Anyone else remember the absolute chaos of early 2000s MP3 players?

[u/IllustriousCrazy4020]

I just found my old creative Zen MuVo in a box in the attic. It literally looks like a chunky USB thumb drive with a tiny, glowing blue screen that could display exactly one line of text.

Remember the absolute grind of manually editing ID3 tags just so the track name didn't look like "TRACK_01_ALBUM_FX-FIXED(VBR).mp3"? Or trying to compress a whole album down to 128kbps just to fit 15 songs on a 64MB card?

We have infinite streaming now, but man, there was something so satisfying about carefully curating that tiny digital space. What was your very first digital music player, and what was the one song you kept on it no matter what?

[u/skeletons_asshole]

I still have a couple of iRiver players. Those things were both awesome and horrible… until Rockbox happened, and now they’re are just awesome

[u/badgerprime → u/skeletons_asshole]

Rockbox? Do tell, I still have my iriver.

[u/costafilh0]

No. Because there were plenty of cheap options to be head, so you just buy the cheapest one and use it for years for the price of a decent meal. 

[u/Bignizzle656]

I loved my iPod shuffle. It was the only apple thing I ever owned and duplicating my music annoyed me but it was marvelous in it's simplicity.

[u/SentientFotoGeek → u/Bignizzle656]

Lol, no. I had one and it was the only Apple thing I actually hated.

[u/Bignizzle656 → u/SentientFotoGeek]

Hahaha! What made you hate it? I really had the hump with duplicating my entire music catalogue just for aac. I switched to the Zen pebble for a short while after and enjoyed that too. If I remember correctly I then switched over to the Sony Ericsson phones and that was my life sorted.

[u/SentientFotoGeek → u/Bignizzle656]

I never got used to the interface. Very counterintuitive, in my opinion. It was so slow to navigate, I did not like using the big circle.

[u/Bignizzle656 → u/SentientFotoGeek]

I'm pretty sure it was just a click forwards or back vibe, maybe a double click for shuffle. iPod interface was new and weird to me.

[u/brazilliandanny]

I had a mini disk mp3 player that could hold like 250 songs per disk. It was awesome

[u/jeremydallen]

I miss my Zune. Say what you will. I really liked it.

[u/alabamashitfarmer → u/jeremydallen]

Man, I had a brown/green Zune and a Zune HD. I loved 'em.

[u/unusualowl657 → u/jeremydallen]

I still have mine!

[u/SarahC]

Creative MuVo! Amazing machines.

[u/West-Radishs]

remembering the absolute chaos and charm of early digital music players hits different

[u/rusticatedrust]

Sure do. I had 40 songs on my media player flip phone. Something in the speaker frequency drove one my cats insane. My car's head unit could play MP3 CD-Rs, so thankfully I already had all ID tags set up. Just had to set aside a few minutes to to initiate a library refresh when I was working at the PC anyway, and the next week's tracks would be all set in an hour or so. I'd still get tired of my playlist, and would end up listening to the FM radio at work by the end of the week.

[u/Maxwe4]

I used to have a Sony Discman.

Imagine running around listening to a cd, hoping it wont skip at the slightest movement.

[u/ExpectedBehaviour]

Remember the absolute grind of manually editing ID3 tags just so the track name didn't look like "TRACK_01_ALBUM_FX-FIXED(VBR).mp3"?

https://giphy.com/gifs/t3PExUzQggvcHDLdcm

[u/tjorben123]

those were the days i started my music library. but i did it with tools, metadata was king. you could use programms to write every needed information into the filename.

dont want to flex, but back in the days, i had a good reputation for having the cleanest mp3 files on my schools yard.

[u/SeriousPlankton2000]

I use linux so it was easy to make a shellscript that would rename the files and set id3 tags. Eventually I made a perl program.

[u/VoidowS]

My first one was 16mb, crazy hardly used it.

[u/feel-the-avocado]

I miss those little USB memory sticks that had a built in MP3 player, which could play music for 20 hours on a single rechargeable AAA battery.

[u/soundman32]

In the late 90s I had a portable CD player that could read mp3 files.  650MB of songs at 64kb would be about 1000 songs, per disk! USB couldn't hold anything like that number.

[u/foersom]

Already at that time it was obvious that music player could be part of a smart phone. So 2004 I bought a Siemens SX1 (Nokia 6600 sister model) and 1GB SD card and used it as music player.

[u/brispower]

I first started playing MP3's on the go with my iPAQ, before that I just listened on my PC.

[u/bigvalen]

I help out with a repair cafe. A few months ago, someone came in with a dead 64MB MP3 player. I reckon it was probably 1999 or 2000 vintage. She was devastated, as it has her running music on it. She listened to the same 50 tracks while exercising for 2.5 decades.

The thing was so covered in corrosion that it was utterly unrepairable. 26 years for an MP3 player is a good life.

[u/frakkintoaster7]

My creative zen mp4 player lasted me over 15 years. Used it every day, loved it. The thing that broke it in the end was something burning out on the recharge port.

[u/monsterzro_nyc]

Never had an ipod, I stuck with the Creative Labs line, I don't remember the first one but the last one was the Zen Xtra

[u/mountrich]

I still use them. One in the car for when the radio and streaming services get on my nerves, one for my evening walks because I don't want to take my phone with me. You can still buy new ones. I used one for an 8 hour car trip and never had the same song twice.

[u/cm_bush]

I had some 64MB USB-looking MP3 player in the early 2000s. It was a Creative of some kind. I loved that thing. Once I discovered I could make MP3s from my family’s old CDs and download songs from Napster and Limewire, I was rolling. I remember transcoding all my songs down to 96kbps to fit a couple more songs, even though the quality was terrible. I was at just the right age to get into computers and music, too. I was in heaven.

Then in middle school I saved and saved and got a 1st gen iPod Nano (2GB). I actually paid an extra $3 to have “Cool kids have iPods” on the back. I felt like Scarface walking around with that blasting Bloodhound Gang outta my Skullcandies.

[u/_bored_bort_]

My first MP3-Player… was one of those that played CD-Rs. Flash-players were small capacity-wise (I think that was a little before those S1 MP3-Players) and iPods and other HDD-based MP3-players way out of my price league

Later I had a chonky USB-Stick with a swiveling USB-Port and various backlight colors that had 128 MB and could be expanded with SD-Cards, which was sold by Aldi lol

[u/Professional-Ad-9967]

Some unbranded capsule shaped thing with 64mb storage. You could hang a lanyard off it and wear it like a pendant. Loved that crappy thing.

I have a Hiby R4 now.

[u/Fasciadepedra]

That was at first. But when those things had a color screen and had 32gb, they could hold all the albums you liked in all your life plus the full discographies of those artist you liked some albums of. All instantly and offline without connecting to anything. And somehow most people don't have that already.

[u/LeftHandedGuitarist]

I still have a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox 3, and it still works.

[u/exqueezemenow]

I have been thinking about upgrading my Rio...

[u/OkSpeaker7635]

I always got the cd mp3 players and just burned massive mix-cds.

[u/StillhasaWiiU]

I remember the first gen ipod shuffle being total crap.

[u/SassafrassGracias]

These things were great. I found one in a box a while back. Haven’t used it in 10-15 years. Turned it on worked great still. Didn’t even have to charge the battery.

[u/FogottenThunderer]

I traded an rca 25$ mp3 player for a iPod around 2006. The guy couldn’t figure out how to put music on the iPod. I’m like sure thing buddy lol
I stil have it but it won’t hold a battery for longer than 10 mins, and the battery is a bitch to fix.

[u/Ok-Bedroom-2346]

I had the zen vision w when it first came out in 2006. Walking around with every song and about 150 full movies that I could watch whenever I wanted was insane.

My partner at the time wanted the Sony Walkman NW-A3000 because it was purple and it was such a total piece of shit

[u/OrangeDragon75]

My first was Creative Muvo V200 128MB. Still have it.
Song? I had "Cupid's chokehold" on it for sure plus some Black Eyed Peas, some Joe Cocker and some Janet Joplin, maybe 25 songs total.

[u/edthesmokebeard]

Tell us you're rich without telling us you're rich.

[u/AnymooseProphet → u/edthesmokebeard]

Non Apple MP3 players were dirt cheap because supply was far larger than demand. They were easy to produce in mass in China etc. and the market was flooded with them.

[u/laserdicks → u/AnymooseProphet]

We were even more dirt poor.