I will inaugurate "Amherst Bytes" with a discussion of one of the most important trends of our time-digital audio players (DAPs for short). One needs only to look at the number of people on campus strutting the iPod's signature white earbuds to realize how far the digital audio movement has come. When technology moves significantly beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream, we need to really sit up and take notice.
To fully understand the impact of the DAP revolution, we must start from the beginning. The Diamond Rio PMP300 was the first DAP to prove successful. Released in September '98, the Rio allowed users to carry around their MP3s (and the now-extinct MP2s) in a device smaller than a portable cassette player and without the skipping of a portable CD player. Though it only held 32MB of storage, it was expandable-but that would only have added to the steep $200 retail price. The RIAA, that bastion of artists' rights, sued Diamond because they believed the player encouraged piracy. They lost, of course, and DAPs were ruled legal, opening the door for Diamond's competitors.
Following the release of the Rio, many other companies jumped into the DAP market in 1999. As competing players were released, prices dropped, and storage sizes increased due to advances in storage media. DAPs took on several forms, the first of which are the flash-based players (such as the Rio) that don't have much storage space but make up for that deficiency in unskippable playback and tiny sizes. These players' lack of moving parts (there is no hard drive spinning inside of them) makes them impossible to skip and also perfect for heavy activity. Today, they can hold around 1GB of music, compared to the 32MB of the original Rio.
There are also MP3 CD players, which for most, myself included, were the only affordable DAP option a few years ago. These playback MP3s record onto CD-Rs, allowing up to 700MB of storage per disc, but they still suffer from the same problems that plague normal portable CD players. They are bulky and tend to skip; no amount of skip protection can compete with the flash-based players. Today they have been overshadowed by flash and hard-drive DAPs, and there are simply no outstanding MP3 CD players.
The final (and perhaps most significant) type of DAP is the hard-drive based. These started out as massive players, often called "personal jukeboxes," which used laptop hard drives instead of flash memory. The release of Apple's iPod in 2002 brought these players and DAPs in general to the mainstream public. The iPod not only brought about general acceptance; it also cemented a new aesthetic and usability standard for all future DAPs. These hard-drive players eventually started using "microdrives," which are tiny hard drives that allow for even greater portability. The iPod Mini uses a microdrive for this very reason. Paradoxically, these microdrive players are hot items right now, even though they often cost about the same as a slightly larger laptop-drive player.
I will continue discussing these digital audio players in my next column; it seems I've underestimated the extent to which I could discuss this trend. I will go further into the hard-drive based players, and spend some time on the new movement toward the microdrive players. Please send any questions or comments on this article, or even better, ideas for future articles, to dahardawar@amherst.edu.