Rare 1999 MacPower MP-ROM player - "Mozart's Music Box"

when I first saw this I thought it was just an external CD-ROM drive for computers with some extra controls on the front for playing audio CDs because that was a common double purpose for those CD-ROM drives during the time back in the '90s also playing music CDs but I thought he was a bit unusual that it has a full display on the front and then I turned it around back I noticed there's no connection for a computer on the back there's no USB port there's no SCSI or anything else to connect it to a computer just power and left and right audio connections so I thought it was a bit odd that what is obviously a computer CD-ROM drive cannot be connected to a computer then I noticed it says MP-ROM what does that mean? and again it's embossed into the top of the case in a fancy script font MP-ROM but if you look around this thing there's no information about who made it and what it is no stickers of any kind you may think there would have been a sticker here but there's no residue where one might have been and then fallen off so it's a completely anonymous enclosure I tried looking it up online and I can find exactly one current web site with any information about this this was released in 1999 by a Taiwanese company called Macpower Peripherals the MP-ROM player which was also known as Mozart's Music Box is an early MP3 player using MP3 files burned to CDs the company that made this is still in business today they're now called inXtron and they feature it in their company history on their web site they call it the Mozart MP3 player all the press photos of the MP-ROM show it in a more bulky enclosure that I've seen used for things like tape backup drives but for the final production version they switched to smaller and sleeker looking enclosure although with what is obviously still a standard off-the-shelf computer CD-ROM drive it still looks very generic doing some digging through the Internet Archive I was able to find the original web site that was selling these the price was $230 and they said it can play MP3 files up to 224 kbps it specifically says it does not support 256 or 320 kbps and and they claimed it could fit up to 12 hours of music onto one CD and it does also support standard audio CDs although that was not really its main purpose since it runs on 12 volts DC one of the recommended applications for the MP-ROM was to use it in your car you could get a cable to connect it to the 12-volt cigarette lighter outlet and then you can connect it to either a cassette tape adapter just plug it into the headphone jack here or an FM radio transmitter I don't know where they expected you to actually put this thing in your car but I guess in the era before iPods, smartphones, or even car stereo head units which could play MP3 files I guess people were more desperate but the MP-ROM didn't last long on the market by October 2000 the Macpower web site already listed it as a discontinued product I made a test CD of 699 megabytes of MP3s I encoded from the BackTraxx Music Library which you can see in the background there so I'll put in the disc close the door and in a few seconds you should see it start to count up the tracks there it goes I was able to fit 134 tracks onto the CD at 224 kbps which actually doesn't sound too bad [Music] [Music] it's cutting out and now it's randomly jumping to another track before the first one finishes so it's clearly not playing that well and I also noticed it doesn't seem to work with CD-RW discs if I put it in see it doesn't even recognize it it should work with a standard audio CD so let's try that out give it a few seconds to spin up the disc and it's playing but we're not hearing anything that's because the only audio output you get when you're playing a normal audio CD is from the headphone jack of the drive itself you don't hear it through the headphone jack of the player or the RCA line level outputs on the back you only hear it through the headphone jack of the drive itself which is a little bit quirky but I guess this was not its main purpose to play regular audio CDs so it mostly works but we're clearly having some problems with the audio cutting out and skipping tracks when playing an MP3 CD and refusing to play a cd-rw at all but then I noticed that any disc I put in gets a ring around the collar you see that ring there and I can actually wipe it off it's leaving a ring of some kind of gook on the disk you can really see on this MP3 CD see that black mark I think there's some kind of rubber component in the mechanism that clamps the disc that must be degrading with age and leaving goo on any disc you put in there and as the disc is spinning it's going to be flinging around that goo all over inside the drive and probably getting it on the laser and that's why it's having so many problems reading discs so clearly I'm going to need to replace this drive this is where using an off-the-shelf drive is an advantage because that means it's easily replaceable and in this case it's a Creative drive but you notice it was made in September 1997 when this MP-ROM player is from 1999 or 2000 I suppose it's possible they used a drive that is two or three years old in a newly manufactured product but that's pretty unusual but then I noticed all these scratches on the side of the drive indicating it was probably previously installed in a computer and if we look at the model number of the drive it starts with DVD so even though this only says Compact Disc on the front this is actually an early DVD-ROM drive I think the original owner of this MP-ROM had the same idea that I was thinking of and that is since this is a standard ATAPI interface what would happen if you took out the original CD-ROM drive it came with and replace it with a DVD-ROM? would you then be able to burn a recordable DVD with MP3s on it and have it play it? because then that would obviously have much more capacity with 4.7 gigabytes instead of the 700 megabytes of a standard CD-R so since I was planning to do it anyway I'm going to install this DVD-ROM drive it's from 2002 and hopefully it won't leave any of that black gunk on the disc there's the main circuit board that was underneath the drive it says MP0005 revision 1.10 it has a date code of the 12th week of 2000 so that's approximately when this was built and here's why we weren't getting any audio from the output on the back when playing a standard audio CD that's because whoever installed that Creative DVD-ROM drive never bothered to connect the audio output connector even though it worked perfectly fine in a computer I just couldn't get that beige Toshiba DVD-ROM drive to work in the MP-ROM it wouldn't even play a standard audio CD so instead I put in this black Sony drive from 2005 it's also a DVD-ROM so if I open up the tray and put in my test CD of MP3 files there goes counting up the tracks [Music] and it's playing [Music] it's actually surprisingly fast at switching tracks [Music] unfortunately there's no way to seek through a file if I hold down the button it just skips different tracks also these up and down buttons are supposed to skip through the different folders on the disc but that's not working even though it is recognizing all the files in the different folders on the disc there's 134 total files on the disc and it's able to play all of them but for some reason to skip through the folders function isn't working so I don't know what's up with that otherwise it works fine and it sounds pretty good unfortunately it still isn't able to play a CD-RW for some reason although to be fair I burned this on a Mac so maybe it used some kind of different format that this doesn't recognize but it does play a standard audio CD through the line output on the back now that I connected that cable that the original person who put in that Creative drive didn't connect so now we can listen to some Foster The People "you both separately mentioned Foster The People to me in the same week" "first of all how do you not know that band?" "because he's like tone deaf" "OK you guys are being brutal right now" "you are a disgrace to our team" but here's what I really want to find out now that it has a DVD-ROM drive will it read a DVD with MP3 files on it let's find out this is all copyrighted music so if it works I won't be able to play more than a few seconds of each song there it goes counting up the tracks 900 tracks on the DVD [Music] so it's working perfectly fine with the DVD burned with MP3 files on it still very responsive at skipping between the tracks but you may have noticed a big downside with this kind of player and that is all we have to go by is what number the track is there's no artist or title or file name or any kind of alphanumeric display it's just the track number so unless you write down a big list of what number corresponds to which track it's going to be difficult to pick out a specific track you're looking for the MP-ROM did originally come off a remote control with a keypad on it allowing you to type in a specific track number but without that if we want to find a specific track we just have to go through all 900 tracks one by one until we find it which is obviously not very convenient when this was originally on the market one of its recommended uses was as a background music player so you can just put in a disk with a bunch of MP3 files on it and let it play away in the background unattended [Music] so that's been a look at the MP-ROM a rare early MP3 CD player that's now upgraded to an MP3 DVD player [Music] [Music]

Channel: VWestlife

Views: 20,065

Keywords: macpower, peripherals, external, drive, cd-rom, cd, compact disc, dvd, dvd-rom, dvd-r, cd-r, cd-rw, disc, recordable, burn, mp3, player, mp-rom, 1999, review, test, teardown, repair, apple, ipod, audio, background, system, backtraxx, library, classic game room, mozart, box

Id: 4KOUIHia5XM

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023