Retro Tech and Movie Blog

I was pretty early to the MP3 (or “empty tree” if you’re a fan of the show Corner Gas) scene. It was in sometime in 1999 when I first heard about this new digital music file format. And when I started researching it, something told me right away that it was going to change the industry.

What impressed me the most was this new compact MP3 player, the Eiger MP-Man; a tiny box, no bigger than a deck of playing cards, that could hold an hour’s worth of music (at CD quality sound) and play for hours on a single AA battery. There was model of the Eiger MP3 player that came out in 1998, but I bought the newest model, the F20, which had a whopping storage capacity of 64MB! That was pretty respectable back then, but it was also little expensive. I can’t recall exactly what I paid for it, but I seem to recall it being around the $200 CAD mark.

There wasn’t any USB (that I can remember) back then, so uploading MP3s to it was done via the computer’s parallel port. Unfortunately, I no longer have the proper cable or software to upload new music to my MP-Man, so it’s kind of stuck in a time warp. It does have the capacity to accept SmartMedia cards for memory expansion, but finding a SmartMedia card these days isn’t easy, or cheap.

The other bummer about my MP-Man is that, recently the nice rubber coating on the player’s housing has begun to melt. So, now I keep it in it’s very stylish faux-leather jacket for display. However, it still works fine, if I put a AA battery in it. But, because the rubber is melting off, it’s pretty gummy and makes it difficult to get the jacket off without damaging it further.

Even for being the first MP3 player, it sounds really good. It has several equalizer settings to choose from, as well as shuffle and replay options.

In and around 2003, I then decided to upgrade my 64MB MP3 player to the Lexar Jumpdrive “Sport” player, which came with a 128MB USB storage stick. This was much more convenient to use, as it didn’t require any special software to upload music onto it. This was great for me, as I was running strictly Linux as my computers operating system by then (still do). Up until this point, I had to maintain a partition on my computer’s hard drive so I could continue to run the Eiger Lab’s Windows 98 software for my MP-Man.

The Lexar Jumpdrive player is also pretty compact, with a two line LED back-lit screen, and easy accessible controls on top. Like the MP-Man, it has some equalizer preset options, replay and shuffle, a bookmark/memory marker and the ability to navigate between folders that you might want to setup on the US stick to organize your MP3s. It’s powered by two AAA batteries and runs for well over a dozen hours or more.

Because the player and the storage are two separate components, this allowed you to easily upgrade or swap out MP3 collections just by changing the “Jumpdrive” that’s plugged into it. I thought that this was a pretty smart idea. Although I rarely ever kept the USB stick apart from the player, it did come with a rubber cap with a chain, which you could wear or hang somewhere for storage.

I think the idea was to be able to not only use the Jumpdrive to store your MP3s, but you could also use it to store other PC files for transferring between work, school, or home. When plugged into the player, only the MP3s are detected and useable. This was a pretty “advanced” idea for back in the day, too. USB storage devices were just beginning to become popular (and affordable) back then. I still use my Lexar Jumpdrive today. It’s compact and convenient, as well as pretty rugged. Unfortunately, Lexar is not the same company as it used to be. The two USB storage devices I’ve bought from them over the past couple years are not of very high quality and have since both failed or developed errors.

After the Lexar Jumpdrive, I upgraded to my GP2X. I never had any use for the over priced tat that Apple produced.
[tag]MP3, collection[/tag]