAM, not entire board.
Though supercaps of the era (and well into 2010s) were losing 20% of their rated capacity in a whopping 1000h at 40°C (yes, that's less than month and a half), thus losing ~85% of capacity a year (at 40°C, with each 10° less doubling and each 10° more halving that).
Two 2.2F supercaps is roughly 3.5mAh when new, and that could theoretically hold three of these RAM chips in low power self-refresh mode for 1.5 hours.
But it's 15 minutes after one year, 2 minutes after two years, and 12 seconds after 3 years (at 40°C, assuming the same degradation rate).
So claims that "supercap retains memory contents for time required to change batteries" are only valid in warranty period. That matches my personal experience with Palm m10x quite well.
I had one of these around late 2000!
I bought it from thinkgeek at a huge discount (like $100) I think it was Creative branded but otherwise identical
I used it while running and I would have to come home halfway through and swap the songs out!
This was also the first time I'd seen t9 input. Loved this thing but some after I got a dedicated AA powered player with a backlit screen, USB and the ability to have folders (wow)
These were such a huge improvement over discman! And I didn't care about the 1x rip, I just loaded one and went to do something else. I would borrow CD sleeves from friends and rip all the best ones too
Also can confirm that you had to twist the door to close it, I was always worried it would break. The portable player started to jam too,you had to be sure to load it straight.
And I just used the main unit to play CDs or I would use the jukebox on shuffle and would skip forward until something I wanted to hear came on.
Ah, yes, I remember the Rio MP3 players. I bought my wife a Rio Sport MP3 player in the early 2000s when the tape player in our car stopped working. The car was already more than 10 years old, and we'd been looking at replacing it, so the Rio Sport with one of those interfaces that looks kind of like a cassette tape (which didn't work because it turned out there was more wrong with the tape player than a loose capstan belt) or a short-range FM transmitter interface (which did work, sort of) made more sense for tiding her over until we got a new car than replacing the radio did. In the end, the Rio Sport proved too fiddly for her, and she just took a battery-powered tape player with her in the car, but I used the Rio Sport to listen to podcasts when working in the kitchen.
Pretty much everything you said about the Rio that you showed also applied to the Rio Sport, except that the Rio Sport had a USB interface for the computer. The problem was that it only had 8MB of built-in flash storage, so it couldn't hold a lot of podcasts (or songs). It had an SD card slot that could accept up to a 128MB SD card, but those were relatively expensive at the time, and I never did use the thing enough to justify buying one. Getting content on to the player was way too complicated. Like the Rio you showed, you had to use the proprietary software that came with the Rio Sport in order to put content on it, and while that software was easy enough to use, it was clunky and would often crash, necessitating a Windows reboot to get it to work again. The Rio Sport was also pretty much locked into the Windows XP world. When our XP computer died in 2011, I was able to continue to use the Rio Sport for awhile via Windows 7's XP Mode, but this took a process that was even more flaky and time-consuming than running the Rio software in native Windows XP.
Eventually, I replaced our junky kitchen boom box with a nice Bluetooth radio that I could feed from my phone or laptop, which rendered the Rio Sport obsolete. But I got a good 13 years of use out of that Rio Sport. For all its shortcomings, I could've done a lot worse back then for $50.
You nailed it. Early mp3 players didn't impress me at all when I could grab a stack of CDs and go. Being able to load a bunch of CDs on got my attention.
Man, I loved T9. Even the annoyances where common words had the same pattern and everyone sent the wrong one half the time. Seeing “fox” briefly for “down” brought back a lot of nostalgia.
Everyone I knew used the T9, but I never got the hang of it or didn't have the patience for it, so I settled for hitting the numbers repeatedly, and I never really had a problem sending texts. I am sure if I had more to say in the moment, then it would have been worthwhile to learn, but most of my replies were short or I just chose to talk on the phone instead. I remember my brother trying to teach me how to use it, but I was having no part of it. I know that a large part of learning how to do it would help with texting while driving as it was potentially faster to use T9 for that task, but If I had to text, I would just pull the car over. No reason to get into an accident because of it.
@@Khorne_of_the_Hill Have you seen that rotary LTE cell phone?
@@russelllukenbill yeah I nearly always disabled it because the dictionary struggled with a lot of local words. But it was still semi common until the smartphones dominated the market making it largely redundant, that said I'm sure there's still phones that use it being used because some don't adapt and others prefer not to use smartphones with their perceived issues real or not (privacy I will give them some of the others are more personal biases).
@@cericat That about sums it up. I have noticed in the last few days CZcams has also added predictive text. This may have been on here a while and I have finally been updated, or it was a feature I turned on by accident, but I am going to try and remove it as well. It is not nearly as bad though because I can just ignore the suggestions. Cheers.
i just sent my phone number and talked. It was mostly to stay in touch with my mother anyhow, no reason to get too good at it. Mom didn't care.
It recording at 1:1 makes me wonder if the "secure MP3" was actually their way of describing "direct audio recording into our own proprietary format that's kinda based on MP3"
But there is a label from the Frauenhofer institute on the box, MP3 is a licensed format after all. So if they did their own secret sauce codec why pay for the expensive license
Reading the Manual and going through all of the grief was really educational and nice of you so as to create this Video . I feel now I could get more use out of one of these if I found one . Thank you for this creation and MP3 0n ! :) QC
To add to your but about the Diamond Rio from the start of the video: I remember the early days of portable MP3 players in the UK. Specifically, I remember a portion of a BBC news segment about them where they interviewed a woman who was a runner, and she said it's great that she can strap it to her arm like her normal CD Player (yes, they really did sell arm sleeves for CD Players) and listen to music on the go without it eventually skipping like even the best CD Player of the time. The downsides were numerous though: CDs took forever to rip, the quality wasn't as good, the player was costly, but given it was just before the debut of Windows XP, it meant fumbling in the dark with Win9x USB support or, heaven forbid, parallel ports, or dirt slow USB1.1 on some kind of Mac if the software even ran on on MacOS8 at all (and if it did, it'd be on the same.basement level as music match for windows) and overall she was disappointed but was keeping it for the "skip protection" as that was such a killer feature to have in something higher quality and still more convenient than making a mix tape or two.
I wonder why she didn’t go with MiniDisc.
@@kaitlyn__L To put music onto it at the time would've required a separate hifi component where you literally recorded content onto it like you would a tape deck. Music files transferred from a PC would require yet more unnecessarily complex steps and software, files were stored in a Sony proprietary ATRAC format that at the time was worse quality than MP3, meaning all these new fangled internet music files would need to be converted to ATRAC, disks were expensive, commercial music was never (or seldom) released on the format, and you *still* had to deal with the fact that you had a spinning piece of metal in your pocket. My older brother had both a hifi component and portable minidisk player, and his collection of mini disks was SMALL. You may as well use a cassette deck with good quality tape and the result will be just as convenient and noticeably cheaper.
@@benanderson89 almost all the portable players could record, and indeed most people used them to get their CD collection skip free.
Not for downloaded music. Was she explicit about using it for Napster on the BBC? Of course if your number one intention is free downloads that changes things, as NetMD players hadn’t yet launched.
Cassette decks were absolutely susceptible to shocks as well, and the runner you quoted was apparently besting CD skip protection regularly. She’s willing to pay a premium for more robust skip protection, so I wouldn’t be surprised if increased flutter would bother her too.
Of course it’s all just academic at this point.
@@kaitlyn__L and there's the problem in your first sentence: RECORD. Ripping a CD on a PC in 1999 plus a data transfer to an MP3 player, even over pathetic USB1.1 speeds, is faster than realtime playback of a full album. Plus, once you've got your MP3s, they're just *on* your computer, so if you wanted to swap what tracks you had on a device, just tell the software to overwrite them and they'd transfer to a flash device instead of a magneto optical one that needed another stage of conversion in-between to a proprietary format. Minidisk was not the answer even at the time when cassette players were cheap and refined and sounded way better than you remember. Yeah, wow and flutter was a thing but it's not pausing the music entirely to rebuild the CD buffer, and really, unless you had the *cheapest* cassette player, it was pretty minimal. My _meh_ Aiwa barely flinched when I ran around with it (albeit in my pocket).
A loooooot of MP3s could be purchased legally at the time. It wasn't just napster.
I'll give you the recordable portable players; that totally slipped my mind they could all do that.
@@benanderson89 If you're planning on dealing with an MP3 music library, then obviously an MP3 player is kind of your inherently ideal solution. But if you're the kind of person who jogs with an arm-strap CD Walkman, then the Mini-disc workflow isn't really that difficult. Just plug it into your CD player and rip a few discs you want to exercise to. Sure it's real time, but you can rip a few discs or even old workout mixtapes if you wanted, and that only takes a few hours to do. Then you can stick all those discs in your pocket and you've already got a few hours of music on the go. It's not exactly fancy without using the clunky software to manage the files but it's functional for at least a significant portion of portable music player users at the time, so i think it could certainly have been a good solution for some people.
Edit: Remember, some of these early players couldn't even hold much more than a minidisc and it was mostly expensive flash memory, so minidisc was at least a *cheaper* way to carry multiple CDs worth of music in one pocket at that time.
47:12 The gradually increasing rant intensity followed immediately back to back by the "every part of the electronic animal" joke is the absolutely hilarious entertainment that I keep coming back to this channel for.
Gotta love that they use VCR recording terms for their encoder quality settings. And I flashed back to the days when music from the iTunes store was DRM’d out the wazoo, and when other stores came along that sold music DRM-free, Apple’s first response was to start selling DRM-free versions at a markup as a premium item, then let users rebuy DRM-free versions of music they already owned at a discount, and then grudgingly replacing the tracks for free.
Great video! I always love a good "Oh noooooo, THAT'S what they're doing..." moment.
Your average music listener back then bought an album for 1 or 2 songs. Those early MP3 players only holding a handful of songs wasn't a that huge issue as that was essentially "a dozen CDs" to that type of average person who only listens to the hits.
I'm guessing the use of the term "mix" to describe a playlist is intended as a reference to mix-tapes, a style of homemade audio cassette where people would pick a mixture of songs and record them to a single tape. This is essentially the origin of the concept of the playlist to begin with, since prior to mp3 audio and CD burning this was the only way you could choose what songs to listen to on a song-by-song basis in a single piece of media.
This is making me remember my excitement at bringing home my Sony minidisk recorder And recording some of my 1960s jazz albums onto it and also CDs from friends that were on loan. And typing in every track and title. Their solution was a keypad on the remote that was pretty easy to use once you did it but you certainly got a lot of practice if you chose to have a lot of albums.
So happy you've found a niche/voice/format that you can be an undisputed master of.
The Palm III personal organizer released in 1998 used a similar memory setup to the Soulmate. It also runs on AAA batteries and uses a capacitor to allow it to retain data during the battery change. You turn it off so as not to use more power than needed and change them quickly. The manual says you have up to a minute. You could try changing the batteries with the Soulmate off to see if the capacitors still have any capacity.
A lot of devices can hold contents for a minute or more if idle when batteries are swapped, but will lose contents if they're active when the power supply is disconnected because by the time the CPU finds out that power is going away, the caps would already be mostly discharged.
Hi, long time fan but just wanted to let you know that your personality is very friendly and energetic that makes these videos a breeze to view. Thank you for making these videos
Started grinning with pure joy when I saw the per-genre EQ coming a few seconds before you said it. I’m a religiously flat EQ guy but if I wanted to mess around with it having different settings per genre actually seems… pretty smart? I think that rules quite a bit
I remember when I got my Rio PMP300 in 1999. I loved that thing and took it with me everywhere. Putting music on it wasnt that bad. The novelty of it all negated the inconvenience. Really, the biggest drawback was the lack of space. To the point that I made due with a very low bitrate in order to fill it with more music.And it was fine, because up till that point, I had used self recorded and worn cassettes and FM radio.
I held onto that guy till I retired it in favor of a Creative Nomad Zen with a little hard drive in it. Now that thing was obnoxious to use, but I loved it too. Eventually settled with a Zune 30 that I replaced the drive with a 100 GB ipod hard drive.
The way I look at the late 1990s, early 2000s: Shit was thrown at walls and fans...what stuck was what got accepted. For good or bad, that era was an insane time to live in. But to me, from 1983 to 2003 was a wild ride with tech. Being born in '83 and experiencing the changes in the early 1990s, and the explosion in tech....I still have trouble wrapping my head around things 22 years ago even now.
Lol, the bit about the text input and T9 was so funny to me. In 2000, we were all absolute pros at entering text using either or both of these methods, since this was how we all communicated with each other when we weren't using MSN Messenger 😂
I was doing digital audio extraction in 1995 with Winamp and some special plugins. And a soundboard with high quality output. Its how I have always played cd music on my computer. Though it was a bit CPU intensive. My sound board did have DSP functions to handle some offload which allowed a Cyrix 5x86 120 to handle it with ease.
MAN I love this channel. I suspect we're roughly the same age (late 30s - early 40s) and got into computers at the same time. I've been around them all my life but didn't start building them until 1997 or 98, so all of this formerly cutting edge stuff is giving me a huge nostalgia buzz. Great stuff!
Those quality options would be instantly recognizable to anyone in 2000. They correspond exactly with the quality settings on VHS tape players.
I worked for a while for Dig Media (pronounced Dig as in "I dig it", not Dig as in "Didgeredoo"), a bit later.
I was working on a later product called SoundCast, that was intended to be a HiFi component web radio player, that would display on a colour LCD information on the "station", track, artist info etc. I developed a custom markup language (SCML) that could respond to media events (eg. the start of a new track) and update the display accordingly - at worst simply display the track info, at best show custom graphics authored by the person writing the web "station".
Of course, it suffered the broadband problem - broadband simply wasn't common enough for this to be a realistic product. The only people likely to have broadband were students on campus, who quite likely didn't have the budget to spend on it.
It was probably the most fun I had on a development project though.
I was given a musicstore and soulmate when I started, but to be honest found it so unusable it pretty well sat on a shelf.
One thing I will say about your videos they are very detailed and well-put together. Thank you.
I remember lusting after the Kenwood Music Keg around this time. Ten whole gigabytes! a hard drive for your car! Also it was expensive as hell, all proprietary, and utterly outclassed by basically any other solution in a few years. Seemed real neat at the time though.
Thanks so much for another great dive into a piece of tech I was oblivious to. The detail and length of these videos are perfect!
I just love all your videos! Its amazing how you can still find all these cool electronics and show and explain them to us all viewers!! :)
And the guy is so funny that.. it's no longer funny 🤣.
His comments are hilarious.
I would really try to change those capacitors just to see if they can keep the SDRAM alive :D Good to know that they aren’t Button cells that leak and damage the circuit board 👍🏻
I love how vintage tech content creators and the community are always recommending and shouting out each other
I remember this thing vaguely. I also remember the state of non-ipod mp3 players.. My solution was to get a portable CD player (a Panasonic if I remember right) that handled mp3s on CD. Sort of the best of both worlds at the time as you could fill an 800mb CD with a lot of tracks and it was way cheaper than any reasonable mp3 player. Eventually I got an ipod mini. But that little Panasonic player was fantastic
mp3-CD players really are a great underrated option that most consumers never took advantage of. I still have a Sony portable CD player and car stereo that play them and periodically still burn new mp3-CDs for them. My blu-ray player in my home theater system also plays them.
That section you explained regarding CD audio playback on older PC drives really took me back to building machines in the mid 90's. Its important to note that they also had a dedicated PC audio cable that linked right from the back of the drive to a header on the sound card. Ahhhh sweet nostalgia!
It's important to note, and indeed it was noted.
@@nickwallette6201 doh! I must have missed it.
I remember building a new pc back in the day and looking for that connection. I was really confused why it wasn't there. That was the day I realised that I'd wasted money on a sound card.
This device is something i'd have used had I been the age I am now in 2000, today I have an Core2Duo based HP laptop with a 500GB HDD connected to my hi-fi essentially doing what this device does. It boots and auto starts Winamp, i choose an album in the media library (all in FLAC format) and then start a visualisation and enjoy the music. I paid £25 for my laptop and it's from 2006 or 7 so running XP it's barely breaking into a sweat.
I'm just using my old Galaxy S5 Mini as a music player, converting my FLACs to OPUS and putting them on a 16 gig SD-card in the phone.
I’m still using Winamp to this day as well. It still kicks the llama’s ass.
I am not sure if i would have used this but in the 2000s i really missed out on a lot of technology that looked useful in retrospect but my mindset was too old school. and Did they have podcasts in the year 2000?
@@belstar1128 Possibly but i wasn't aware of them. Had they existed downloading one, even only 30 minutes long, on a 56k modem would've taken ages to download, easily an hour. Broadband was around as was ISDN but it would be a couple of years before they were feasible.
@@Martipar Yea but couldn't they have made them low quality. you don't need good audio for podcasts compared to music 32 kbps would be enough. that should even be able to be livestreamed with dial up. it would be bad quality but as long as you can understand what they where saying it should be good enough.
even today on my phone i compress my podcasts into 18kbps ogg files because i have low storage and mobile data is overprized in my country. but an ogg file has more efficient compression .it sounds like an old radio broadcast and that did not exist in 2000
I absolutely love that you included an image of the HDD with this video. Top notch!
You research and explain a tremendous amount of detail! I marvel at how you can get all this together! 🙂
Some VCRs/TVs used supercaps in the late 80's and later to save tuning and date/time data. "supercaps" have been around for a while, whats more modern about newer ones is making them in larger than 2 Farad and being capable of really high charge/discharge currents
Wow that's a blast from the past. I had a soul mate mp3 player back in the day. 48mb of solid state storage in your pocket. Enough for two albums if you didn't care about quality. The cool kids had mini disc players.
Amusing to see your name here. I hope everything's going well. Minidiscs were once thought to be cool? I missed that.
It's funny, if you go to your car and try to equalize the song, they put the "genre" or "style" at there, so you can put in reggae, rock, blues etc, at the Panasonic or Sony mp3 players, for cars, the "shuffle" function sometimes is called "mix" until today and if you want to select a playlist from a pendrive, there is "mix tracks" hahahaha
Edit: in Brazil, we still use mp3 players with pendrives for cars.
You're not alone, my car's stereo supports BT but only for Apple so worthless with my phone, so while my car was on the road a pendrive lived in it so I had music since the local radio stations are mostly a bunch of nutters. The exceptions are a station I helped setup, which is hard to get reception for in most of the town and a pretty low end local station that's all volunteers.
Really interesting video - kept me intrigued! Great research and work, thanks!
A great potential add-on for these types of videos would be to have some interviews with people who actually used this thing. It would be cool to hear that experience
Would be hard to actually find someone who used this one.
The DSP is most likely running heavy number crunching like the FFT for the MP3 compression / decompression, as this would overwhelm an 2000style ARM CPU and the low cost FPGA, but be easy for the DSP.
The “SP”, “LP” AND “ELP” nomenclature would have been very recognisable to the average consumer back in the day. My VCR had the same settings/options and some blank VHS tapes used to write the same on their packaging (to indicate they were compatible and worked well at the slower speeds).
Yup
Would always record everything in ELP on the vcr
Your sacrifice a little quality but could fit way more on each tape
Yeah, I had a flood of nostalgia seeing those abbreviations again after so long.
I just love how they went to such effort to prevent piracy, then included software that just lets you rip CDs to your PC with no restrictions.
You finally found your soul mate! Yay! I'm so happy for you!
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Awwww... You erased your soulmate. My condolences.
I remember owning a soulmate stand alone, my first MP3. I also remember the volatile memory. I remember moding the battery holder to trickle the nicads I used and leaving it on a wall wart all the time when not in use to hold the memory. Supercaps were available at the time and were used in VCRs to back up the clock. I remember changing them. They could not output much current though compared to what we use today. I remember being glad when I got a more modern stick MP3 128mb with proper flash memory and better buttons. Thanks for the video, Daz
love your channel dude. Just subscribed. My brother was a big nerd in the 90s and 2000s. He got my parents to buy all of us rio players it was awesome for a while. I do recall going back to CD players for that little period between the Rios creation and the first I Pod. Especially since my brother introduced me to News bin groups back then and I downloaded MASSIVE amounts of music lol. I actually just found all our old Rios and I pods the other day while helping my parents move. It's pretty awesome.
you do get that massive mp3 collection, broadband downloads, and no pc scenario today, it just exists in federal prison, i've had several people pay me to retrieve all the mp3's they bought while in jail off of the sansa music player they bought in jail, filled from a dedicated music terminal in jail, and never were allowed to touch a pc
When I was in jail the only music option was a radio. In prison some of the guys had CD and cassette players.
@@danieldaniels7571 yeah i meant prison for the rest of it but it's definitely a more modern thing
it apparently goes through the TRULINCS system for loading music, having never been to federal prison i only ever encounter this from ex inmates
@@Mister_Brown that’s fascinating. I was released from an Arizona state prison in early ‘99 so I expect much has changed, and federal prison is a completely different animal. On that note, Techmoan has a really interesting video on prison inmate tech, but it doesn’t cover anything mp3 based like you described. I’d love to learn more about it, but have no plans on ever going back.
A note on the included HDD in the MusicStore - That drive sounds much like the hard drives sounded in the late 90's. So I'm guessing that the drive included in the unit you have there is "new old stock" that was had for cheaper than spinning rust from the turn of the century.
Thanks for putting another great deep dive together on something that I wanted so bad when I was younger! Lol
@2:30 in, its a modem isn't it.
Its always a modem.
Amazing journey as always, thanks for your work
You're awesome, I love watching your videos!
Maybe it's just so painfully 2000-generic looking that I'm misremembering, but I SWEAR I remember seeing that Soulmate thing under a different brand, or maybe even rebranded as a generic gift/promo item back in the 2000s. That design is really ringing a bell despite me never ever hearing of the Soulmate before.
I had one of these (like 22 years ago ) so I can't remember for sure but I think mine might have had different branding too
Well it looks kinda like a Mega drive with the CD expansion.
@@synapticburn lmfao anything else would have been better, so you didnt have to constantly ERASE THE SOULMATE
The girl at least is a stock photo. The "head first design patterns" book is the same person in the same outfit.
It was memory corporation in the U.K.
Missed opportunity to plug that CD drive into a PC to find out how fast it could have been had they used IDE to transfer the music. Also interesting to see what happens if you plugged a PC CD (or DVD drive even?) drive into that thing's IDE interface. As long as the drive had the digital audio output port would it work? Curious how the IDE master/slave thing is set on that. Did it use the cable to set that or was there a jumper somewhere on it like a normal PC drive?
Maybe you can revisit this in a CZcams short? ;)
22:07 mad props for correctly referincing Bonkers
Between the Rio and the iPod, there was one product category that's often overlooked: MP3-enabled discmans. You could just burn 10 albums on one CD-R. Or better yet, use a CD-RW as a cheap reusable storage for your player. And it could play your original albums as well.
I've never owned one of those myself, and I've read a lot of bad things about them: that they were clunky, had bad UX, felt cheap and all that. But on paper at least, that concept made a lot of sense: it wasn't worse than a regular portable CD player in any way other than the price, in fact it had all the features of one, and with a help of a CD burner (which were already pretty common in the early 2000s) it also allowed you to take roughly 10x the music on the same amount of physical media, at a much better value proposition than flash memory. So it perplexes me that they're rarely mentioned in retrospect.
This has been one of the routes I’ve used since Y2K. Not only have I owned several portable CD players with mp3 playback since then, but also every car stereo and DVD/Blu-ray player since 2005 has also had this feature so I can play my mp3-CDs in my car and home a/v systems as well.
Imo 128kbps mp3 could sound totally fine _if_ you used the correct encoder settings (i.e. lame - 9; which of course most people did not). Of course in 2000 those correct settings would have seen you waiting quite some time for it to finish encoding (0.25x, if you're lucky)
Which brings me on to another thing, this device probably couldn't have done the encoding any faster than 1x anyway, so a better extraction method wouldn't have been relevant.
But I wo der why they didn't shove a USB or ps2 port on the back for an external keyboard. A simple change change that would have drastically improved the usability.
The ram bit caught me totally off-guard. What a whacky idea.
Q: could the Dock charge the handheld?
Q: was the media unlocked while the handheld is docked, even without wiping? If yes, what happens if you yank the handheld out while playing one of those tracks?
I'm tempted to look at that drive image and see what I can figure out, if anything
I didn't see any obvious traces to the battery compartment during the pulldown from the dock, or other common elements for charging so probably not. Maybe they're in the sealed part of the battery compartment but seems unlikely.
when you said the device loses tracks when you unpower it I started smiled lmao.
Also fancy fining an fpga in such a chaep products in the early 2000, probably necessary to encode their propetary usb maybe?
There's a chip I didn't mention that appears to be a USB interface, but it's true that I don't know how much intelligence it has, and the FPGA might be necessary to handle most of the conversation
i really dig you - so good luck with your quest xxx
I looked at that image, the data isn't encrypted, its just obfuscated, the machine applies a circular bit shift operation every 512 bytes to the data stored on the drive, with each byte offset from 1-512 being a different value shifted. This can be observed as repeating patterns in areas of the disk that you would expect to be zeros.
We need a decoded image!
@@Ipergorilla so CRD did a video on an email conversation with one of the engineers who worked on this, this is now what i think is a rolling cypher, and it would need to be brute forced
Damn you have not only an Assemblage 23 track in your MusicMatch playlist, it's a Funker Vogt remix of an A23 track! I did a double take. That's impeccable music taste in my eyes!
Man I was in withdrawal desperately searching for a fix. Thank you for itching that scratch! I knew you would come through. Over an hour long CRD goodness?! Proof there is an omnipresent being out here doling out peoples
Iriver was so far ahead of the game and everyone had one. It was great!
I miss them.
I loved my iRiver, but never met anyone else who had one.
@@danieldaniels7571 in high school, it's all anyone had. A discman or an iriver.
@@dpc4548 I graduated high school in 1988. Everyone either had a cassette Walkman, or an off-brand wanna-be walkman.
@@danieldaniels7571 that was my primary school! Good times.
Wow. I just spent an hour and 25 minutes watching a breakdown of a product from 23 years ago that I never even knew existed, and this is not the first time Cathode Ray Dude has pulled me in with a video I really shouldn't care about at all. You are an excellent writer and presenter. If you regularly talked about more popular subjects, or you moved into tech reviews or something similar, you could have a lot more subscribers. Excellent work 👏 👍 and I hope to see more of your videos
Erasing soulmate just about killed me
I'm surprised how enjoyable the video was. At first glance I thought it would be too long, but I finally watched it all and it was interesting.
damn, every music/band namedrop in here is golden. you have great taste, gravis!
It really is a thrilling feeling when a new CRD drops. Please keep doing what your doing, best damn channel on this site!
"Lucky Dip" sounds like something for tobacco-addicted superstitious baseball players from the 1940's. "Hey, sonny, fetch me my lucky dip."
Just wanna say this is my favourite CRD video by far, I’ve watched it probably hundreds of times atp
This was the video that that persuaded me to do this........SUBSCRIBE. Good to be here man, you cheered me up.
The flip-open spindle CD drive is very similar to a very early barebones tabletop consumer CD player sold by Sears under their LXi brand. My family owned one. It also only read CDs at 1x and had no frills but sold at least some units because it was an affordable device at a time when home CD players cost a lot.
Wouldn't be surprised if the CD door warped and that's why it was hard to close. It was probably *just* good enough when it was brand new to close smoothly
Nice Dankpods shoutout! Him, LGR, and Techmoan are what got me into retro tech!
Great video!
I remember upgrading to an MP3 player in about 2002 after having a discman for a couple of years. The first (and subsequent) players that I had were small USB dongle sized players that were powered by a single AAA battery. My initial reason for doing this was actually related to the battery life itself, and not any kind of audio or usage advantage over a discman. From memory they lasted a bit longer than a dual battery discman, which meant my battery consumption was twice as efficient with the solid state MP3 player compared to the mechanical discman. I think the first one I purchased was 64mb, but I already had a growing library of MP3s on my PC that I mostly ripped from CD. I do remember getting my hands on a discman that supported CD Data so that I could burn 700mb of lower quality MP3s that stored a lot more, but it didn't solve my battery consumption issue. The great thing about those little dongle players, even though they had a super basic LCD UI, was that it supported ID3 and had pretty tough plastic buttons. Each 6-12 months I'd upgrade them to the next highest storage, so by 2003 I had at least 128mb and by 2004 was at least 512mb. I also remember converting a lot of my library to 96kbps MP3 as a trade off for size/quality. I used to travel nearly 5 hours per day to and from high school, and with a discman I'd have to take spare batteries to school, but with the dongle players I could get a full day of playback without needing spare batteries.
A lot of the pros you list in this video would have been really attractive to me as a 15 year old in 2002 but the DRM quirks would have been really off putting. I loved being able to manage my tracks directly through Winamp, so I could jam in my USB MP3 player and organise or add/remove tracks from Winamp itself. To a certain degree I still use this style of music management, but I use the awesome MediaMonkey software (based on Winamp) to manage my several thousand CD library, and use it to either stream them over a DNLA network service, or transfer to UFD for the car, or yes, even still burn mix CDs (as I own CDJ equipment and used to perform with them). I rip almost all of my music as HQ FLAC these days, with a 320kbps MP3 copy in each album's folder, so that I can quickly copy MP3s to a data CD for the DJ gear, or use the FLACs for the car or my phone.
I am recent subscriber to your channel but I've been enjoying every minute of your content 😁 I will be enjoying your videos for years to come, and wish I had discovered you sooner. Greetings from Australia 👋
Excellent detailed review.
To my mind the UI is the key thing that held it back. Had it had a better UI, who knows, perhaps it would have done much better.
P.S. Solar watches as well as self-winding electronic watches (e.g. the Seiko 'Kinetic' range and its predecessors) used to use those types of capacitors. However, they were phased out in favour of physically compatible rechargeable cells as the capacitors tended to degrade rather quickly. The rechargeable cells last a lot longer in service.
i want to meet the like one guy who got this thing near its release, paid full price, and used the hell out of it for like a half decade or maybe even a whole one
I absolutely promise there were people who loved this thing, and some of them are almost certainly still using it.
@@CathodeRayDude i could see it. i mean you could fit all the ffxiv soundtracks at 128k in there still, so i could find use for it if pressed 😂
5gb is a lot at that bitrate. could see use out of putting your like 70ish cd collection in there and not having to fiddle with discs to change albums and have library shuffle. even if you just put in like 1-2 cds a week due to all the t9 data entry and 1x ripping you'd have the thing filled up within a couple of years
oh yeah while im here: if the batteries fall out of the soulmate, can you still unlock your tracks by putting it in and doing the reset, or do you have to re-rip whatever you lost?
I had this at the time but got it on a killer deal at thinkgeek like $100
I had a great stereo and car stereo, but this was just for the gym and garage to be a jukebox. I just loaded every CD myself and my friends liked at the time and left it on shuffle when working out or having parties etc
I still have my first mp3 player. And the 64MB SmartMedia card I bought for iirc $150 back in the day. Damn, those things were expensive back then...
Enjoyed this cool find!
I appreceiate that your choice of Norwegian Black Metal was Dimmu Borgir back when their name was in unreadable black speech of Mordor
>super capacitors in the portable unit
I think that it was more intended for power loss protection during jogging etc. where the batteries would disconnect for a short period of time due to gravity
Also, the power jack in the battery compartment etc. makes me think that they considered making a rechargeable battery pack for it, but it never reached the needed success for it to be relevant