Fishing about in the loft, I came across the first MP3 player I had. A Samsung Yepp YP-E32.
Bought back in 1999 or 2000, I think it was one of the earliest MP3 players.
Obviously compared to modern standards it's a little bit limited in storage capacity... 32mb is just about enough to fit one song of what today would be considered a decent bitrate! I seem to recall typically using a bitrate of 64kbps or so to be in with a chance of fitting anything like an album of music on this thing.
I can't remember ever using this that much. I guess it was just too much effort to spend hours downloading songs over a modem using Napster, then uploading to the Yepp over a slow parallel connection, only to do it all again once you'd listened to your 30 minutes of music. I seem to remember feeling pretty cool having an MP3 player though!
Out of interest I looked up some of the reviews it got from satisfied Amazon customers:
"...The downloading goes really fast too. It takes less then 5 minutes to download 32MB"
"You can also store 300 phone numbers in it!"
"32mb is enough, you really don't need to buy an extra card! One thing is because it would cost $100 more"
How easily pleased we were back then! But then can you imagine being able to carry around all of your phone numbers? I do remember SmartMedia cards being crazy expensive though. I think this player could only support up to 32mb cards, so it was hardly worth the investment.
I upgraded big-time when I inherited my University flat mate's Creative MuVo TX FM - which was also in the loft.
128mb storage, FM radio, 1 x AAA battery, backlit display, USB. All of a sudden I'm carrying around two low-bitrate albums in my pocket instead of one!
Kommentare