The earliest precursors to portable digital audio players were portable CD players and mini disk players. The Eiger Labs MPMan F10, a 32 MB portable digital player, was one of the earliest non-mechanical digital audio players in the American market and was released in 1998.
The first big selling Digital Audio Player (DAP) was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, introduced in September 1998. The huge success of the Rio player brought about a large amount of interest and investment in the digital music sector. Other early DAPs included Sensory Science's Rave MP2100, the l-Jam IJ-100, and the Creative Labs Nomad. These portables were small and light, and could hold around 7 to 20 songs at normal 128 Kbps compression, and had compact flash memories for storage.
By 2000 when USB ports had gained popularity and were increasingly used to transfer data, digital audio players came integrated with them. At around this time a company called Remote Solutions made a significant improvement in the storage problems faced by DAPs by using a laptop hard drive for storing songs rather than the low-capacity flash memory. The Personal Jukebox (PJB-100) had 4.8 GB of storage space, and held about 1,200 songs. This was the beginning of what would be called the jukebox segment of digital audio players. This segment eventually went onto become the dominant one in MP3 players.
Apple Computers then released their iconic iPod in 2001, along with the iTunes music download service. They also released versions that could hold over 30 GB of data including images and music files. This opened the floodgates of the industry and the market was soon inundated with players offering various storage capacities and also recording and playback capabilities.
In a reversal of sorts, with advances in flash memory technologies, companies today are heading back to flash storage from solid state storage devices. The recently released iPod Nano has up to 4 GB of flash-based storage capacity.
The first big selling Digital Audio Player (DAP) was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, introduced in September 1998. The huge success of the Rio player brought about a large amount of interest and investment in the digital music sector. Other early DAPs included Sensory Science's Rave MP2100, the l-Jam IJ-100, and the Creative Labs Nomad. These portables were small and light, and could hold around 7 to 20 songs at normal 128 Kbps compression, and had compact flash memories for storage.
By 2000 when USB ports had gained popularity and were increasingly used to transfer data, digital audio players came integrated with them. At around this time a company called Remote Solutions made a significant improvement in the storage problems faced by DAPs by using a laptop hard drive for storing songs rather than the low-capacity flash memory. The Personal Jukebox (PJB-100) had 4.8 GB of storage space, and held about 1,200 songs. This was the beginning of what would be called the jukebox segment of digital audio players. This segment eventually went onto become the dominant one in MP3 players.
Apple Computers then released their iconic iPod in 2001, along with the iTunes music download service. They also released versions that could hold over 30 GB of data including images and music files. This opened the floodgates of the industry and the market was soon inundated with players offering various storage capacities and also recording and playback capabilities.
In a reversal of sorts, with advances in flash memory technologies, companies today are heading back to flash storage from solid state storage devices. The recently released iPod Nano has up to 4 GB of flash-based storage capacity.
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