I think we got our channels switched this week…

Dankpods talks about calculators and LGR talks about an MP3 nugget all in the same week. Fun times all around.

That "magical" feeling from ripping CDs was legit. I remember the first CD I ripped was The Slim Shady LP and it was freaking mind blogging that I was listening to the songs while the CD was sitting next to me in the case.

Thank you for capturing the nostalgia of this time. I spent so many hours ripping cds and trying to organize digital music files. I remember leaving downloads going all night on a P2P program, then waking up in the morning to see what actually downloaded. Thank you for putting this together.

dankpods makes an extremely LGR video, LGR makes an extremely dankpods video. the world is in balance

9:17 Was waiting eagerly for that line.

Ahhh, love hearing the 1990s RIAA story being retold. The RIAA were just insane with their lack of vision and desire to control.

When mp3s first came out I remember just being blown away by it. We went from huge wav files to mp3s seemingly overnight. Game changer!!

My dad was one of the Lead Software Engineers that worked this player. We had drawers full of these all over our house when I was in highschool. My dad would let us play test them. I remember my teachers being blown away when I showed them this. If I remember correctly he has several patents in his name pertaining to his work on this. It's crazy to see these showing up on a YT video so many years later.

Media was so expensive back then, I waited for the CD/MP3 versions, easy to burn those mp3's to inexpensive CD's and enjoy hours of playback per CD. Great vid as always!

That alliteration of the Rio’s size relative to it’s cost. Precise practical perfection!

"Of course, that's all history for the history books." And I appreciate your time and effort into gathering it, Clint. Always nice to know how the device came to be and how it's affected the future.

The whole RIAA thing they posed against the Rio is how they kept the Philips DCC (digital compact cassette) from becoming commercially viable. They kept Philips wrapped up in legislative road blocks and it was released in like 1992, having been ready for prime time in 1989. At that point is was a technological curiosity at best.

My 1990s mp3 experience: will this be the song I wanted, that clip of bill clinton apologizing, or "developers developers developers!"

Yep, I bought one of these on release back in the day. It was pretty amazing at the time, you could actually play back entire CDs on this thing! You have to understand, we were in an age where CD walkmans were pretty new. But THEN.... CD walkmans that could read MP3s came out...

I'm so jealous Clint gets to relive days through new-old-stock, but then again I can't think of a person or KZfaq channel more deserving of it.

Gotta love the packaging - it couldn't look more late 90's if it tried 😂

I saved, saved, and saved to buy a PMP300 when it was released and it was truly one of my treasured possessions for many years after. Seeing one in new old stock condition- every pamphlet and CD, and especially the software just absolutely floods me with nostalgia.

I've been watching for years and I just wanted to say that your editing has improved tremendously in that time. This was a particularly well-made video.

Your videos are always such a trip, man. I love them. Thanks for making them :)

You gotta love when the stars and time align, LGR makes a DankPods video with the Diamond Rio, and DankPods makes a LGR video with the calculators.

Man, I wanted one of these so bad when I was 17. But $200 was just way too much. I think I stuck to my portable CD player for a while. Sadly, it wasn't a DS9 Defiant CD player.

tbh I remember embracing mp3 in 2001 and it was a huge step-up. Up until that time, the music was either on radio or cassette tapes. what's interesting, I remember there were legit online sources of mp3s, even freeware, mostly independent hip-hop, punk and techno - it was a gateway to many different stuff I was introduced to as a young kid.

I had one of these, thanks for the nostalgia. I absolutely love your content brother. Thanks for the hard work.

9:18 “it sure is a nice little nugget”

OMG, I almost cried when you said Musicmatch Jukebox . . . duuuuuuuuude! I'm encroaching on 38 years old this year and these LGR videos always stab me in the eyeball with nostalgia.

Oh man this takes me back. I saved up and got one of these because I thought it was the cutting edge and I felt so cool walking around high school listening to music on this thing. The battery door broke on it and I can't remember if I got it replaced or did some kind of a fix for it. I ended up using it for quite a long time actually.

your channel is very good seeing the past equipment and games refreshes my memories thank you

The perceptual models used in MP3 encoders have improved *heaps* since the early days. If you encode the same audio at the same bitrate with a 90s build of LAME vs a modern build you'll notice an enormous difference in quality, despite both files being the same size and being playable on any mp3-capable device. We have a much better understanding nowadays of which parts of sound are important to human perception, so audio encoders can make far better decisions about what to keep and what to throw away when encoding a file, even when working within the same format and bitrate constraints.

Man really need a dankpods and LGR colab now cuz I’m pretty sure he will watch this video lmao, both amazing content creators

I remember having one of these and despite it's small storage capacity, it wasn't a bad little device. Not to mention it was just cool to think about how far things might go and the fact that this thing was basically the beginning for portable players of digital formats. Rio was actually a pretty great company for a while. After owning the pmp I just kept buying more Rio devices as time progressed. Definitely owned more Rio devices than Ipods or zunes. Great piece of technological history here.

26:35 To be fair, there was a good reason for that wariness about sharing anything personal - a lot of the early internet was built on plaintext communication protocols, so depending on how your connection worked, anyone from your ISP to literally every node between you and the endpoint you were connecting to, plus everything directly connected to all those nodes, might have seen what you were sending. Literally just strings of ASCII text sent across the wires. It was actually built less for privacy and security back then than it is now, if you can believe that.

Dankpods does a calculator then Clint does a mp3 player

What a neat little device. I also remember getting my first mp3 player around 2001 and playing the absolute crap out of it.

Outstanding video - I remember buying it when it launched....and it replaced my giant CD player that took 6 AA batteries - this was magical...I was stuck with about 6-8 MP3 songs I could play over and over but it was worth it! Also, every kid in high school was like "dude...how is there music coming out of there with no CD? What is an Mp3?". It wasn't until 2000 when everyone realized what an MP3 file was! I still had my original Rip PMP that I fired up back in 2015: it had tracks from the early 2000s era! (ended up donating the player The 8-Bit Guy along with a fully working Creative Nomad Jukebox!)

This entire video just sent me back to the 90s - seeing Winamp just bought a tear to my eye.

Oh man, I had one. Returned a CD Burner to Best Buy in exchange for it plus some cash. Used it regularly until it broke or I lost it in 2002 or so. I learned about joint stereo MP3 encoding to squeeze every bit of playtime I could while convincing myself 96kbps joint stereo was just as good as 128k . It was my first loved music player for sure. Great video.

I use to be strung out on mp3's then I tasted FLAC for the first time. Still freebasing audio daily 2 decades later.

The first three seconds of your videos are like a warm blanket to me.

Your retro gadget videos are my favorites. I'd love if you'd keep doing some more for a bit

im 100% here for this dankpods/lgr bromance arc. Next thing LGR is gonna switch from smooth radio voice to yelling, and Dankpods will be trying to run Duke Nukem on an ipod shuffle

Portable MP3 players were too expensive for me at the time. I used to record my music onto cassettes & listen portably with my walkman all throughout college until around 2003 when I got my first MP3 CD player. By then, the prices on those had come down to the $30-$50 range. MP3 CDs were appealing to me because you could burn an MP3 CD with 700 MB of MP3s & listen to it on the go, and swap it out for other MP3 CDs. I think I went through 3 of them, each lasting around 2 years, until I finally got a proper MP3 player around 2009. I think I have owned 6 MP3 players & still use one to this day! I like listening to my favorite tunes on shuffle, and remove songs if they ever get annoying or tiresome.

The tie-ins on what you're narrating with what you're filming is really _nice_ I mean beyond what narration is. Like planning a gag, then timing the video for it, and then doing narration later on top of it!

Had one of those, what a nostalgic video!!! Thank you :)

That thing was (literally) my jam for a few years until I could afford an upgrade to an iPod. I remember shuffling around MP3s all the time since it couldn't fit more than a couple albums' worth of songs. I also remember 'magic' of being able to listen to high quality "digital" music without the constant skipping I encountered with my cheap old Discman.

My first digital music player! Blew my friends minds with this thing back then.

“Nugget” and “dank appeal”…. Adelaide represent. LGR just called you out Wade! So much love.

I Loved my Rio and I still have it! Thank you. this brought back a lot of memories. So so many memories of watching that animated gif of the cd flipping while my computer slowly filled up the rio over the parallel port lol...

Got one of these in the summer of 1999. I very clearly remember going to Best Buy to get it, and they had it in a glass display case along with other small high ticket items. I guess because they were easily stolen? I still have it, actually. It is still loaded with the last songs I put on it in the late 00s. That battery compartment door, oooof. Also the belt clip's plastic was brittle as hell and mine snapped off of mine pretty early on (just like the battery compartment's nub). I always taped the battery door shut. Also, for anyone wondering, it CAN play higher bitrate MP3s. 192kbps and even 320kbps work fine. 160kbps, however, does NOT work. I remember reading an article on how just bumping up to 160 from 128 was a noticeable improvement, and it had sample mp3s for you to listen to. I was hyped, and ripped a whole CD at 160, which was NOT FAST, back then. Only to find out they wouldn't play on my PMP300. It was infuriating. Haha.

Thanks for downloading this video to KZfaq, Clint! I remember the first MP3 I downloaded in ~98 - House of the Rising Sun - I couldn't believe the quality. I thought it was magic. And at 3:00 - that looks like a typical set of mp3s of that time. Who didn't download CCR or Weird Al mp3s?! IRC was the best way to get them. !serverlist ;)

A pitifull pair ! I love it, great vid as always....

Your awesome alliterations are always astounding and acute

As a 21 year old, I love looking at old tech like this. Thankyou so much for what you cover LGR! It gives people like myself a glimpse into the past to see what it was actually like in the 90s.

thank you for these videos. the opening shot of the shelving with all that 90s-2000s era stuff and boxes with those retro colors and designs - really hits me in the feels. we truly did live through an amazing time where analog transitioned into digital. external modems, aol, sim city, shopping at frys for 3rd party parts for my desktop, doing school projects using info from Encarta...good times. thanks again for your channel. definitely a high point in the entertainment/media that i follow. i like these retro reviews more than most of the 'tv' shows i watch streaming.

I remember getting my PMP300 as an added bonus for buying a CDR4x drive from Best Buy in 1999. Thanks for doing this review...tons of nostalgia.

I love your videos, thank you.

The Rio 500 was my first MP3 player and it was frickin awesome at the time. My classmates were mystified by it as if it were some alien technology. Still have it, and it still works!

I remember playing random files, not having internet made me love those magazine CDs and also random CDs you could just buy for cheap. While I did not have an MP3 player, I did enjoy the tape walkman and later on the first phones where you could upload a few mp3 files. Yes, this kind of thing is fun, your reviews of odd hardware and wares is really fun. Do it, you have a knack for reviews, even if it is not that indept, really fun to listen.

MP3's a gateway drug to FLAC with the vapor/smoke in the air around the RIO is an amazing shot! Really clever. Keep up the great work!

I have no prior knowledge of most of what you talk about, despite often being old enough. I was from a very Slow To Adopt family when it came to 90's/Early 2000's tech, but you're so goshdang enthusiastic about every tech memory you revisit. It's utterly infectious.

There was a sense of discovery at that time, getting music from friends, hunting for new stuff and such. I used to enjoy and appreciate music much more at the time, instead of having everything available all the time, the limited availability made me enjoy music much more, and I feel it's the same with games.

You and DankPods really crossing the streams this week huh

This was so nostalgic. Thanks for taking us down memory lane.

Damnit, was just watching an informative video and you had to go and have the smoke blow by XD earned a like from a long-time sub, keep it classy Clint.

I remember buying this at Babbage's in 1998. I went from a MiniDisc player with great audio quality and tons of music to an mp3 player with space for around 10 tracks which vaguely sounded like they were underwater... it was a glorious. BEST PURCHASE EVER (at least that was what I kept telling myself).

The very first digital music player I remember hearing of! This thing was the stuff of legends back in the day! When I got a Rio 500 it felt absolutely magical! Then I got the 750 and it felt cheap after the really high feeling quality of the 500 despite the better specs.

man brings back some memories. I had a Rio and loved it!

hearing dankpods reference you directly is wild after being subscribed to you for years, so hearing you make subtle references to dankpods yourself is equally delightful

13:49 is exactly how my desktop was back in 1998-2000, all those classic games, so nostalgic.

I still have my diamond rio, the rubber turned into sticky stuff but i keep it forever. Epic piece of history

towards the later years of playing with mps i loved musicmatch jukebox, the database and ripping tool made it so easy to go full ocd on editing those id3 tags,,

I vaguely remember seeing these still in stores in like 05 or 06 with every box still on the shelf because no one wanted one by then. Wild.

I had one of these! I still remember going into Computer City to get a 64MB SD card for it and the sales guy laughed at me and said such a thing would never exist...so I bought it online that evening, starting the end of brick and mortar stores for me. I ended up years later trading the Rio for a Chicken Finger Sub. I still have my Diamond Rio 500 somewhere around here.(correction Smart media card)

OMG the memories hit hard! I got that thing when it hit the shelves over here, paying something around 2500 Austrian Schilling for it iirc (that's about 175€, or ~350€ adjusted for inflation). I used to encode my mp3's at a lower bitrate so I could fit more than half an hour worth of music onto it's 32mb storage... crazy times.

This video makes me thankful for what I have right now... PS4 & phone & MacBook pro to enjoy😌

This is a nicely made video! I passed on the Rio and bought an MPMan F60 a couple of years later. 64MB built-in, expandable with SmartMedia, full ID3 support including non-Roman characters, built-in radio and voice recorder.

I remember when I found out my CD player could play disks full of MP3s. I seriously blew some peoples minds with a single CD that held like a hundred songs.

I had one, it was amazing you could get the music OFF the computer and bring it with you. Now I have a Fiio X1 (1st gen) which borrows some of the design elements, but with exponentially more storage, 128 GB. It's incredible how much solid-state storage capacity has jumped over the years.

I love when my favorite youtubers cross streams! Dankpods mentioned you the other day, and now you call an old mp3 player a nugget! I love it!

I still have my Diamond Rio, and was thinking you should do a review... and here it is.

I remember this was the first MP3 player that I experienced in school, one of my friends had it. The Diamond Rio was mind blowing that you could listen to full length songs without any physical media at the time!

I got one of these for my birthday in the summer of '99 and it truly felt like the future! The rise of Napster alongside it and the whole mp3 era was truly special!

My PMP-300 that my father purchased when it was new has no button degradation, I imagine that was due to the bag it was stored in or the environment that it created.

I remember on Linux there was plenty of open source CD rip programs you could download and compile which used extended capabilities of the CD-ROM-Drive to actually read useful data from totally scratched audio CDs. ;-) And for the RIO Diamond it took a VERY short time to actually have people code programs to use it on the command line to move files onto the Rio.

I owned this one! Great product, had so much fun with it. Great content as always - so much joy for the weekend. Greetings from Germany

I didn't even know MP3 players were around in 98. I got my first one (RCA Lyra with 128mb for about $300) around 2002 and they were still pretty uncommon at the time.

Good video! Brings back memories of ripping my cd’s using Musimatch any playing it with Winamp. I did not buy am MP3 player until 2001 but I can’t remember which one I had. Exchanged mp3’s with my friends and never bought any more cd’s. Such memories…

MP3 players were so huge for me, especially at the gym, on my bike or played thru AUX port on my car stereo. Ditching the bulky CD walkman was SO great!

Would love to see more videos about MP3 players! Great video as usual, Clint

Wow so many memories came flooding back into my brain. I haven't thought about any of this in almost 20years. My dad loved ripping music. We had a box full of about 30 hard-drives all with music on them. I still have them come to think of it!

This thing was so freakin cool when it came out. My first MP3 player was the later released silver Diamond Rio One 64MB model.

Used to have one of these, was so great for it's time. Good memories.

Haha, I remember when this came out. I was a country radio DJ in college long before the Rio MP3 player came out and when it did, I wondered if the group would sue Diamond for the naming rights. I also remember the horrible early days of MP3 when you had to COOK and UNCOOK the files in order to get them to play. You young kids have no idea what we went through... Hahaha!

I love how it has the bit rate for the current file being played, what a neat lil player.

This brought back so many memories I had to break out my rio 500 with some mods and some 90s music still on it! Thanks!

Great video bruh bruh

I used to love that A➞ B feature. When practicing a song on the drums, looping the same part over helps in being efficient

I remember wanting this so badly. I was 15 and we had dialup internet. It'd take half a day to download a single song (assuming nobody picked up the phone and disconnected me). I still wanted one, practicality be damned.

I'm still using Winamp 2.8 player on my Windows 7 now in 2022. Great review - and greetings from Latvia.

Despite never owning an MP3 player (always listened to my music at home) this video was a shot of early 2000s nostalgia for me. Downloading MP3s and random junk off Kazaa Lite, RealPlayer, using web browser download managers because so many people including myself were still on crappy dial-up internet and couldn't complete a download otherwise. Back when the Internet was still the wild west and vastly different from the sanitized corporate playground of today. I still have my old music and game folders from the early-to-mid 2000s which have jumped from hard drive to hard drive, survived multiple desktop computer replacements, and still have stuff I downloaded from back then. I keep them around for posterity and remind myself of simpler times.