MP3 Players: Whence Came You?
MP3 is the common name that refers to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3, which is a patented digital audio encoding format using lossy data compression. It is used to compress audio data to increase the amount that can be stored in a single medium.
Audio files in this format are stored and played by digital audio players (DAPs). Since DAPs play MP3 files, they are more popularly known as MP3 players. The MP3 players we know today have evolved over time. They have a confused history because of claims and counterclaims made by companies and researchers who probably have been working on their prototypes at the same time, but beat their competitors only by small margins or perhaps to the patent office.
Notwithstanding this, it is generally accepted that one of the first DAPs was designed by Kane Kramer in 1979. Called the IXI, his prototype could play 3.5 minutes of audio, about the length of one song. IXI never made it to commercial production, but Kramer was later hired by Apple, Inc. as a consultant. Some of his ideas probably live on in iPods.
It was not until 1996 that Audio Highway introduced the Listen Up Player. Along with the player is a system of uploading MP3 audio files into a computer and downloading them to the player. Listen Up won various awards, earning for Nathan Schulhof, founder and CEO of Audio Highway, the monicker “father of the MP3 player industry”.
Two years later, Saehan Information Systems of South Korea began marketing MPMan Players. These were based on flash memories with a capacity of 32 MB, or about six songs. These were licensed to Eiger Labs which distributed them in North America as Eiger Labs MPMan F10.
Following in the heels of the MPMan was Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300. Like its predecessor, it also had a 32 MB capacity. Often, the RIO is claimed to be the first DAP.
Also in 1988, Compaq came up with the first hard-drive DAP. It was sold as the PJB-100 (Personal Jukebox) and initially had a capacity of 4.8 GB with a capacity of 1,200 songs.
The Creative NOMAD Jukebox came in 2000 with a 6 GB hard drive.
Apple, Inc. joined the bandwagon in 2001 with its first-generation iPod. It had a 5 GB 1.8-inchToshiba hard drive. In the following year, the second-generation iPod was introduced and today, iPod dominates the DAP market.
DAPs’ incorporation into mobile phones began in South Korea in 2001. Today, Samsung, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, and Motorola all manufacture musicphones, with half of all mobile phones worldwide having a DAP.