Technology in music series; (part 11) Hardware and software – on demand and on your hip (I)

Say what you will about his music or his politics, Ice-T is smart. When he addressed the MP3.com convention in San Diego in 2000, he offered a funny, biting, and ultimately very true reading of the state of digital music. Among his comments on the subject, he succinctly got to the heart of why people weren’t getting wealthy from downloadable digital music files yet:

Right now, you can’t get MP3 two feet off your computer. How many people got their computers hooked up to their stereo system? It’s not really happening.

The internet, music, MP3 is not going to move until the hardware catches up. The Christmas of the MP3 car stereo, the Christmas of the MP3 home system, the Christmas when the Rio player is playing six and eight hours, when that shit happens, sites are going to be bombarded because people are going to need content.

Christmas that year was supposed to be when hardwired digital music players would be introduced to people’s homes, the year downloadable files would start to migrate off the computer and onto entertainment systems. However, with the exception of the already available digital music players like the Brujo, which had allowed early adapters to burn CDs of MP3s and play them back as MP3s (as opposed to reconstituted CD audio files), and, of course, the Rio, a prospective marketplace full of brio and brouhaha fuelled by hyperbolic press releases in May had turned suspiciously quiet by September.

This didn’t bode well for the kind of quick penetration into the marketplace that people promoting digital music anticipated. And, as T pointed out, it had more to do with the hardware than the software. Files using MP3, A2B, NetTrax, and a bunch of other proprietary compression systems could have gotten onto stereos around the world but for the lack of actual players.

People wanted the convenience of digital music on demand; they wanted the ability to put 11 hours of music on a CD-R or load thousands of songs onto a player and not have to worry about changing the record. “I had my record out on MP3 download,” Ice-T told the convention audience, “but it’s stuck on my fucking computer. I’m not burning no fucking CD. I’ll go out and buy the goddamn thing.” Some people, however, would sooner burn than buy.

At the time, several pieces of audio equipment allowed compressed music files to migrate away from the computer and into the realm of home audio as components of a home audio system. The aforementioned Brujo MP3/CD player came out during summer 1999 and sold for around $300 – not a bad price point for early adapter technology.

The first player of its kind, it played traditional compact discs, but also CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, and ISO-9660s, as well as MP3s. This allowed a listener to put 11 hours’ worth of music on one CD with the CD burner on their computer and play it on a home sound system. Several similar players came along and upped the ante, allowing people with DVD burners to play DVDs and SVCDs, as well as all CD formats and MP3s.

For people who preferred to take that 11-hour CD on the road, there were portable CD players, starting with a player called the Genica, which had all of the functions of most popular portables with the advantage of playing MP3 discs. More traditionally, if anything about MP3 players could be considered “traditional,” the chip-based Rio, introduced in the latter part of the 1990s, continued to allow for MP3 play and music reproduction without moving parts. However, as T pointed out in his speech, it only held about two hours of music, and that at a lower-fidelity setting.

Around this same time, hard-drive-based iPod progenitors began to show up as well. The portable Personal JukeBox and the home-stereo-compatible SongBank were both based on hard-drive technology. The JukeBox used a very small-sized six-gig hard drive that held 1,500 songs. The unit was about six inches long by three inches wide and an inch thick, weighing in at a little over half a pound, about the size of a paperback book, and sold for about $750.