Moore worked with Hwang and his team to finalize a hardware design, with Diamond engineers supplying the control and interface software. In a hotel room in Seoul, they signed up DigitalCast to work for Diamond.įortunately, the Korean team recognized the shortcomings of its first MPMan versions and had renders of next-generation designs. In the spring of 1998, Huh and Comstock jumped on plane and flew to Korea to meet with Hwang and MPMan's designers. Using his Korean college chum network, Diamond CTO Hyuang Hwe Huh tracked down the company behind the MPMan: DigitalCast, a startup with 20 employees founded by a young engineer, Jung-ha Hwang. Scouring the market, they discovered the MPMan and multiple "crappy little reference designs" of several MPMan iterations, according to Moore, all using an MP3 decoder chip made by ESS Technology and "hung together by Band-Aids, rubber bands, and glue." Moore’s idea was well received, but Comstock, multimedia division VP David Watkins, and everyone else at Diamond also worried that their small company would be beaten to the portable music player punch. Diamond executive Ken Comstock admitted he "didn't even know how to spell MP3." But Diamond's audio product manager Todd Moore was quite familiar with Winamp, and he presented a plan for a portable MP3 digital audio player that he dubbed Loony Tunes. Considering its young, PC nerd customer base, the nascent MP3 market seemed to be a ripe one to exploit.īut how? The MP3 format, invented in the early 1990s by a team led by Karlheinz Brandenburg at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, was still an infant, and the first Windows-based music player, Winamp, had only just been released. The San Jose-based company's core aftermarket graphics card business was slowly disintegrating as chip makers began to integrate graphics processors onto motherboards. It wasn't until a court ruling on Octomaking it legal to make and sell the Rio and subsequent portable digital music players that the record industry was pulled kicking and screaming into its own enormously profitable digital music-selling future.ĭiamond Multimedia needed a brilliant idea. It also sold more than 400,000 units, making it the first commercially successful digital music player.īut the "which-was-first" debate is superfluous. Only a few hundred units were sold…Īnnounced in September, 1998, Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300, in contrast, cost $199.95, was easy to use, and was packaged with all the necessary cables and software. But the MPMan was expensive, wasn't widely available, and it didn't work very well. Which MP3 player came first? Technically, the Korean-made MPMan, which was unveiled in March, 1998, appeared first. Here’s a compressed history of the events surrounding the birth of the MP3 player. A momentous occasion in the evolution of recorded music occurred 20 years ago when a California district court ruled to allow the sale of a curious new portable music player in the face of opposition from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
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