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Museum of Portable Sound

Our is a : The 2nd MP3 Player in the World, the Diamond Rio PMP300 (Sept 1998, after S.Korea’s MPMan in March) – the 1st commercially successful MP3 player.

The Rio provoked the 1st RIAA lawsuit trying to kill MP3s (they lost bc their suit was based on the misunderstanding that the Rio was a recording device).

Even after 25 years, our Rio still plays the (terrible) files on its built-in 32MB storage.

Our Diamond Rio PMP300 sits under a glass vitrine here at Museum of Portable Sound Laboratories. It is a black plastic device, with a small LCD screen above a circular control interface featuring nine separate buttons. A superfluous yet endearing label that simply says the word "DIGITAL" is at the top centre directly above the LCD screen; the word is written with a reflective metallic material that almost looks like rainbow-reflecting pixels when you tilt the device back and forth: a completely analog method of representing the concept "digital".
A closeup of the RIo under glass. You can't see them, but on the top of the device are three more buttons: MENU, MODE, and INTRO. The INTRO button plays the first 8 seconds of every track, since the LCD screen is unable to display any track title information, so this feature allows the user to quickly scan through everything to find their favourite track.
Our Diamond Rio PMP300, out from under the glass and being held in the right hand of our Director and Chief Curator. There is a pair of headphones plugged into the Rio's headphone port, and the LCD screen displays information, showing that it is turned on and working. There is a volume indicator, an arrow indicating that sound is playing, a large '01' which means it is playing the first track on its storage, there are minutes and seconds indicated next, a battery strength indicator, and a readout of what fidelity the MP3 file has been ripped to – this one says 128kbps, which nowadays is considered low quality but back in 1998 this was allegedly "CD quality", which was a lie.
Feb 27, 2023, 10:54 AM·Public
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Phillip Winn

@museumofportablesound I had one of those! Well, so did a lot of people, clearly. I no longer have mine, but thanks for the memories!

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