Ten years old: the world's first MP3 player

The MP3 player is ten years old this month. The first commerciallyreleased personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was theMPMan F10, manufactured by Korea's Saehan Information Systems andlaunched in March 1998.
The F10 contained 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful ofsongs encoded at 128Kb/s. It measured 91 x 70 x 165.5mm. It connectedto an old-style parallel port on the host PC from which songs could becopied to the player. There was a tiny LCD on the front to give anindication as to what you were listening to.

Saehan's MPMan F10: held up to eight songs

The device made its debut at the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany. Itwas a prototype, but Saehan must have garnered enough interest to putthe player into mass production, which it did in May 1998 before goingon sale in the US and Europe through importers in the summer.
In the US, local supplier Eiger Labs wanted $250 for the F10, thoughthe price fell to $200 the following year prompted by the release ofthe Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300, which was priced at $200.
The PMP300 - widely but wrongly held to be the world's firstcommercial MP3 player - also had 32MB of storage fed through a parallelport. But it boasted a larger display than the F10 and also featured aSmart Media slot to allow users to increase the gadget's storagecapacity.

Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300: sued, but famous

The Rio was released in September 1998, but by 8 October had becomethe subject of a lawsuit from the Recording Industry Ass. of America(RIAA), which claimed the player violated the 1992 US Home RecordingsAct. By that point, Rio had already teamed up with MP3.com to offersongs from the website.
The RIAA asked for a sales ban, and got one on a temporary basis on16 October, only to have it withdrawn on 26 October. In December, Riocountersued the RIAA, claiming the organisations actions were anattempt to impede the growth of a market - digital music - which itdidn't control.
It was later ruled that Diamond had not infringed the Act because itwas not responsible for the actions of its customers. The RIAA appealedagainst the verdict, but lost there too: the Court judged that thePMP300 was not a recording device and so did not fall within theboundaries of the Act.
The RIAA and Diamond would eventually settle their differences inAugust 1999, but by then Rio was a household name, especially amonginternet users busily sharing MP3 music on the internet using newlycreated peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing software.

Eiger Labs' version of the 64MB MPMan F20

Thanks to its lesser known name, the F10 avoided such legalentanglements, but at the cost of all the free publicity its rivalgained through from the lawsuit. Saehan soon established MPMan as asub-division, and as such it later appeared among the roster of membersjoining the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an cross-industryattempt to develop a universal digital rights management (DRM)technology.
SDMI ran out of steam in 2001, largely because of a highlypublicised cracking of its encryption technology, leaving the way openfor Microsoft's Windows Media DRM technology to fill the gap. And itmight have done if Apple's release of the iPod in the October of thatyear hadn't proved ultimately so successful.
In the interim, MPMan had continued developing and offering MP3players, but Apple's move to allow Windows PC owners to use the iPod,from April 2003, resulted in explosive growth. MPMan, Rio and otherpioneers couldn't keep up.