![]() Enter The Pod The Creative Nomad Jukebox, with its roomy 2.5″ HDD. While not exactly a multimedia star by 2022 standards with its clunky, parallel port-based PC connection, for something that was meant to be used alongside Windows 98, it has essentially the same features as the first Apple iPod that would be released three years later, including internal storage, media controls, an accompanying software utility and (eventually) an online music store. The other major obstacle for MD was a newfangled audio format that was doing the rounds on the Internet’s Digital Information Super-Highway, called MP3, which got pounced upon by then multimedia giant Diamond with the release of the Diamond Rio PMP300 Flash-based MP3 player in 1998 (also reviewed by LGR and Ars Technica in 2016). Although MD became affordable enough for the average consumers by the end of the 1990s, it saw its commercial success hampered by a number of things, not the least was Sony’s proprietary ATRAC audio format that was required for MD audio. Despite this still being optical media (magneto-optical to be precise), MD media is far more compact than a CD, stores at least as much audio as a CD and comes in a protective cartridge. Things got interesting during the 1990s, as in 1992, Sony had already released its MiniDisc format. This meant that the tape-based Walkman and kin remained around until the early 2000s. Yet for all their benefits, optical media like CDs are less durable and more prone to technical issues than tape-based media, not to mention that CD-based Walkman players and clones are far less pocketable than their tape-based siblings. After details like anti-shock buffering were figured out to (mostly) prevent audio skipping, everyone needed to have personal CD-quality audio in their lives. ![]() That’s why eventually cassette-based portable audio players gave way to CD-based ones. Naturally, technological progress is inevitable. Even if one’s personal use of a Walkman – or one of its many clones – was less glamorous, it is hard to deny the cultural change that came with the availability of these devices. With over an hour of music on a single cassette, anyone could listen to their favorite music (and mix- tapes) while traveling, working out at the gym, or jogging through the park or along the beach in a typical 1980s fashion. When Sony launched its first Walkman in July of 1979, it would kickstart a whole new market of portable media devices. From portable record players in the 1950s alongside the rise of compact, transistor-based radios in the 1960s and of course ever more convenient media formats like the 8-track tape, Philips Compact Cassette and the Compact Disc (CD) that made media more portable. The concept of portable media players isn’t a new one by any stretch of the imagination. Setting The Scene Original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 from 1979. This marks the end of Apple’s foray into the PMP market, and makes one wonder whether the PMP market of the late 90s is gone, or maybe just has transformed into something else.Īfter all, with everyone and their pet hamster having a smartphone nowadays, what need is there for a portable device that can ‘only’ play back audio and perhaps video? Yet despite this success, in 2017 Apple discontinued its audio-only iPods (Nano and Shuffle), and as of May 10th, 2022, the Apple iPod Touch was discontinued. While few today remember the PMP trailblazers like Diamond’s Rio devices, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t know what an ‘iPod’ is.Įven as Microsoft, Sony and others tried to steal the PMP crown, the iPod remained the irrefutable market leader, all the while gaining more and more features such as video playback and a touch display. ![]() It wasn’t the first Personal Media Player (PMP), but as with many things Apple the iPod would go on to provide the benchmark for what a PMP should do, as well as what they should look like. On October 23rd of 2001, the first Apple iPod was launched.
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