An MP3 Jukebox for Everyone (Including The RIAA)

well it happened again and I'm not talking about having a lump on my nose right before I need to record that happens all the time I walked into my local junk store last Saturday looked down and right there in front of me was a device I've been searching for on eBay for a year maybe longer but I never expected to actually see one in person and yet there it was new in box or close enough like it was put there just for me to find uh it's from the year 2000 because of course it is I mean if you've seen my channel before and it was made by a long dead company called well all the logos are covered up here uh there we go dig media dig media I'm not sure which one's correct and both feel pretty weird I'm gonna go with dig media the thing itself is also pretty weird uh I think it's the first product or nearly so in a market that's existed for over 20 years at this point it's still around but most people probably never paid any attention to it uh and it's also a pretty unusual entry in the early MP3 player Market or more accurately it's two of them see if we take a look on the box here there's actually two gadgets the bigger one is the music store which is actually the name on The Box although you can't quite see it under the clearance sticker this is actually an MP3 player it's a stationary rather than a portable one which is a variety that I think most of us never knew existed um or at least we don't care if it does and then there's a second Gadget plugged into the top of it that's a far more conventional portable MP3 player called the soulmate and that's the part that's been giving me trouble see these were actually sold as separate products as you can see here on the back it says the soulmate was sold separately but honestly they're supposed to go together like they don't really make sense uh separately so I didn't really want to just get one but I could only find part A on eBay the big boy I've never come across anybody selling a soulmate until now as the sticker in the corner tells us this is a combo pack that was sold with the soul mate so it came with the little guy originally and since I think the previous owner either never used it or only used it maybe once and then carefully packed it all back up maybe hoping to return or resell it the soulmate is in fact present so I finally have the entire system you mean it's complete okay well not really there's actually a third component to this ecosystem that doesn't even get mentioned on the box and that one's total unobtainium I don't expect to ever find one I don't think they ever sold one but fortunately it's also completely useless nowadays for reasons I'll get into so we're not missing much but it is a bummer if I'm honest because if you look at digimedia's whole system in the context of the era it's actually pretty neat uh and even this specific product is pretty neat it's a little surprising it didn't seem to go anywhere even at a time when the personal audio Market was ripe for Innovation because yeah by the time this thing came out the MP3 Revolution was already occurring this thing wasn't first to Market by any means but let's talk about what problems MP3s had not yet solved if you've watched any amount of retroelectronics YouTube you'll know that prior to the 2010s portable music players were one of the biggest consumer electronics markets and I think that's mostly because anything else you could conceivably do on the move was pretty awkward I mean there were a few companies that nipped and tugged at the idea of personal video players and portable web Terminals and of course there were hundreds of pdas some very successful within their niches but very little of it escaped being early adopter stuff even decades into a all even pdas didn't really integrate into most people's lives and very few portable gadgets really did until modern smartphones put every imaginable capability into the same pocketable slab portable music on the other hand integrated into millions of people's lives instantly upon the release of the first Walkman in 1979. I mean even before that pocket transistor radios were incredibly popular but Sony's portable cassette player let you choose what music you wanted to listen to and it was so small that you could have it on you all day long no matter where you were or what you were doing and that's exactly what tons of people did but as convenient as it was the Walkman sparked a whole industry that spent the next 30 years trying to figure out how to make a clone that was smaller higher capacity better quality more convenient cheaper or all the above and they had their work cut out for them because for the most part you just couldn't get all of those at once not even most of them really not even when the MP3 player came out this subject has of course been covered in great depth on YouTube because MP3 players utterly changed how people listen to music on the go particularly when the iPod came out and put our whole music collections in our pockets but that didn't happen right away it's generally agreed upon that the Diamond Rio pmp300 was the first commercially successful MP3 player but that came out in 1998 for years before the iPod so it took a while to get the formula right in fact by some people's measures the iPod didn't even take over the market for another couple years but that's getting a little too nitpicky for me the Rio was impressive in a gadgety kind of way it had no moving Parts it was smaller than a CD player it was very cool but in the cold light of day that is you know retrospectively from 2022 it wasn't necessarily any better than a CD player and it was maybe kind of worse I mean we can debate the oral quality of MP3s especially since the Rio couldn't play anything better than 128 kilobits which many people would say is unlistenable but of course we also know the majority of people can't tell the difference or don't care otherwise the MP3 Revolution never would have happened since that bit rate was pretty common for most of the 2000s the things that really matter to people are convenience and practicality and the Rio kinda didn't have either one it used flash memory for storage which was extremely expensive so at release it only held 32 megabytes even at 128 kilobits that's only about two-thirds of a typical CD you could cut the bit rate down to fit a whole hour onto it but at that point even the average listener would probably notice the degraded audio you could also add storage but a 32 Meg flash card was about two hundred dollars at the time roughly the same price as the player itself and even worse you still had to fill that all up with a CD player if you wanted to switch music you just grabbed what you wanted and popped it in the device but you couldn't do that with the Rio it had to be plugged into your PC to populate the internal memory and well you could swap out memory cards they were way too expensive you couldn't just keep a bunch around with different albums on them cost you literally a thousand dollars so basically whenever you wanted to hear something new you had to plug your player into your PC run the special program and then wait well it shoved 64 Megs of MP3s to a 200 kilobyte per second parallel port and USB could have been faster but you probably didn't have that in 1988 and even if you did the Rio didn't offer it things did improve obviously the second version of the Rio had 64 Megs of storage and a USB interface so it probably ran quite a bit faster but you still had to sit at your PC and wait to load up an album no matter how often you listen to it and that probably stung so simply using MP3s didn't automatically make these Superior portable audio devices the only thing that was special about them really was that they didn't skip but contemporary CD players had skip buffers I had one and it worked great I mean once I was running a jackhammer which did happen a couple times and I imagine joggers would benefit from a totally skip proof device but I think for most people early MP3 players were just Novelties not really life-changing the iPod on the other hand Monumental as it was used a multi-gigabyte hard drive so it could hold much more than one CD you could put tons of them on there in fact and I think this was key to its success it wasn't the first device to do this and we could talk all day about why it succeeded while its predecessors didn't but the point is it wouldn't have succeeded otherwise that hard drive allowed it to serve as a complete music library you didn't just put one album on your iPod you put dozens on there so you could decide what you wanted to listen to while you were out and about and that was finally something that CD players couldn't match I mean you probably wouldn't bring 10 CDs with you on a jog not usually but you could bring 10 albums on your iPod and that was new and exciting the only question left then was where you were going to get that music to begin with I mean plenty of us know where we were getting our MP3s back then but if you wanted legitimate legal option well that was complicated this video isn't a history of online music stores so I haven't researched this part but I seem to recall that prior to iTunes there were a ton of competing vendors they're all pretty much gone now which probably tells us how well their services worked downloading music also cost a lot in both bandwidth and time especially when most people still had dial up and many people didn't have internet at all so in the inner regnum if you will from about 1988 to 2003 when the iTunes Store launched and more people were starting to get Broadband the best way to get MP3s was to rip audio from CDs that you already owned and tons of people did that but it required time hard drive space a computer new enough to do it and an understanding of the software none of which were guarantees at the time for a lot more people than now and finally while there were a lot of MP3 players available Circa 1999 and 2000 they were almost all portable they were meant to compete in that Walkman space but what about the person listening on their home Hi-Fi system who wanted to use MP3s there there wasn't nearly as much Hardware being sold towards that use case as far as I can tell and I think most people assumed you just use software on your PC which you could but again not everyone was comfortable with that and so it wasn't hard in this era to imagine a demographic that wasn't being served people who wanted to leverage this New Media technology maybe at home as well as on the go and who maybe even wanted to buy songs online but couldn't use a PC or the internet to do those things or at least would prefer not to and that's who I think digimedia was targeting with this product line it was originally sold under the name MP3 go by a company called memory Corporation who I think initially marketed them sometime in 1999. memory Corp lasted a very short time however before deciding their business wasn't viable firing everyone and divesting their consumer products division that went along with the CEO one David Savage to a new company which I'm going to continue pronouncing that's the wrong side dig media they rebranded the product from MP3 go to the less iconic music store and I think that's pretty much all they changed about it other than the plastic case so I can't be certain but I think that whenever ever we talk about this being sold in 2000 we could assume that it was also being sold in 1999 just with a different look anyway let's see what did media's proposed solution looked like the box for the music store says that it's a Digital Jukebox a CD player and a web music something no details on that one and naturally given the era it makes a lot of claims a revolution in how you manage and enjoy your music trust me that's what it says under all the Comp USA markdown stickers and then it says that you can store over 2 000 tracks links to your existing Hi-Fi you can manage and identify your music via a simple keypad instant track download to your portable soulmate and it links directly to your PC for quick web music downloads and of course over here in the corner we don't want to forget to explicitly say it's MP3 compatible because it was the biggest buzzword of the era finally in the upper left we can see the price started out at 450 dollars which was probably less than MSRP and got marked down to 300 before it sold and again the other tags here suggest that this was sold at CompUSA so the markdown suggests it didn't do much selling at all until it hit the Bargain Bin then around on the side we've got some more claims says this is the best of both worlds change the way you manage your music record and mix from both conventional CDs and from the internet and then a lot of the rest of this is uh kind of redundant to what's on the front except for this bit here which is curious secure MP3 format prevents piracy and makes encoding to MP3 format automatic and secure not sure why a consumer would have considered that a feature but anyway now it seems to me this was repacked uh pretty much like new so we can see how it shipped if we open it up here we've got The Usual Suspects I've got your AC line cord you've got a pair of stereo rcas for audio output then you've got the typical pair of earbuds these are made by costs and they're in one of these typical 90s retracting winders which just disintegrated when I opened it which is probably also pretty typical and I tried these and they didn't sound half bad but then the little foam ear pads started disintegrating so I won't be trying them again there's another pair of ear pads in here but you can bet those are disintegrating too then we've just got the manual and then a registration and a quick start card nothing remarkable there over here we've got the driver CD such as it is we'll talk more about that later and then we've got a sample disk from some indie label with a bunch of bands you've never heard of um the color red stunt monkey acid 9 probably all broke up like three months after this got pressed anyway if we take the top layer out here's the goods uh this is the music store itself of course that there is the saw mate and then we've got the power supply for the music store so let's get this all unpacked and then get all the junk back in the box so this is the music store itself and from the box you could probably suss out a lot of what's going on with it but in case you ever seen one of these before this is what's called A Digital Jukebox or digital media player basically an overgrown MP3 player that's meant to go in your stereo system instead of in your pocket it has a five gigabyte hard drive and the idea is that you load this up with your whole MP3 collection so you can play anything you want at any time without swapping any media in other words it's basically a really big iPod but it's worth keeping in mind that the iPod didn't exist yet and in fact the creative Nomad jukebox which Apple basically cloned to create the iPod as I understand it probably didn't exist either when this was being designed and this fact will come up again later now some Modern digital media players and actually a few very early devices made not long after this one can stream music off your PC directly the modern ones can even stream them from internet services but in this era you weren't expected to have a network at all and in fact you might not even have a PC which is okay this works fine without one you can see that it has a CD-ROM built in and what you're expected to do is to take the CDs you already have put them in here and it will rip them and turn them into MP3s on the internal hard drive and as I mentioned you can actually still buy devices that do exactly this complete with the CD-ROM portion just nowadays they're usually aimed at the audio file market and they're pretty pricey whereas this one was a lot more consumer oriented anyway to illustrate what this is all about uh let me plug it in and get some speakers set up so here's the dream of this device in a nutshell suppose it's Y2K and I want to listen to my friend Jeremy Blake I mean to YouTube audio library music you won't compose for another 18 years but let's not worry about that I walk up to my stereo I punch a few keys and there he is do you notice how fast that was you'd be hard-pressed to get an album playing on your stereo that quickly even now that was probably faster than starting winning up and dragging an album into it even including the time it took to power the thing on hell that was faster than finding a CD opening the jewel case and putting it in the player that's pretty damn slick for 2022 let alone 2 000 wouldn't you say we'll go into all the details of how I did that so quickly in a bit but first let's introduce the little brother this is in no uncertain terms the cheapest ugliest portable MP3 player I've ever seen um on the other hand the bar was pretty low at the time and I think its contemporaries didn't score much better still it's pretty Barren feature wise and it doesn't feel very good in the hand uh so while it was supposedly sold as a standalone product I'm not sure anybody ever bought one of these on its merits which maybe explains why I couldn't find any by themselves on eBay as an MP3 player it plays MP3s here [Music] foreign [Music] what makes the soulmate special is solely its relationship to the music store the big flap in the middle of it here is a docking port and you can insert the soulmate to transfer media directly to it because yeah if the point here was to make an MP3 library that didn't need a PC then how would you get those files onto a portable player the music store wouldn't have drivers for a Rio or a creative Zen so the soulmate as its name implies is the perfect partner the Dig media created for it but that of course means that this video is really a review of two separate products and I'm gonna have to address them one at a time starting with the music store since it has the bulk of the functionality your first impression will be that this thing feels cheap as hell they definitely did not go overboard on the quality of the plastic the molds or the silver paint I'm pretty sure this thing got plugged in tested and then put right back in the Box because if it had seen any substantial use I'm sure they'd be worn through patches of off-white plastic all over the thing the CD-ROM mechanism is one of the pop top variety and curiously uh well it has a spring assist on the very flimsy hinge back here the latch in the front lands on a micro switch underneath here which is pretty typical that's what tells the machine if the door is open but in this case I'm pretty sure they're relying on the spring inside that micro switch to uh pop the door up when you hit the button which is uh pretty poor form I'd say uh that latch also sticks out quite a bit so when you open it it just kind of runs into the edge there and uh you have to actually bend the door a little bit you have to like strain it against the hinges to get it to close and I'm not sure why they did this but it sure seems intentional this thing appears to be in pristine condition so I guess that's what it's supposed to do the user interface is entirely through this tiny LCD and the keypad which is also usually not a sign of great things to come but you'll see when we power it on it's really more of a mixed bag and less of a disaster much like the top the back is pretty austere there's a pair of rcas to plug into your stereo a headphone jack a USB port and a power input that's it and there aren't any other details on the thing nothing on the sides or the front except for this IR receiver window and this is strange since it didn't come with a remote there's no mention of one anywhere the pictures in the manual don't seem to show this receiver window so I'm guessing they added this late in production and just never got the remote working there's actually even a sensor diode inside and since remotes were cheap and commonplace in the year 2000 this really seems weird it's an odd place to just give up especially given how the device is meant to be used what sort of thing went in your stereo in the year 2 1000 that didn't have a remote control the headphone output also doesn't have any kind of volume knob now it's adjusted digitally which I'm not a big fan of but they probably did that so you could use the remote which they never delivered it could also just been to save money though since I'm pretty sure they built this thing down to a price I mean they didn't even put the headphone jack on the front where it belongs so did media was probably digging in the couch cushions for spare change to get this thing to Market at all that's probably also why it uses an external AC adapter the reason manufacturers do this is always the same they don't want to pay for UL certification to build the power supply into their device but even the cheapest crappiest CD players and tape decks shell out for that anyway so if you have a stereo system this will probably be the only thing in it with a separate power brick and even if you don't know what UL is I think you'd get the message when you notice that everything else you owned just plugged straight into the wall so at this point uh the machine is sadly looking pretty dire already and it does take a bit to start looking up even after we turn it on first let's talk about sound and I don't mean what comes out of the RCA jacks as I mentioned there's a hard drive in here and it's not deafening you probably can't hear it in this audio here I'm going to have to amplify some b-roll but it's not silent either I can hear it right now now I doubt this thing ran for more than a couple dozen hours tops so the hard drive bearings should be like new which means it probably always sounded like it does and it's not all that loud but the cheap plastic case doesn't isolate sound at all so if you're in a quiet room like you know the ideal Hi-Fi listening setup there's a good chance that you'll hear it and since it runs the entire time the unit is powered on if you can hear it it's gonna drive you bonkers the CD player doesn't run all the time of course but when it does it's also quite loud foreign stereo system CD player to compare this to but I feel like this one's quite a bit noisier than most when you play a disc you can really hear it going in there the entire time it's much louder than the hard drive and again that's probably just because this is encased in thin plastic instead of heavy steel and aluminum it would really have been nice if they just added a thin sheet of foam rubber or something to mitigate the noise but I think that might have cost money anyway let's see this do something the CD player works pretty much like you expect you pop the top bend it until the latch pops loose and then pop a disc onto the spindle here and then the installation is the reverse of removal I should point out again that closing this door feels just horrible if you try and casually shut the lid it just wax into the case until you twist it to the side feels like it's put together wrong looking at this display is a little cryptic this is one of those awful hobbyist style like four line LCDs that just does letters numbers and it can do custom characters but they aren't really detailed enough to communicate anything this kind of display is generally a mark of Shame you only really see it on high-end gear when it's something you're supposed to interact with like a dozen times in the thing's whole life span like putting an IP address on your expensive stereo receiver it was a dig as a primary user interface it's usually bad news and sure enough this UI is pretty rough I'd wager that most people would not be able to use this device casually like if you sent somebody over to the stereo and told them to play something I think they'd come back you just defeated you'd have to either read the instructions or want to play a song badly enough to spend 10 minutes running into walls before you can work out the interface as soon as it's powered on the music store asks you to enter the name of the music you want you'd expect to see a menu at this point with artists albums and so on but it actually wants you to search for something like full text search you're supposed to use the numeric keypad to enter a query and we'll talk more about that later but generally when a device only has a keypad that's not a great sign fortunately there are these soft keys under the display that give us more specific context options but they aren't as useful as you'd hope they have these symbols that don't really explain much the first key for instance looks like it might be help but it's actually lucky dip which is a pretty neat feature honestly it shuffles songs from across your whole library or from a specific artist or genre all of which was pretty much impossible with anything else other than a PC in the year 2000. but I wouldn't say it's worth top billing on the UI the other two soft keys are just as baffling and to save you some time none of them will take you to an iPod style browse Library menu because there isn't one this device is navigated solely by search as far as I can tell now like I mentioned earlier the iPod didn't exist yet and I don't even think the devices that the iPod cloned existed yet there was little or nothing on the market that could hold enough music for a library interface to make sense so let's be real nobody knew how to do this properly yet there was no model for this interface at least not among consumer products and it's not that surprising the designers of this device didn't think to mimic the act of thumbing through a CD or vinyl collection and that was an easy thing to miss still with 2022 hindsight we can realize that even at the time it was pretty stupefying to be faced with this when all you want to do is play some music and you maybe don't know exactly what if you don't have total recall of your whole music collection if you're looking for an artist name but you're not sure what it is you'd be kind of stuck here short of hitting Shuffle and hoping for the best we'll look more at the library and search features in a bit but let's follow the workflow here with this machine fresh out of the box you need to rip a CD to get some music to get started with so we've got one in there and of course this can work as an ordinary CD player and that part is pretty straightforward all we do is just hit CD and then there we go you can press play and there's your music and this is a really simple CD player uh you pretty much have pause play next track and that's about it you can't seek you can't do program playback nothing like that there are options for Shuffle and repeat but they're just sort of stuffed in here on a numpad button and you actually can't tell if they're in effect when it's paused you have to hit play for those to show up so this really feels like a last minute feature to get to the CD ripping interface we exit the CD player and then press the soft key with the record symbol and this is in fact the recording menu which seems very exciting for a moment you might think it's for burning a CD from your mp3s and that would be very cool very ahead of its time I don't think people typically did that until iTunes came out in 2003 but nothing quite that exciting record refers here to ripping a CD and that seems like a strange use to terminology but to be fair most people in the year 2000 probably hadn't ever burned a CD or ripped a CD and the closest analog to what we're going to do here to take the contents of the CD and put them onto the device would be recording like with a tape also after a fashion um this makes a lot more sense than you'd think even in the context of ripping a CD and you'll see what I mean in a minute what is particularly strange is that the mix option shows up here now that really doesn't belong in this menu at all I'm going to talk more about mixes later but just so you understand in ditch media's book a mix is what we now think of as a playlist so it's just a bunch of tracks on your device that you're playing in a particular order now playlists as a concept were brand new and the vocabulary was probably still in flux in 1999 when this was designed so I don't bemoan that so much but I don't know what it's doing here in the record menu you're not doing any recording all it does is let you assemble your existing media collection into playlists and there's a much more intuitive place for it that you'll see later just a bizarre choice anyway it tells us how much space is free on the disk still in percentage which makes sense because this device can record at multiple bit rates so it can't tell us how many minutes remain and most consumers probably wouldn't want to see the raw megabyte count so this is the best option available anyway if we want to rip a CD we press CD and now we get another kind of confusing interface at least to me I never would have figured this out without reading the manual this shows us the list of tracks on the disk and of course there's no names for these this is before the era of Grace note and there's no internet connection for cddb and I don't think very many things supported CD text at the time so the device can't know what disk is in the reader that's normal the problem is that this interface sure looks to me like it's asking me to pick one track to rip and there's no all button so I was pretty confused here in reality if I just hit OK it'll start ripping the entire disk this is actually listing the tracks that it's going to capture and it's offering me a choice if I don't want to rip an entire disc I can press this delete key all the way down here at the bottom of the numpad to remove tracks from the list to be ripped so this is actually a nice interface this is slicker than it needed to be but that delete key really needed to be up here under the display so I Associated it with the options on the screen I never even noticed it was there until I read the manual anyway when we hit OK it asks us what quality we want to record at and if you ask me what these options mean I can't exactly tell you because dig media doesn't specify the bit rates anywhere in their documentation and it's impossible to look at the actual files see remember when we looked at the side of the box and it said it had secure MP3s that prevented piracy what they meant is that the mp3s as stored on the disk are encrypted and in fact digimedia held some patents on that process and sure enough when I pulled the hard drive out and took a look at what was on it I found that it had no MBR no standard file system and nothing that looked like an MP3 header floating around in the sea of bits on the platter their intent I assume was to make it impossible to use this device to rip a bunch of disks then just pull the hard drive out and offload them all and that's pretty silly for a variety of reasons um for one I assume the encryption is not particularly robust but also you'd need a PC to do anything with that hard drive and if you were that kind of nerd you'd just have a free CD ripping program anyway my only guess is that dig media did this as a faint they were trying not to look like a juicy Target for the riaa even though their product would never have been anywhere near the top of their hit list to begin with for what it's worth a contemporary article suggests that the bit rates that the soulmate supported were 96 122 and 128 kilobits pretty typical for the era and probably those correspond to the SP LP and ELP options so we'll go with that and move on select a quality level we're asked to enter an artist and it's finally time to talk about the thing that I've been avoiding so far text entry this device is meant to be a complete media library which means you need to name everything you put in here it doesn't know the names on the CDs so you're expected to enter with this little two-line screen and a 10 key numpad names of artists albums and even tracks both for ripping discs and searching through music now obviously that sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass but in an incredibly year 2000 move dig media licensed T9 if you're under the age of I don't know 30 you might not remember T9 at all in fact my girlfriend is several years older than me and she doesn't remember it either but if you were doing a lot of texting or God forbid mobile web surfing in say 2003 you either adored or abhorred T9 see the nor thern way of entering text on a cell phone dial pad for instance was to press each key repeatedly until you cycled through to the letter or the symbol that you wanted and the music store can do it this way if you want so let's see what that looks like suppose I'm ripping a System of a Down CD so I want to enter system we have to do seven four times for an S and then nine three times for a y and then seven four times again for an S and so on and so forth uh this is a 15 character name and it takes I think over 40 key presses to enter this way pretty miserable the solution to this misery was an extremely early predictive text entry product called T9 the idea is you just press the keys with the letters you want one time for each letter and it applies a dictionary to figure out which words you could have meant and from there it uses weights and grammar analysis to guess at which word you probably meant so if we go back and turn on T9 Again by holding down this key there it is to type in System of a Down we just type the letters I want that was so fast I didn't even need to cut it this works a lot better than you'd expect that was a 15 character name and I pressed the keys 15 times but it did have a couple drawbacks um first off words had to be in its dictionary if it wasn't like a normal English word then you had to fall back to the old press the button repeatedly style of Entry also as you're typing the text in the entry field constantly changes to whatever its latest guess is so it Cycles distractingly through a bunch of wildly unrelated words as you type and finally if you type out your entire word and t9's final guess is wrong then you have to press the next word button repeatedly well it Cycles through every possible guess and there's almost never a previous word button so if you overshoot you have to go all the way around again obviously this system isn't perfect but it does pretty well with most common English words and since most music in this thing's target market was probably named with common English words then this was a decent fit of course if you were listening to a bunch of German industrial or Norwegian black metal then you are going to have to enter everything letter by letter anyway honestly as irritating as T9 could be it was the right choice here this device I'm just guessing was probably not very successful but without T9 I don't think it ever would have left the drawing board it would simply be too tedious to use at all after typing in just one Sufjan Stevens track name even their own testers would have wanted to return the thing to the store anyway after we enter the artist's name it asks us for a title and that's basically the album name so we put something in there and then it'll ask us for a style or genre the list is pretty basic it's got you know usual uh dance pop rock that sort of thing and you could edit that from the main menu if you want to add more and I've already spent more words on the genre feature than you'd ever think this could deserve right there's no possible way that it's worth it for me to keep talking right this is absurd what am I doing it's a genre field it can't be an important part of the design of the device what's he still doing why is he still talking about it well would you believe me if I told you that the genre feature is going to come up two more times in this video and that it contains an essential playback feature mark my words this thing's a trip anyway with all that Agony out of the way it's it's actually less than 10 seconds it's pretty straightforward uh we select an option for genre and The Ripping process finally starts and something interesting happens at this point the music starts playing while it's ripping [Music] after a few seconds it Dawns on you that the only reason this could be happening is if it's ripping the disc at 1X real time and your stomach sinks that's right if I want to rip the entirety of the Bare Naked Ladies stunt I need to let this thing sit there for 51 minutes and yeah it's a one-time process and yeah I can listen to it while it's ripping if I want but imagine ingesting your entire CD collection like this I like to think that they were targeting a pretty casual audience but still if you had enough of a collection for the music store to seem worthwhile at all that had to be at least what 30 40 discs you were looking at nearly a full work week worth of man hours to feed all those into this thing just sitting there waiting for one to finish and then putting the next in and waiting for that to finish which seems completely absurd in an era when 32 speed CD-ROMs were cheap and commonplace in just about every PC now if you're wondering what happens if you interrupt it part way through the RIP by the way yes you do in fact just get a partial track it doesn't clean up after itself and it doesn't have any ability to resume interrupted sessions so if you just open the drive by accident halfway through a rip like I've just done you're going to have to figure out which track it failed on manually delete it then manually restart the rip and manually deselect the tracks that you already have in completion this is why I said it made sense to call ripping a disk recording because it really is behaving like it's recording it like a tape deck and I think I know why it's like this and we'll talk about that later when we open the machine up anyway once The Ripping process is done you get pitched back to the main menu and if we want to listen to the music we just ripped we have to search for it so I type in Jeremy and this is actually found the incomplete rip that I just uh cut off a couple minutes ago so to get to the complete rip I did the other day we press the next button here and if you punched in like a partial artist name that it would go through everything that matches that search this I know is the version of the album I ripped in its entirety so if I hit OK it lets me either Play the album it says a there or I can step through each one of the tracks hence the T if I hit play on the album then it just cues it up and now it works exactly like the CD player does it's just the very basic play pause track forward back Shuffle repeat there's no seek no program play none of that stuff and there it is that's most of the functionality this thing rips disks and it plays them there are a couple remaining features but they're fairly trivial going back to this from earlier the mix feature allows you to make playlists and it's a little clunky but it's not too bad given the age if we go into the record mix here we can either create a new one or we can edit an existing one if you make a new one you just have to name it something and then it'll pop up anywhere as if it was an album once you've given it a name you then search for some music to add and you can either pick an album or you can pick an individual track you know it's a playlist after you add a track it asks if you want to add more music to this mix and every time you want to add another track you have to answer yes and then restart the search from the beginning which is a little clunky but otherwise it works pretty much like you'd expect of course as I mentioned the mix interface doesn't really belong on the record menu at all it belongs up here on the scissors menu which is where you find all of the maintenance stuff so for instance you can go to change names in case you didn't name an album or a track correctly and in fact this is where you have to go if you want to name tracks because when you rip a disk they all come in as track one track two track three you have to come in here and manually select each one and rename it it's very tedious but I really don't see how they could have solved that you can also delete music off the device one album at a time and this is where you can edit the list of styles or genres now you can also merge genres like if I go down here and pick Rock and I had other songs on here that were tagged with like post grunge and ALT Rock and I want them all just smooshed together into one set that I can pick merge and then go pick something and it'll re-tag everything to that one parent genre which you wouldn't need to do with music you ripped obviously right you'd pick consistent genres but the music store does allow importing of external MP3s it's one of its selling points so if you did have a PC and an internet connection then you could put your very legally obtained U2 albums on here and those might come in with a bunch of weird genres as was the style of the time now about that you'd think that having a PC interface would be a great asset sure the device is meant to be Standalone but remember there used to be people who did own a PC they just didn't necessarily have it on all the time they'd still be willing to hook up their PC to this thing periodically for Library maintenance or file transfers and those seem like really exciting options right you could plug into your PC to see your whole music library which you can't really do effectively through the LCD you could build playlists with like a drag and drop interface you could bulk delete music the list of possibilities is endless and of course none of it's possible the support is absolutely austere it's it's like the software you get for programming a microcontroller except worse because those usually have you know an ugly window with a single button that says write file this on the other hand has no interface I mean it there's no actual application included with this device there's just a USB device driver and a plug-in for music match jukebox if you were around in the early 2000s you will remember music match jukebox it was highly divisive as I recall I can't tell you exactly why people hated it other than the fact that it was commercial software bundled with just about everything music or audio related for years if you got any early MP3 player including some of the iPods in fact the included disk would try to install music match jukebox on your PC and I think we all just got sick of it being pushed like McAfee the version included with the music store is just like all the others I've seen has been customized in any way it does the normal music match stuff which namely is playing songs building playlists and ripping CDs yes that's right the music store a device which largely exists to rip CDs and play mp3s includes a program that does both of those things except with a graphical Library a browsing interface keyboard and mouse support and even internet metadata lookup to automatically populate your ID3 tags when you rip a disk you'll the only real downside was that your computer needed to be on all day if you wanted to use it to listen to music which was starting to become a pretty normal thing anyway so maybe we can see some reasons why these jukeboxes never got all that popular anyway once you import some MP3s or rip some CDs you can select those tracks in the interface and use the send to device option to transfer them to the music store and there we have it not only is this the sole PC interface on display here but the window title also describes the only thing you can do with it this dialog lets you confirm which tracks you're sending and send them that's it it doesn't show you what's already on the device only a count of remaining disk space and megabytes and obviously since this device is so incredibly anti-piracy we didn't expect to be able to pull music off of it but still this doesn't even let you see if you're duplicating data if you're sending files that are already on the device even worse when you tell it to start the transfer it asks you to enter an album name which doesn't make any sense it should just pull that from the ID3 tags right but that doesn't work and I think it's because the music store doesn't really know what albums are it understands artists and track titles but that's it when you rip a disk it doesn't really make an album I think it's just putting all the tracks into a new mix so when you search for the album title you're just pulling up the pre-made playlist there's no actual concept of albums on here so when you import files from music match not only are you forced to manually punch in a title but also you can only import one CD at a time because think about it if you select tracks from multiple albums and try and push them all at once it only asks you for one mixed title so they're all going to get crushed into one playlist this is absurd frankly it really just it's the cherry on top of this thing's clunkiness the PC interface should have solved the problem of bulk Imports for anyone who already has anything ripped on their PC or you know wants to buy a bunch of music online and just dump it onto one of these things you should be able to select your entire music match library and just push it to this device and then go get lunch well it slowly transfers everything it ancient USB 1.1 speeds and come back later and find your whole collection here on the device but no if you have 30 CDs that you ripped on your PC you can't start the process and walk away you're gonna have to sit there the entire time babying it waiting for each transfer to complete before starting the next one by hand just as if you were ripping the discs on the device itself and honestly this is so typical for a Y2K product to have a great concept with heartbreaking UI issues the box for the music store makes the claim that it can store over a thousand sorry over 2 000 tracks but imagine getting them in there it's almost like they've gone out of their way to make it as impractical as possible fast CD ripping would have made a difference no dice Library management from your PC would have made a difference no dice bulk imports from a PC that made sense would have helped but no dice every possible Avenue to make this thing less irritating to use as intended has been cut off I mean ditch media wrote their own custom USB driver for this thing they had total control it would have been trivial to add the ability to query the library and edit tags it would have been trivial to create mixes on the fly as files import doesn't matter if it doesn't understand what an album is just make them automatically based on the ID3 album feel it's hard to understand how they arrived at these decisions it seems more obvious to do it the right way they worked hard to screw this up so yeah this is all pretty depressing stuff from our perspectives anyway let's back pedal a bit if you're an Enthusiast what I call a full contact user someone who consumes every part of the electronic animal and lets nothing go to waste this is a usability disaster it's a kind of interesting idea but it's hampered by a clunky UI weird data Concepts and inexplicable limitations plus it's packaged in a cheap ugly case as nerds many of us wouldn't have given this thing the time of day even when it was new and if you're an audiophile forget about it but if you aren't either those people if you don't have Golden Ears and you aren't trying to index a 120 disk Library if you're an ordinary person who just buys a new pop CD once in a while who doesn't have stuck up ideas about how things should be designed as long as they work honestly this device mostly works there are certainly things that would make it more appealing to anyone like a remote control or a library interface that lets you actually browse your media but if we're honest this is still pretty cool as is especially for its time and for its price 450 seems a little steep but consider that this product actually had competition and its competition cost a lot more there were other devices in the market and they had better interfaces some even plugged into your TV to offer a graphical Library I haven't been able to find any example pictures of what those looked like but I'd really love to get one sometime they could also do higher quality audio and they could store more of it and they were better built and they cost 800 to a thousand dollars or more they weren't entry level they weren't for the Everyman they were for Gadget freaks like I would have been at the time if I'd had the money early adopters and audio files not people who just wanted their CD library to be a bit more convenient for that person this worked remarkably well once you had it set up if you wanted to hear an album you just walked in typed a couple letters of the name and hit go and that is undeniably pretty slick for the year 2000 even if you had to do some effort up front to make it work I think this is the right perspective to have and dig media CEO David Savage seemed to agree his various press releases strongly suggested that he was focused on that every man for instance this quote regarding online music sales the record companies think that the label is the brand but most people don't know what label the bands on their CDs are from consumers just want the music clearly he was interested in that demographic that didn't know much more about music than how it sounded and he was probably on the right track pun fully intended I wrote it in the script how can it not be intended now that quote I should mention was about another product they were offering called the internet audio port yes they really called it that and that was the third product that I mentioned at the beginning the one that I'll never find but that filled in the last part of this ecosystem and I'll only cover that briefly since there isn't a lot of info available I have to speculate on some of this from what I can tell it seems like it was a device with an ethernet port that you plugged into broadband internet service and then you could use a touch screen to buy or at least download music from quote the user's favorite online music store a possibly inaccurate Magazine review also claims that you could have it then transfer those downloads directly to the music store that is the the Dig media product this not the generic concept of a music store that I used in the previous sentence so that's the complete package right if you had all that then the audio port would help you get MP3s the music store would store and let you listen to them at home and the soulmate would then let you take your purchased music with you now that assumed that other companies would partner with digs music to offer support for this thing and I doubt that initiative ever could have gotten off the ground and it required you to have Broadband in the year 2000 but presumably not be a PC Enthusiast already which was probably not very likely but assuming somehow this had worked out we could have ended up with the fascinating situation of a bunch of people with massive MP3 collections broadband internet connections and no computers which I think we can all agree would have been deliciously weird we really missed out on something special here so anyway let's take a look at the soul mate now and see what that notional weirdo's mobile experience would have been like now I will be frank with you once again this is the cheapest MP3 player I have ever personally handled it's not the smallest but it's definitely the cheapest this has a plastic belt clip and it's not even well you know what I I hadn't actually tried bending that before this is going to snap the first time that you put it on your belt this this isn't even real wow that is incredible that sucks unbelievably it also runs on double a batteries but that wasn't unusual for the time I actually had a number of MP3 players that ran on those as well but they do live in this little pack that you have to unscrew like you actually have to get a screwdriver see you can't really quite do it with your fingers there we go that did it so they live in this little pack here and it's got this little little cavity down here that looks like it might contain charging circuitry or something like that but it's actually almost empty there's just a little circuit board in there with a bypass for the DC power jack because for some reason oh it's really hard to get this plug out because it's it's not rubber like it should be it's made out of some awful plastic also I guess that just came out anyway uh this has a DC jack so you could actually run this thing off an AC adapter for some reason I'm not sure why you would do that but I guess you could if you wanted the build quality has the same general cheapness as the music store the same flimsy plastic and silver paint and the LCD is a conventional type you know it's not a dot matrix it's just got a couple sets of fixed digits so we've got the track number here and the current playback position and then for things like repeat or Shuffle it's got predetermined shapes so if I press the feature button here I've got EQ repeat shuffle and then we've got a scan and an erase feature curiously I'm not sure why you'd want to do that and then if you select the battery icon that's how you turn it off there's no backlight on it and the buttons are the mushiest rubber you've ever felt in your life and besides the repeat and Shuffle it's got the same controls as the music store play pause next previous track and the volume control you can't seek within a song you can only skip between tracks and that's pretty much it that's all this thing does it's one of the simplest MP3 players I've ever seen um probably on par with a Rio I've never actually owned one so I'm not sure but you know it plays tracks what else is it supposed to do but the equalizer setting that's interesting I mentioned that you can turn on EQ but there's no interface for configuring it and by default it just acts as bass boost there's no option to adjust it on the device itself and that could be that there were devices that just had bass boost and nothing else but this one has a little more going on uh if you bought the Soulmate by itself it came with either a parallel or a USB interface cable and you could hook it up to your PC to load files or run a program to set the EQ it only has bass and treble sliders but you know at least it's there so you can change it from a bass boost to a treble boost if that's what you want to do but the combo kit doesn't seem to come with this cable so you can't configure it from your PC you can however set the EQ from the music store but in the weirdest imaginable way guess what we're talking about genres again if I go in to edit genres sorry change Styles and I edit Blues I can rename it I can merge it or I can set the equalization settings and there's bass and treble they are tied to genres so if you want to bass boost one track but not another you're going to have to create separate genres to put them in which is probably why this calls them Styles instead of genres the even Wilder thing is that these settings don't even apply to the music store itself they don't do anything on here they only take effect when the songs are transferred to the soul mate yeah this is a very strange solution to put it mildly but to be fair there's also nowhere on the device to put these EQ settings the screen doesn't have room for them so I guess they did what they could um and of course the screen also shows no track information no artist uh no album no Library view nothing like that and that all makes sense because like most contemporary MP3 players this has very little capacity it's not clear from the documentation exactly how much storage this has but various press releases suggest that it's 48 Megs although it may have been improved in a later release to 64 Megs if that ever came out now to its credit that is more capacity than the Rio had but that was also two years older and that one could be expanded while this one can't at 128 kilobits per second the soulmate can store about an hour of Music which isn't all that bad but it does mean that by itself it is once again just an inferior replacement for a CD player combined with the music store however it actually has some value as I mentioned this flap in the middle of the music store hides the docking port for the soulmate of course the soulmate has a mating connector on the side under an absolutely detestable cover this should be made out of some kind of rubber it should have a little tab on it but instead it's some kind of plastic and it's got nothing you can get a grip on so it's almost impossible to pull this out without like a screwdriver to pick at it with even then ah it just sticks in the hole and then once it's out it just kind of dangles from this little tether and the plug turns out to be this extremely fat board Edge connector like you'd see on like an Atari 2600 game cartridge anyway uh to dock the player you have to hold this awful little thing up out of the way and then you drop it into the slot and just kind of uh wiggle it because there's no way to nail it on the first try the tolerances here are just awful so you just have to kind of Jiggle It and eventually it'll seat into place in fact I've crashed the music store while plugging this in about six times and I'm guessing that's because the port gets you know cross-threaded and shorts out the CPU data bus so that sucks anyway once it's docked the right soft key turns into this arrow and that puts you in transfer mode you get the search interface again and you can select you know either a entire album or a mix or a track just like normal and then just press the button to send it over to the device now if you do try and send multiple tracks at once and it's too much to fit on the device it informs you with this extremely comical music too long message now a lesser device would just error out at this point too much can't do it but here you can either hit fill which will copy tracks until the device is out of space or you can step through the list and delete tracks one at a time until it says music fits this is actually a really nice feature like I said they didn't need to actually do this they could have just said too bad and you have to go back and make a mix that's smaller than the device of course it's only a nice feature if you know it's there I had to read the manual because it was just not obvious to me from this interface that I could do that once you have it whittled down just hit transfer and everything will start pushing to the device then once it's done you can just pop the soulmate out and take it with you that works as you'd expect but something interesting happens now if we try and play that album on the music store because this thing is so concerned with preventing piracy it actually applies DRM measures here so once you send a song to a soul mate it becomes locked and you can't play it on the music store or transfer it to another soulmate so it behaves as if you only have one physical copy of the song that can only be played in one place at a time which is exactly what the riaa has always wanted to unlock a track you have to plug the soulmate back in and let the music store wipe the entire device you can't do it one track at a time and this illustrates what a poor choice this device's name was because the message it prints is do you wish to erase the soul mate they could not possibly have made that more Awkward yes erasing soulmate DRM aside the way these work together is actually pretty slick you drop in the player type in what you want hit the button and it's on there and it's not just convenient it's fast too in fact uh the speed at which this transfers made a real mess of things when I first tried to shoot this video the manual claims that it takes 20 seconds to transfer 60 Minutes of music to this thing and that would be absurdly fast for this era by my math that's about 2.4 megabytes per second or a lot faster than contemporary flash memory should have been so I wrote a script about how shockingly fast this was but while I was shooting it I got suspicious and I timed it out myself and found out that it's more like 30 seconds that's only about 1.6 megabytes per second which isn't as fast as I thought and I'm pretty sure that dig media was talking about 60 Minutes of low bit rate music so it wasn't actually filling the entire device but even so this still seemed curiously quick I couldn't find firm numbers on how fast typical consumer flash memory was in this era but as far as I can tell this is on par with some of the most expensive compact flash cards that were being sold at that time 10 or 12 speed models that Lexar was selling to professional photographers it doesn't make sense that this Ultra cheap MP3 player would have something that good inside in fact I dug up and benchmarked a 32 Meg smart media card for comparison I figured that was about typical for a consumer memory card at the time and the best figure it could produce for write speed was about 0.4 megabytes per second which sounds a lot more likely now it could be the card reader at fault here I admit that I don't remember how close USB 1.1 got to its claimed 12 megabit throughput in practice so maybe that's the problem and in fact the manual for the music store has estimates for how long it would take to fill the soulmate up from your PC directly and while the parallel port estimate is unsurprisingly comical a whole 20 minutes they also claim that USB would take three minutes that's only around 250 kilobytes per second which is a far cry from 12 megabits now I'm sure that the music store and the soulmate use a proprietary high-speed interface that wouldn't be affected by any bottlenecks in a generic interface like USB so maybe that's all there is to it but still that write speed feels curiously fast for a cheap consumer product besides that there's one other quirk in this device that really made me suspicious that something odd was going on inside for the most part the soulmate is a boring but functional MP3 player doesn't have any real problems except for one if the batteries run dry all the music on it disappears I'll show you I have 14 tracks on this device right now there we go obviously I have music on here now let's take the battery out [Music] and then put it back in zero tracks they're all gone now there's only one real explanation for this I know some of you are gasping right now it's a really really weird explanation and I can't be certain I'm right about it but I think I am I'm going to open this up and show you what's inside uh maybe someone can verify this in the comments uh but I will say first though if you're wondering uh this doesn't screw you over regarding the DRM um all your transfer songs are locked to a key that's baked into the player Hardware so even if this thing gets wiped when you dock it it'll still unlock everything on the music store so anyway let's crack this thing open the battery pack comes out first and uh now we know why it's screwed in instead of using a tab like every other consumer device the batteries fell out by accident you'd lose all your songs so they didn't want to take any risks the rest of this comes apart with just four screws and then the two halves of the case pull apart and this is more of that weird flexible plastic stuff not rubber so I wouldn't take this thing out in the rain inside we've got a pretty typical setup I've got a single board fairly densely packed on both sides on this side we've got the LCD this is the pick microcontroller basically the CPU of the whole device and on the flip side we've got these two chips here that are doing most of the work uh they're labeled micronas micronus something like that one of them is labeled a DAC 3550a that's a digital to analog audio converter and the other is a mass 3507d which is an integrated MP3 decoder we can make some safe assumptions here microcontrollers of this era weren't fast enough to decode MP3 so we can guess that the pick chip just handles user input and controls the LCD and then it spends the rest of its time just grabbing MP3 data out of storage which is these three chips here and sending it to the decoder which then sends it to the DAC that would make this just about the simplest possible MP3 player design so the only question remaining is what kind of chips actually are these now in a tip device these would each be 16 Meg nand flash modules but Flash doesn't lose its contents when you power it off so I doubt that these are also IBM branded and I'm pretty sure IBM never had a flash memory division so although Google can't turn up any results about these part numbers given the behavior I feel pretty certain that these are static RAM chips static Ram or SRAM is similar to the dynamic Ram or dram that we use in our PCS today dram is extremely fast but it's volatile meaning that if you don't constantly refresh the contents of your memory they'll just evaporate static Ram is very similar and it was actually used in a few PCS well up into the 386 era it's still pretty fast and it's still volatile but there's an important difference all it needs to keep the contents of memory alive is a continuous supply of DC power it doesn't require any complex refresh circuitry so if you write some MP3s to these chips and then just keep them powered you can read those files back anytime you want and it seems absurd to use SRAM like this but hey this is how your Zelda NES cartridge saved your games it wrote them to a battery-powered SRAM chip and some of those chips are still running three decades later in fact the soulmate can supposedly idle on a set of aaa's for about two weeks or longer if there's nothing on it the battery life in the manual actually says two weeks with content three weeks without because if it's empty well there's no reason to keep the ram alive it's not storing anything so the pick Powers it down to save battery life and if you keep it on the dock when you're not using it it'll last even longer since the dock Powers the ram directly okay so literally as I was about to hit render on the final release of this video one of my patrons found the data sheet for the ram modules I'd searched for it over and over and never found it but somehow they dug it up and it turns out that it's not static Ram after all it's sdram just like what we were using in PCS at the time um but this isn't really a disappointment because it's still pretty weird stuff normally you need a dedicated controller to handle the refresh process for Dram I was pretty sure a pick couldn't handle that or at least you wouldn't want to rely on it and I was also pretty sure that it would pull too much power to leave that pick constantly running when in standby so since I didn't see a memory controller I didn't even consider dram as a possibility but it turns out that these particular modules support a power saving mode in which they can be told to refresh their own contents without an external controller so functionally they might as well be static Ram because you only need to provide constant DC power to maintain their contents and since the intern circuitry is doing the bare minimum to keep them refreshed you save a ton of power versus any external solution I don't know if this is a common feature in dram but I certainly didn't expect it and effectively everything else I'm about to say still applies I just wanted full disclosure now it is extremely funny to me that this company made a media player that runs down its batteries faster if there's music on it but it also makes a lot of sense this was probably cheaper than flash memory and it works fine for the use case it's intended for you don't need it to last years in storage when the expectation is that the user is going to wipe and reload it probably every single day and since the capacity is so small losing everything when it runs out of power isn't a big deal you can just reload it and it's even less of a problem because reloading the thing takes so little time and that's probably a big motivator here I suspect the soulmate was the fastest transferring MP3 player of its time when used with the music store because the mothership here could just dump data straight into the RAM chips basically as fast as you can load it off the hard drive and that speed made this incredibly convenient compared to the competition at least I think so not exactly dank pods I haven't looked at a thousand other MP3 players but with all my belly aching about those MP3 players tiny storage forcing you to make your music decisions before leaving the house well this one might not solve that problem but it at least lets you do it in a matter of seconds instead of minutes and without having to mess with your PC even if you're ready to walk out the door when you realize you've forgotten to reload your player you can just plug it into this thing punch up a Stabbing Westward album hit transfer in half a minute later you're ready to go it's almost as fast as grabbing a CD and I think that's what ditch media thought would make this stand out if you can't store more than one disc at least make exchanging that proverbial disk really really fast the only real downside to the solution is the fact that you can't change the batteries I certainly remember taking my CD and tape players with me all over the place and bringing a pair of Double A's which I ended up needing not infrequently but if this runs down while you're jogging well you're out of luck all the spare batteries in the world won't bring your music back so once again this Compares poorly to a CD but it's also possible that this limitation wasn't supposed to be this bad on both sides of this board there's these little metal cans that look like lithium button cells that's what I thought they were at first especially since they each metered out at less than a volt which would make sense for 22 year old batteries of this size but I realized I was wrong these are silk screened SC and they're stamped Elna 3.3 volt and .22 something now that unit symbol is hidden behind a lead but I'm betting that it's 0.22 farads these are clearly super capacitors uh capacitors with unusually high energy density and nowadays they get used for all sorts of things they're almost like a low capacity batteries but I didn't know they were even around in the year 2000 now this is a total guess but I feel like the soulmate might have been one of the earliest consumer products to contain one now my assumption is that they're meant to solve this problem they're supposed to charge off the batteries since supercaps charge nearly instantly and then they could provide a few seconds of life to the SRAM just enough for a grace period for you to swap the cells without losing all your music but if that was the plan it doesn't seem to work as you saw the player blanks out pretty much instantly as soon as you remove the batteries so maybe these have failed or they don't do what I think but I'm not sure what else they could be for and I'd like to imagine the digimedia at least tried to solve this problem because it's a real doozy at any rate uh having laid Bare The Mysteries of the soulmate I think it's only fair that we open up the music store as well it's not quite as unusual but it will give us an answer to an important question why is the CD ripping process so slow this unit comes apart with six screws driven into the plastic foreign and when opening it up you need to be careful not to tear the little mylar ribbon cable connecting to the LCD and then this metal shield just lifts right off and there's most of the device several of the chips are under this 4200 RPM hard drive so I've unscrewed the CD-ROM transport so we can flip the motherboard up here and now we can slip that hard drive out now this CD-ROM mechanism is a kind of an unusual thing I think it might have been sold as an industrial module because it's really neither here nor there it's got the spring-loaded spindle that you pop the disc on like you'd find on a portable CD player but then it has a native 40 pin IDE data interface and a PC style 4-pin Molex connector so I thought for a minute this might be like a gutted PC CD-ROM but then it wouldn't have the spring-loaded spindle and I don't think it would have all these headers down the side there's this whole row of unlabeled pin headers down the side instead of on the back where you'd expect them on a pccd ROM and at least one of them I'm pretty confident is analog audio output because that's the exact same plug you see on every PC CD-ROM drive but the blue wire here for instance is for the lid switch that's the micro switch over here that tells it when the the door is open and that switch actually goes into the main board here uh so it could tell the processor whether the door is open and then the signal passes through uh to the CD-ROM mechanism so as soon as you open it it can immediately stop playing there's only one other connection here which is this guy and that is digital audio I scoped it to be sure it's definitely digital and I'm not sure which protocol it is but I suspect it's speedif since most pccd ROMs have that as an output option and also because the Cs 8412 chip over here is an AES and speedf decoder so it seems likely at any rate it does output audio and that's what makes this device so weird I suspect the CD-ROM May connect to the motherboard via what appears to be an ID interface but it doesn't send audio over that and we can actually prove this let me plug it back in and now I'm just gonna unplug that little red wire oops [Music] there goes the sound and then if I plug it back in it picks right back up [Music] I'm no expert in reverse engineering but I think I understand what's going on here see every CD-ROM has the built-in ability to play CD audio and in fact uh some PC drives back in the day even had play buttons and headphone Jacks built in and if you just plugged one of those into Power with no data connection you could use it as a standalone CD player and for much of history when you played a CD in your PC all that happened is your machine told the drive to seek to a particular track and start playing and then the drive circuitry took care of the rest it decoded the CD audio converted into analog piped that analog signal to your sound card which related to your speakers and that was that your computer had nothing to do with the playback process once it started and the same is true with this device it does have this IDE interface but that's only used to send play pause and change track commands it doesn't handle any of the audio data that all runs over the speedif digital output so I'm going to take a look at the chips on the board here and I'll take a stab at how they handle that output the major players are this chip labeled arm SEC n950 which I can't look up uh but it might be a CPU maybe that's what the arm part means there's a Motorola digital signal processor and actel fpga we have the speedif audio decoder here then a digital analog converter and an amplifier chip as well as about five Megs of onboard Ram since I don't see a dedicated MP3 decoder chip here like we saw in the soulmate I'm assuming that the MP3 functionality is in the fpga and when you rip a disk it probably works something like this the CPU tells the CD-ROM to start playing a track once it starts audio begins flowing to the speedif decoder which starts out putting serial audio samples to the fpga where they get compressed to MP3 and written to Ram meanwhile the CPU grabs the compressed samples as they're deposited and writes them out to the hard drive meanwhile the fpga splits off the samples and forwards them to the DAC which then outputs them through the RCA jacks and then through the amplifier to the headphone jack and of course if you're just playing a CD it skips the compression step and if you're playing an MP3 this all happens in reverse the CPU copies samples off the hard drive to RAM and then the fpga loads them decodes them and the rest is the same now this all seems plausible to me except that I've left out this big Digital Signal processor chip I'm not sure what that's here for since there's no audio processing options there's not even a basic equalizer so my best guess is that this is converting between sample formats like maybe the fpga sends every sample from the speedif decoder over to the DSP to have it bit crushed or expanded or swap the you know the significant bit or something and there could be other problems with my order of operations here but I'm pretty sure I have the basics right and either way this is the answer to our question the music store rips CDs at 1X because it's not really acting like a a computer it's not copying the audio off the disk as blocks of data instead this is more like plugging a tape recorder into the output on a CD player and just hitting record I mean sure it's digital rather than the analog and it uses the IDE interface to recognize when a track ends so it can start recording to a new file those things make it cleaner than the typical analog hole approach but otherwise it's just slurping the sound off the aux Jack as it were I'm going to be honest here this is a bit above my head all right I don't actually know if they could have improved on this situation and I don't fully understand how CD audio works I do know that the option to play music in real time over an IDE interface a technique that's apparently called digital audio extraction was notoriously flaky for many years I never managed to get it working up until probably the late 2000s I also learned while researching this video that even music match jukebox at least in this era didn't enable that by default apparently it just wasn't very reliable instead it committed even worse crimes than this thing does the music store to its credit does at least record from a digital audio stream presumably the speedif output is lossless not that it counts for much since it immediately gets crushed to 128 kilobits but it's trying music match however by default also rips at one speed and it captures the CD's output put through your sound cards analog audio input and from what I've read this was often the only option available some drives just would not output digital audio at all so despite my blustering earlier about how inferior this is to just ripping your CDs on your PC with free software unless you were lucky enough to have the right Hardware the results from the music store technically used a purer signal path so maybe the digital audio extraction technique just wasn't mature enough to use in the year 2000 and digimedia really did their best here or maybe the CPU RAM and hard drive they chose weren't fast enough to handle a high-speed CD-ROM data stream so they had to punt and work with off-the-shelf chips that only functioned at 1X either one seems possible and I'll never know the answer but I will know that the hard drive doesn't play A Part why did I write that obviously this can record faster than that what's wrong with me but this is one of several problems with the music store that feel more like artifacts of the time than mistakes on the part of the designers oh don't get me wrong this system is cheap crappy and awkward but when all said and done I'm not sure they could have designed it that much better for the price I just think they should have raised the price a bit I think there was a low to mid-range consumer Market that would have appreciated this thing if it was a little faster a little better built had a better interface and a higher capacity portable player basically if it cost 550 instead of 450 it probably would have seen more success on the one hand I strongly suspect this is the only product of its type that was ever stocked in retail stores now the price point and the feature set of all the Contemporary devices I found all seem like things you would have mail ordered well this is very much an Impulse buy kind of product but on the other hand I think we can see how the buyer of the specimen felt about it they got the box home opened it grimaced tried the device out for a few minutes and then put it back in the Box only to find out Comp USA wouldn't take a return on a clearance item at which point they stuck it in the attic for the next two decades I think digimedia wanted to sell this to Average Joe's but they aimed too low not realizing very basic consumer they were targeting wouldn't be willing to Shell out 450 for something so confusing and tedious the slightly more dedicated listener wouldn't be willing to Shell out 450 for something so basic and the serious music enjoyer wouldn't be willing to buy something with such poor audio quality when they could spend twice as much on something that could do 160 to 320 kilobit MP3 now another angle entirely is my girlfriend's take that this wasn't for any kind of average person at all that it was really something you were expected to buy for your teenage kid that's a fair point and in fact the box art somewhere on here there we go there's a kid I think okay maybe that is the case but something about it doesn't quite ring true to me it seems a bit too much to stick on Ferris Bueller's dresser but maybe I'm overthinking it Market speculation aside what's really intriguing to me is that despite the onwards March of Technology you could use this today and it would work exactly as well as it ever did if you're one of those people who can't hear the differences in 128 kilbit MP3 then this is a perfectly viable digital audio player for your Hi-Fi system and despite my mildly ragging on the UI even that has some advantages it's very stripped down and it's very responsive and the universal alphanumeric search feature means that it's actually much faster to find music on this than most other devices of its type that I'm aware of for a 22 year old product that's pretty impressive so I suspect that this is another victim of the Y2K uncertain future problem where companies in the early 2000s just didn't know what was coming or who the market really was maybe this thing flopped just because PCS became popular so quickly that it became moot people were okay with just playing all their music off their PC they anticipated a pickiness that didn't actually exist but we'll never know and at this point that's all I've got to say about if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to my channel so I know you're into this sort of thing remember turn on notifications if you want to find out when I upload new stuff since I'm kinda back on a regular schedule these days if you really like this however consider supporting me on patreon like these people here are doing I couldn't do what I do without their help because this device may have only set me back twenty dollars today but in another reality I would have bought one from the UK on eBay for four hundred dollars and I can't afford that kind of Lark without the support of viewers like you I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who's keeping the lights on here thank you all so much and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]

Views: 180,116

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: KT_-1TOyifc

Length: 84min 29sec (5069 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022