LGR - Diamond Rio PMP300 MP3 Player from 1998
Added 2022-01-31 22:31:52 +0000 UTCMP3s!! In the late nineties there were few things more exciting in the world of music, computers, the internet, and general gadgetry. And the original 1998 Diamond Rio was one of the trailblazers that kicked off the whole portable digital audio player craze. It may not have been the very first, but it came close! If nothing else its impact was notable, being the first of its kind to be commercially successful in North America, and the legal pushback it endured from the RIAA set a lasting precedent for all other MP3 players to come.
Yeah this is a mighty important bit of tech history that I've wanted to talk about for a long time, so I'm happy to finally have this complete and ready to share. I've held onto this new old stock PMP300 for years now so finally releasing it from its plastic prison was exciting enough on its own. And wow, these things sure got harder to find boxed in recent years huh? Back when I got mine they were all over eBay. Not so much anymore.
Covering this has also gotten me in the mood to revisit more digital audio players from 1998 to 2003 or so, since that little half-decade-long explosion in the market was a lot more fun to revisit than I anticipated. I hope you enjoy!
Comments
I had the Creative Labs Zen Nano. I think it died from battery leakage.
SuperTekBoy
2022-02-20 13:53:29 +0000 UTCDang, I had no idea. That's rad!
LGR
2022-02-06 01:41:16 +0000 UTCSaw master Zap! He deserves his own retrospective. He’s been online as long as I’ve known, back to 94 or so. He’s given away a free drum synth program called Stomper that whole time. It was responsible for a ton of drum sounds on stuff before more commercial dance music products started to become available. Over the years he’s been into all sorts of tech memes like vrml, ray tracing, etc.
K8T
2022-02-05 17:00:45 +0000 UTCI remember listening to an mp3 file for the first time when we got our first PC back in 2000. It was an Intel Celeron 633 with 64MB RAM and a "MASSIVE" 20GB Seagate HDD (it was slow AF, but I didn't know better 🤷🏽♂️). The guy who built our PC installed Winamp (after installing a SUPREMELY LEGIT copy of Windows 98) with a slew of 90s Bollywood songs. Later, all the music shops that used to sell legit audio cassettes started selling SUPREMELY LEGITIMATE CDs with the latest Bollywood mp3 soundtracks (along with SUPREMELY LEGIT VCDs) and that's how we sourced our music for the longest time, since Broadband took a long time to arrive in my (Indian) Tier-2 city and we had dial-up for the longest time. When DSL arrived in 2006-2007ish, an exchange student from Germany introduced me to Limewire and I was hooked! In fact, Limewire is how I discovered and started listening to international music. NuMetal, in particular. It's surprising that I never used Napster, I only heard about it in the 2010s when I started following and reading tech news. As far as hardware is concerned, I have never owned a portable mp3 player. iPods were prohibitively expensive in India and I was pretty content with listening to music on cassettes on my Aiwa portable cassette player, on the move. Otherwise, I'd fire up Winamp on my PC and listen to mp3s I had downloaded from Limewire or on CDs purchased at my neighbourhood music store. As far as portable audio is concerned, I think I went straight from my Aiwa to listening on my Moto Razr V3i, the one with the truncated iTunes support. All of my subsequent phones had mp3 support, most memorable of which was the Walkman branded Sony Ericsson W810i. I even bought a 4GB Memory Stick ProDuo (remember those? 😅) for it, which wasn't officially supported but worked fine. 4GB seemed huge back then. At any rate, the point being that I find these videos about portable multimedia players immensely interesting because I skipped this format entirely. I, essentially, leaped from cassettes to mobile.
Karan Deshmukh
2022-02-04 10:35:05 +0000 UTCIs it okay to say that you downloaded from Napster? Like do you think someone could still go after you?
Steve Lovelace
2022-02-04 05:41:09 +0000 UTCThere are two cables on a CD-ROM drive: analog and digital. Analog sends the CD audio directly to the sound card through an analog 4-pin header on the card. Digital grabs the data digitally through the IDE cable and doesn't bother with analog audio output :)
LGR
2022-02-03 18:16:29 +0000 UTCOh man, the RCA Lyra... I loved the hell out of that thing when I was a kid, its 15GB or whatever it was was incredible compared to the 500MB Rio I started with. What the heck is the Digital / Analog "recording method" switch in Musicmatch? Isn't ripping a CD just, uh, ripping a CD?
Ezra Knickelbine
2022-02-03 17:43:12 +0000 UTCI only knew one person at the time who had it, and I was insanely jealous! Lucky enough, a year or two later my parents bought me a Sony Network Walkman NW-E3 which had twice the storage in 1/4 the size. Despite resembling a lighter, I think its design still holds, so I put it on display in my living room. Lost the cable ages ago, so it's a musical time capsule to a more embarrassing time in my life.
Asaf Sagi
2022-02-02 21:44:44 +0000 UTCGot my first player in 2001. Weird no-name thingy from a local discounter. Technically, it is still alive, but that early USB connectivity is a royal pain. 🙄
msuboot
2022-02-02 14:58:19 +0000 UTCIt's weird seeing something from that era that looks pretty well put-together. Reminds me of my first MP3 player, which I believe was a full 3.5" hard drive in a caddy. It had a lot of space for songs, but... yeah, not very portable, and pretty ugly overall. I'll have to see if I've still got that around somewhere, and see what gems are on there...
James Cheese
2022-02-02 14:16:30 +0000 UTCHey nice! I've been wondering how many owners of the PMP300 splurged on an expansion card :)
LGR
2022-02-02 00:01:40 +0000 UTCThank you!
LGR
2022-02-02 00:01:13 +0000 UTCit's the flying slider burger across the screen and smoke haze in the video for me hahahahaha. Great video as always!
DFawlt Uzr
2022-02-01 23:51:29 +0000 UTCI had one of these... in 2002. An early eBay purchase for high school me. I got an expansion card for it too so it wasn't completely useless lol
Dave Hunt
2022-02-01 23:40:43 +0000 UTCMy dad still uses a 128MB Creative MuVo TX, despite having a smartphone with 64GB of storage. He seems fine listening to the same single album over and over again.
Matt Tester
2022-02-01 23:09:05 +0000 UTCI still have my own first mp3 player, the Pontis SP 600, and still remember having much fun with Napster and later KaZaA Lite. Nowadays i buy music i like on Bandcamp tough, just because they offer DRM free mp3s and i can use them in one of my ancient but still working players. Most of them have just one little problem, i need to hoard 2 GByte SD cards as for example the Pontis can not access SDHC cards. And CF cards of similar size for the same player. ^^'
BastetFurry
2022-02-01 18:38:15 +0000 UTCI was just chatting with someone not long ago about SideWinder coverage. It'll quite likely happen, yeah!
LGR
2022-02-01 17:42:01 +0000 UTCIt does! Counterintuitive at first seeing as the parallel connection itself is almost as big as the device is. Makes sense they went with a PDA-style data cable connecting to that!
LGR
2022-02-01 16:19:56 +0000 UTCI went from a minidisc player to ipod mini after that came out, so never played around with all these things! Minidisc was _so cool_ at the time compared to these, more audio and sounded great. I do remember heavily using "allofmp3" in college. They had a Russian radio license? And claimed that covered them for selling MP3s. Worked for a while, I guess! I'm still a fan of offline music, between bandcamp and discogs I'm pretty much set. Edit - Are you coming out with a mix disc for "totally legit mp3"?
JennaKay
2022-02-01 13:37:35 +0000 UTCI had the JazPiper MV32P, which came out around the same period. It came with 32MB of memory, and was expandable via smart card to 64MB total. Amazing little device.
Martin Ravensholt
2022-02-01 10:31:58 +0000 UTCI remember getting a Diamond Rio 600 for my first MP3 player, a mere 32MB with an offer to register and get a 32MB addon pack. Even then it was barely enough space for an album at good quality. I stuck to my tapes in the end as it was so much of a faff to use, how far we've come along!
Mat Cooper
2022-02-01 09:51:29 +0000 UTCMay I suggest the iRiver H340, plus a CF upgrade, plus RockBox? That thing could even play Gameboy games in the end!
Adam Baxter
2022-02-01 08:04:45 +0000 UTCI’m disappointed you didn’t find some way to show something on your iPad Pro, in a Shrek Green iPad cover…
Darryl Sell
2022-02-01 07:26:05 +0000 UTCThe fact that it's using a parallel port instead of USB makes this a lot cooler :D
Uncleawesome
2022-02-01 06:43:42 +0000 UTCOne of the Nomad Jukeboxes perhaps, those things were beastly in their day. Nice!
LGR
2022-02-01 05:47:19 +0000 UTCIt uses the analog audio cable on the CD-ROM drive that connects to the header on the sound card. Something I don't recall ever using back in the day!
LGR
2022-02-01 05:45:14 +0000 UTCWhat was the analogue option in MusicMatch? Did it record via soundcard linein or something?
zephyrmo
2022-02-01 05:03:20 +0000 UTCI'll never forget my first MP3 player, I bought it on eBay. A 200 GB creative Nomad. It was the size and shape of a CD player but held so much storage for music! I was the cool kid at summer camp because I had a huge variety of music on it and nobody had a MP3 player at the time! It made me really stand out! It was awesome
Terry Lee
2022-02-01 03:38:38 +0000 UTCMy first MP3 player (and my day to day for a long time) was the Rio S10. Most definitely better than the Diamond. But this was a treat to watch. Also the "PC throwing discs at the player" animation is quite pleasing. Edit: and yes, this video brought back early childhood memories. Shoveling snow after quickly loading Linkin Park's Meteora on the S10 and listening to music in a compact and portable device. Magic.
Eric Barch
2022-02-01 03:32:00 +0000 UTCI had the Rio Car player. Originally called the Empeg Car, it was bought out by the same company that bought the Rio line from Diamond, and renamed Rio Car. It was a single-DIN unit that fit into your dashboard's single-DIN radio slot (or half of a double-DIN slot, with a special adapter). It had a handle where you could pull out the entire unit (leaving the wires connected to the vehicle's harness), bring it into the house, plug it into your network via Ethernet (WiFi wasn't really a thing at that point -- maybe it existed, but it definitely wasn't popular enough to be in a device like this), and transfer songs to its internal 4GB laptop hard drive. It ran on a distro of Linux, and was absolutely the coolest piece of tech I owned at the time. I eventually upgraded the hard drive and had literally my entire CD collection with me in the car at all times. Long before that was a thing. Wish I still had it -- I'd totally let you borrow it and make a video with it. But I sold it on eBay probably 15 years ago now...
Laurence MacNeill
2022-02-01 03:31:50 +0000 UTCGlad someone else is bothered by that, heh. Downloading files *to* something just never sits right with me. The very first thing I did with the first car I bought was install an MP3-capable stereo. I don't think I ever played an actual audio CD in there, it never made sense!
LGR
2022-02-01 03:27:23 +0000 UTCKind of. Audible had their own audio compression format that was used on the Mobile Player I covered on LGR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veSsIDmyQyc The Diamond Rio supported Audible audiobooks, but only in the sense that Audible started releasing MP3-converted versions of some of their content. So it didn't do anything different to what I showed in the video, far as I know. Here's a snippet of the news on CNET back then: "Under the terms of the agreement, Audible will make part of its library available in the MP3 format, and will work with Diamond to ensure that its content can be downloaded to the Rio, the firms said. The alliance will create an offering similar to books-on-tape products; users will be able to download spoken audio such as speeches, articles, and books to listen to on the go. Audible also is offering an MP3 showcase on its site. Rio customers can download an audio portion of Stephen King's book Bag of Bones, read by the author, among other promotional items." I'll add a bit about in the final video!
LGR
2022-02-01 03:23:20 +0000 UTCWasn't this supported by Audible or something as well? I remember the manager software managing it, and Audible is listed on the box. Might be something to test!
Curus Keel
2022-02-01 02:27:44 +0000 UTCAhh Rio The Rio 500 was my jam. I scored a used one off ebay back in the day and it got me through first few years of college. Usb and Kernel support in linux (until that got screwed up and bricked it) Its nice to see a video on the first Rio.
Jacob Nelson
2022-02-01 01:46:13 +0000 UTCI remember hooking my laptop (a 1999 PowerBook G3) up to the stereo in my car to play MP3s when driving home to visit my parents. I'd have bought an MP3 player but I was a starving medical student at the time and had no budget for such frivolities. I had the laptop sitting on the passenger seat open and the screen brightness turned all the way down at night (which basically turned the screen off). Then in 2001 I got a new car stereo that could play MP3 CDs. Chuck about 400 songs onto one of those and you could have ~12 hours of music. One day my father borrowed my car and when he came back he asked what was up with the CD player. He'd had the car for 3 hours and never heard any music repeat. So I explained what a MP3 CD was. Two weeks later he'd gone out and bought the same stereo that I had in my car and installed it in his and wanted me to show him how to make his own MP3 CDs. Good times.
Stavros Karatsoridis
2022-02-01 01:42:17 +0000 UTCYou beat me to it! I had planned to do a video on this one day. I do have one, but it doesn't work. I actually bought one of these when it was new. I remember how excited I was to connect it to my car stereo and play MP3s while driving. I thought I was so cool! I also agree with you on the nomenclature about upload vs download. I hate it when people get it backwards.
The 8-Bit Guy
2022-02-01 01:19:48 +0000 UTCThis was fun, keep 'em coming! I have a different experience with the boom of MP3s but I felt the nostalgia too. Have you thought about doing a video on the SideWinder family of Microsoft controllers? I'd really love to see a SideWinder Dual Strike review with properly configured games. There's not many videos on the net on it and none of them used it right how it was designed. Cheers!
Dukefazon
2022-02-01 00:21:59 +0000 UTCNow this one I remember I think, a friend in the mid 2000s had one of those
Braxen
2022-02-01 00:04:19 +0000 UTCI've always wanted to grab one of these to check it out, the first mp3 player! it was really cool at the time...then iPod just put everything else left in the dust....I was able to get a copy of Music Match recently I installed on a Windows Xp machine, which really brought me back and how I missed it so much!
John Piscopo
2022-01-31 23:15:57 +0000 UTCUgh. All batteries of that era are increasingly becoming the bane of LGR existence. So much death and corrosion.
LGR
2022-01-31 23:14:01 +0000 UTCAlso rather prone to failure these days too, from what I've seen online. Creative using unreliable and cheaper components, who woulda thunk
LGR
2022-01-31 23:13:27 +0000 UTCI feel so old knowing that there are probably kids entering their teens right now, who don't even know what an MP3 is. When I was entering my teens Napster was at it's Speak and I was downloading Sum41 songs...
Novel
2022-01-31 23:08:44 +0000 UTCFeel free to skip the creative nomad, which was a truly unwieldy player to work with.
Jim Leonard
2022-01-31 23:06:24 +0000 UTConly the crunchiest of referential nuggets on LGR
LGR
2022-01-31 22:57:29 +0000 UTCTell me about it, ha. I had a weird moment of self-reflection later on in the video, where I'm describing the process of ripping audio CDs to MP3s so you can add them to a playlist file and sync everything over parallel... realizing that almost all of that is entirely foreign stuff to a good chunk of the population now
LGR
2022-01-31 22:51:08 +0000 UTCTry searching for working Creative Zens with batteries that still have a charge! Woof!
Steve Martin
2022-01-31 22:49:35 +0000 UTCT1 to me *still* seems like the be-all, end-all peak of internet performance. I wanted so very badly to be able to choose T1 in all those dropdown boxes where you had to select your connection method in games and programs! Only got to experience it at the local library and they restricted apps and sites quite a bit.
LGR
2022-01-31 22:48:33 +0000 UTCLoved my rio500 back in the day when that edition came out. That usb support really helped the transfer speeds overall and I think it’s processed the mp3s a bit cleaner.
Matthew Taylor
2022-01-31 22:48:17 +0000 UTCIs that a Dankpods reference
Adult Sword Owner
2022-01-31 22:47:18 +0000 UTCYeah it's bizarre that I can't find more references to that! Doesn't seem to have been brought up that much back in '98, it's mainly just confused country music fans in various forums
LGR
2022-01-31 22:47:12 +0000 UTCThis still would've been insanely enviable in my friend group back then! Especially with the SmartMedia expansion slot, that was just the coolest format at the time
LGR
2022-01-31 22:45:47 +0000 UTCOh no, it finally happened! LGR old tech has now caught up to something I bought new. This is a macabre milestone…
Ethan Terry
2022-01-31 22:42:17 +0000 UTCI'm surprised DankPods hasn't covered this one yet!
Luke warm
2022-01-31 22:42:14 +0000 UTCThis brings me back to my years in college where we would sneak in the computer lab and use their T1 connexion to download thousands of songs on Napster. We were blown away by the speed compared to our dialup connexion. Happy times...
Frederic St-Georges
2022-01-31 22:41:58 +0000 UTCHa I was wondering if you were going to mention diamond rio the band, the first thing I thought when I saw the title was”why would those guys have their own MP3 player?”
Zachary Outen
2022-01-31 22:41:31 +0000 UTCI'm so excited to see you post this! I saved up my paper route money in middle school to buy this thing and was the envy of all my friends. Until I told them it held less than a CD's worth of music.
Luke warm
2022-01-31 22:40:55 +0000 UTCWhat a nugget
Joe Conti
2022-01-31 22:38:11 +0000 UTC
