I remember getting my first mp3 player in the early 2000s. The leap from carrying a CD player that jumped and skipped to a tiny little thing that slipped into my pocket and never skipped was amazing.
Casettes had the downside that you couldn't skip to individual tracks without lengthy scrolling back and forth. But CDs didn't continue where you left them and skipped. For the skipping there came CD players with anti skip features. And later MP3 CD players. Those where the shit. You could get 10 albums on a disc instead of just one.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosAnti-skip was a special feature, even during the rise of MP3 and slow death of CDs many budget players didn't have anti skip. Cassettes weren't that bad and for walking around with a tape player, way better than a CD.
if anyone's wondering what the songs were at 7:38: 1. 666 - D.E.V.I.L. 2. (unsure about this one) 3. Fergie & BK - Hoovers and Horns (Ingo Remix) 4. Klubbheads - Kickin' Hard
i remember a show called beyond 2000 doing a piece on mp3. the presenter smacked the player on his knee and presented it as music that doesn't skip when jostled. i instantly wanted one.
Back when tech was about how amazing it would be and not about how much of your privacy it would cost to use the new thing they were trying to force you to use..
6:30 I love that for the mp3 encoder, there is a note that "This meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason". Like someone actually took the time to add that. Priceless.
My god this video brought back my Win95 trauma. Back when they first came out; MP3s were the new kid and were still trying to usurp WAV, VOC, and AIFF formats. Just to play it on Windows 95 initially you had to use a propriety player called "WinPlay3". And remember, you were HIGH-TECH with an Intel Pentium 120MHz (that's not a typo) and 16MB of RAM. Common hard drive size at the time was less than 1GB. An audio CD, uncompressed (DAT files), ran about 650MB to 700MB (depending on album length). I remember having to delete all the games from my hard drive at the time just to rip a single CD. Just to get the files on the hard drive. Then, I had a batch fiile RUN OVERNIGHT to re-encode them from WAV files to MP3. Man, I do NOT miss those days. You can now rip and encode an entire album to MP3 format in less than 10 minutes. And then there were those that argued about variable bitrate encoding sounding better than constant bitrate...
The argument for variable bitrate back in those days was that it was the best compromise between size and sound quality. 128kbps MP3s can sound like garbage, but it makes tiny files. 256kbps sounds better, but twice the filesize. With a VBR MP3, you could get 256kbps audio quality with a file size that might be only a little bigger than 128kbps.
I remember my dad not letting me buy Ultima 6 (possibly 7?) because it required like 42MB of hard drive space and he didn't think we could spare that much.
I highly suspect you needed to connect the device BEFORE turning on the PC. I remember that problem from the Zip drive Paralell port versions. Also, there are drivers required for the paralell port interface. Were you able to get the device appear in the Device Manager?
I don't think drivers are required for parallel port for the device itself, as the program should communicate with it (on 98 most LPT communication was the programs just bit-banging it, as they get full access to the data bits). Zip drives had a driver, but it basically was just the program running in the background. However, the laptop may have the LPT port set to a wrong mode, it may have to be in Byte or EPP mode (and it's possible that a laptop may not entirely support it)
I had a discman, my buddy had one of these. I used to give him so much crap about how long it took him to change his music while I could carry around *dozens* of albums. I still wanted one of these.
Dude...... this is the most nostalgic video you have released. Audio catalyst.... windows 98.... this was my late teen years, the best times ever. Thank you for this trip down memory lane. The buds were shocking in those days. But that's why one would get aftermarket headphones or earphones. You may have needed windows 95 to get it to work properly.
@@coolduder1001 it might have just been that he connected the parallel port when the pc was already on. There are many many possible reasons it never worked.
I didn't know AudioCatalyst but I'm definitely familiar with the interface. Turns out it's just AudioGrabber (which I've used a lot) bundled with an MP3 encoder by Xing.
I mean, people were used to calling things record players or cassette players or CD players, and MP3 is a format just like records, cassettes, or CDs, except instead of a physical thing, it's a digital thing you put on a physical thing
Parallel ports actually have multiple modes of operation, for example ECP/EPP. You might need to take a look into your BIOS/CMOS setup to change those settings. Also double check your windows doesn‘t have a printer configured on LPT1, otherwise that‘ll mess with it.
It looks like the device connects and the software recognises it just fine since he can see the songs already on the device. It's more likely that the scarlet fire rip has too high a bitrate for the device to handle. When he shows the ripping screen it says 128Kbit and that the finished file will be 24MB, rather large for a device with a max of 64MB storage.
@@awesomenokes Possible, but probably not. Since the device isn't appearing in windows as a storage device like a lot of more modern devices, the mpman software probably handles any driver stuff. I could be wrong though, I've only ever used parallel once or twice and am assuming it works similar to serial.
In the Patreon-only aftershow he tries another parallel port MP3 player and briefly shows the Windows Device Manager where LPT1 is listed as "ECP Printer Port"
I had one of these, bought it second hand sometime in 98. Absolute sorcery at the time, had to encode at 96kbps to fit your average length album on it. Transfer speed over the parallel port was soooooo sloooooow.
I started using Audio Catalyst in '97 for ripping cds and it always had that weird message! I guess there must have been some point in its development where it actually did something but god knows how far back that was!
I remember buying this with my first pay packet from my first part time job. I even got a whopping 8MB expansion card for it. If you thought the CD ripper software was bad it gets worse, it doesn’t let you rip a full CD at once, it only lets you do half the tracks at a time and they’re selected randomly so you had to restart the software to see if you got lucky and managed to be able to select the missing tracks. I can’t remember if it was a technical limitation or a licensing one though
@@adwan182 That nearly came true. Diamond got sued over their Rio player and eventually won in court but for a bit it wasn't a sure thing. LGR covers it in his video on the Diamond Rio
It was a money limitation, they supplied a limited version of the software for free as far I remember - you could buy a better version with no limitations.
I remember being in art class when I was in high school and my teacher telling me and my friend about mp3 technology. I think she had an article and we were reading about it and it was totally blowing our minds. Here we are about 25 years later and streaming uncompressed huge digital files wirelessly to our portable super computers.
Weird how that goes huh? I still vividly remember a day where me and my best friend ripped a demo cd out of a pc magazine in a shop and stole it because it had the first playable Fallout ( Yes, the very first one ) on it, and then we talked about internet stuff and I said something along the lines of : "Man, I'd sell my mom, my nonexistant little sister and both of my balls......and a kidney for a fucking 1 mbit internet connection" that was at a time when in my area ISDN dial in was still the best you could get. Nowadays I'm sporting a 200mbit glasfibre connection and I'm going "Damn, downloading this uncompressed 2k uhd movie takes two minutes, that is two minutes too long, I need faster internet!" the sheer audacity!
7:28 there's something great about Dank getting all excited about it turning on and the display just says "stop" like it's a scream for help and it doesn't want to be alive
Okay I definitely want that tracklist on the mp3 player... Also parallel ports .. whew! I was 17 when this came out.. I remember those halcyon days of cd ripping/ mp3 playing...crazy times.
“Welcome to vintage Windows, where nothing’s synced together and nothing works and the computer is surprised you’re actually asking it to do things.” Honestly i’ve never heard a truer statement.
It's crazy how revolutionary the original iPod actually was. I can and do still happily use my 1st generation iPod classic (manufacturered in November 2001!) and it just works! No fuss, no horrible controls, it just works! The audio quality is perfectly fine for me and 5GB is plenty of storage for around 600 songs give or take.
BTW The parallel port is probably in SPP (Standard) mode. You need to jump into BIOS/CMOS on the lappy and switch to ECP (Extended Capability) or EPP (Enhanced Parallel Port) mode.
In the Patreon-only aftershow he tries another parallel port MP3 player and briefly shows the Windows Device Manager where LPT1 is listed as "ECP Printer Port"
ECP should be the correct mode I would guess as its the more recent, however it might be worth trying with EPP just as a test. I remember having similar issues with an MPEG Capture device that used a parallel port interface back in 1999. Whenevr I had issues with it, I found it was almost always due to an IRQ conflict or port sharing in the OS.
for anyone interested the first song is 666 - D.E.V.I.L. despite the first beat, it has an extremely catchy chorus bit and worth listening if you like that mind numbing dancy music
oh man. some ancient memories just flashed back to me -your audio on the laptop is probably MIA because it looks like you may not have a sound driver installed at all ( I remember always looking for the little volume speaker icon everytime I reformatted a machine back then as it seemed like a gamble if windows was gona load an audio driver I swear I included on the disc lol) -as others have said, parallel ports especially on a 98 vintage machine arnt really hot swappable and it needs a restart plus probably enabled in bios and Ive sometimes had to enable/ cycle through com ports in windows device manager I have so much dang nostalgia for this era of computers but also its one of the few things I look back on and go "hellllllllllllll nooooooo Ill take the modern tech " so vehemently at least lol
To be fair you could get decent quality compression with the right sampling and bitrate all the way back in the 90s, and back in the 90s most MP3s were around 128kb but some were 192kb or higher. This had varying loss in quality for compression. 192kb back then was a pretty good compression rate while still having a pretty good quality for what you got.
But the problem wasn't the bitrate. The problem was that people did choose to encode to MP3 with low quality settings since the processing power meant that it took a lot of time to encode. Lower quality settings (not lower bitrate, but actual lower quality at the same bitrate settings) meant faster encoding times.
6:26 "This meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason." It's a useless, on screen meter for no particular reason. At least the programmers were honest about it. "What does that meter mean?" "Ah, nothing. Don't worry about it. I just had to fill this blank area with something."
I love the headphone jack. It's simplicity means that you can take the first ever MP3 player, courtesy fucking 1997, jam it into a portable speaker manufactured yesterday, and have no problems whatsoever. Bring back the headphone jack.
I was born in 87 so I grew up with all this stuff. I remember my first CD player and then MP3 player. I never cared about the audio quality because it was just too cool.
My idiot friend got a minidisc player, constantly talked about how amazing it was, brow beat me and a few friends to drop most of the little money we had saved up on a player and discs, and then less than a year later the iPod came out. I didn’t get one until the 3rd or 4th gen mini. He absolutely hates it when we still bring it up +20 years later
Fun fact Serial Port Standard was 25 pins like the Paralell port, but since 9pins did the job for single direction data transfer people started using that, and it eventually became part of the standard.
Bought my first mp3 player in 2000. Claimed to be the 'slimmest' in a translucent blue, packing a massive 32mb storage. I was able to get 8 songs, AND had .5mb to spare. I'll see if I can find it, it may have turned into a discernable puddle
We had one of these, but it was branded Eiger Labs Eigerman. The rubberized coating was absolutely disgusting but at least it came with a nice fake leather case. I don't think we used the cable once because the removable SmartMedia card was a far more straightforward to use. Windows recognized it like a regular drive so loading music was a piece of cake; easier than iTunes or any other crap music transfer app. Biggest limitation was that at the time those cards barely held much more than a CD's worth of music.
Seeing that green background gave me a nostalgia blast. For the longest time, the family computer was an old workstation running Windows NT 4.0 that could run autocad, solitaire, and paint without crashing and that was about it.
Dammit - you beat me to it! I have this up in the loft somewhere and was deffo gonna send it to you if I found it. RE: getting the bastard connected, there was some setting in the BIOS I had to change. Something about LPT modes or something. Give that a go - and good frikkin luck! I got a decent selection of about 12 songs on it and never bothered changing them because it was such a faff.
Ngl, this video has made me miss ripping movies from my VCR to disks then ripping them to my laptop. All for the long travels. Truly some of the best times of my childhood.
Mp3 encoding was a black art in the early days. The computer magazine (those were blogs that updated only once a month that you could hold in your hands) Maximum PC even had a cover story and lengthy article on ripping and encoding. And it took a loooong time. This was back when mpeg2 video encoding speeds were measured in minutes per frame. Really - minutes per frame. And you needed an add-in board to play them back.
Yes, I was learning my trade as an editor back in the 90s and I needed to obtain a seriously chunky mpeg decoder card as well as a SCSI drive with constant data rate which was all it'd talk to! All to hold about an hour or so of video at a time. Ahh, those were the _very expensive_ days!
Danksy, this was truly a fun video exploring the granddaddy of the iPod (and all the other nuggs) even though you didn't manage to load Scarlet Fire. Also don't think it would have been an authentic experience without the buds getting tangled.
I think you need to install the sound driver on that laptop, usually you see a small speaker icon down on the right side of the task bar when the audio driver is installed.
Wow! I'd forgotten about Audiocatalyst but that interface, complete with "This meter is used by the codec for no particular reason" brought it all flooding back. NB: Listening on my new Samson SR850 headphones. Been meaning to get some for at least a year and I thought I'd treat myself. Very happy with them!
music library: 1. My heart will go on 2. random ABBA song 3. random The Beatles song 4. random techno song that is 10 minutes and takes up the rest of memory only on here to be cool
Born in 1998 I still remember my dad blasting 90s Tech in his old Audi 80 whit a massive subwoofer. He did even got a few MP3's that even I used,cant remember what one. But the First ever MP3 does seem good for its time.
I remember in1996 seeing an mp3 player on a TV show called "beyond 2000". I thought this is awesome 👌. No more skipping due to scratched CDs. Then I learned about bitbrates vs file size and sound quality etc...
Not possible since the first portable mp3 player was created in 1997 (the one in this video). Well, that is if you are not talking about mp3-palyers on computers, which probably was there already in 1994-95. (in November 94 mp3 was released).
@@Magnus_Loov all I remember is it was a prototype of a future project, as in the thing that came before this commercially available player... If the details were listed on IMDB, I would have found the exact episode so wouldn't have to correct me.
@@nickj2508 Ok. So it wasn't something that you could buy. It's in the same league as "The first mouse demonstration", which was done in 1968 and available to the public in the 80:s...
@@Magnus_Loov well yeah, its interesting to see new things in development before they're commercially available, like a little sneak peek for whats to come
3:18 after reading this article, it appears to be referring to TwinVQ, a technology added to the MPEG-4 standard almost like AAC's little brother for extreme data compression (like 8kbps extreme). the technology was later used in Vorbis and Opus
I was a teenager in the Rio diamond era. These were too expansive to be useful. Short battery life and with 128kbps MP3 (which was the norm late 90's), you could only get 8 or so MP3's. I stuck with portable CD player until 2001-ish when I got a NetMD mini disk and later a Rio Carbon (5GB HDD). Solid state players took a long time to be viable, due to storage limitation. I think 128+mb players only came down in price mid 2000's.
I was going to say that the funniest part of this video was the idea of having to put Scarlet Fire on a CD, but then I noticed the ol' chonker laptop has The Neverhood still installed on it and I don't know what to believe anymore.
I got everything from DOS 6.22 up to XP on genuine PCs... Its so fascinating to see the difference. Back in the days it was so much harder to do some simple tasks... But its tealy entertaining every now and then
I got this mp3 for Christmas. It took me a week to figure her out but then I was a music wizard. Everyone else had cd players that skipped and I had 100 songs at my disposal. What a time for tech
Bet you could copy Scarlet Fire to a FAT32 formatted SmartMedia card and install the card in the expansion port. I got lucky and found a 64mb SM card in some ancient VoIP equipment. USB adapters that read SmartMedia cards are pretty easy to find after finding the cards themselves. SmartMedia feels a lot like miniature 5.25” floppy disks.
Seeing that you released a new video made my day, I had a bad thanksgiving because I had the flew the whole time. I loose my appetite when I get sick so I didn't eat, and I also slept most of the time. Thank you for making my day with that Aussie accent and hilarious video!
What is with the 666.ged file? At 8:08 I really need to know, the gedcom file format is for sharing genealogical information and was developed by the church.
I've messed around with parallel cables before and they absolutely need the screws, the cables for them are so thick that they can wrench the connector out
This is literally the first Video I watched after updating my Pc to Windows 11 and I dont think there could be anything more fitting than looking at the nugget experience while being happy about the edges that got a lil less edgy with windows 11
I think mp3 cd players was a better option for that time period (end of 90s). Maybe you could try to find the 1st gen Soul CD/mp3 player. That was a really good player for its time from a kinda obscure brand. Also some love to the real hdd players of the 2000s like the iRiver: Fat32 folders and m3u playlists like it should be!. none of that iTunes/Sony proprietary sync/cable/app stuff.
Not gonna lie, when i saw that thumbnail i thought it was a bathroom scale
Same
Same
Emas
Fr
me too
I remember getting my first mp3 player in the early 2000s. The leap from carrying a CD player that jumped and skipped to a tiny little thing that slipped into my pocket and never skipped was amazing.
@Marcos Moutta yeah except cassettes sucked
Casettes had the downside that you couldn't skip to individual tracks without lengthy scrolling back and forth. But CDs didn't continue where you left them and skipped.
For the skipping there came CD players with anti skip features. And later MP3 CD players. Those where the shit. You could get 10 albums on a disc instead of just one.
@@russianacorns8080 Oi, I Mean At Least They Tried
Yeah but the cd does have a little better sound quality. On expensive headphones/speakers.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosAnti-skip was a special feature, even during the rise of MP3 and slow death of CDs many budget players didn't have anti skip.
Cassettes weren't that bad and for walking around with a tape player, way better than a CD.
weird how this one seems to still be a solid and not just turned into oil like some of those old mp3 players. :D
It's the soft-touch stuff. It's all over the inside of my car and I spent a while a few years ago scraping off what I could.
He said this one's just hard plastic
It’s hard plastic,it’s the rubber crap that turns into nuclear waste
@Nоt RiскrоII 🅥 scambot
How do I send him a mp3?
if anyone's wondering what the songs were at 7:38:
1. 666 - D.E.V.I.L.
2. (unsure about this one)
3. Fergie & BK - Hoovers and Horns (Ingo Remix)
4. Klubbheads - Kickin' Hard
thank you!
E.F.O. - Now '99
Track 2 is E.F.O - Now 99
🐢
Thank you ❤
You're a legend, thank you!
i remember a show called beyond 2000 doing a piece on mp3. the presenter smacked the player on his knee and presented it as music that doesn't skip when jostled. i instantly wanted one.
by this point most CD players and MDs didn't skip. Also cassettes didn't skip. Soooo.... Yeah.
I miss beyond 2000. Every episode was bound to have a segment from Japan and there was tons of futuristic home automation stuff.
@@razerow3391 I assure you, shit still skipped if bumped or jostled, especially if you couldnt get a top of the line player
@@razerow3391 they were bound to skip by the way he was banging the thing on his knee. you couldnt slap an md or a cd player around like that.
Back when tech was about how amazing it would be and not about how much of your privacy it would cost to use the new thing they were trying to force you to use..
6:30 I love that for the mp3 encoder, there is a note that "This meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason". Like someone actually took the time to add that. Priceless.
ahaha good catch!
My god this video brought back my Win95 trauma. Back when they first came out; MP3s were the new kid and were still trying to usurp WAV, VOC, and AIFF formats. Just to play it on Windows 95 initially you had to use a propriety player called "WinPlay3". And remember, you were HIGH-TECH with an Intel Pentium 120MHz (that's not a typo) and 16MB of RAM. Common hard drive size at the time was less than 1GB. An audio CD, uncompressed (DAT files), ran about 650MB to 700MB (depending on album length). I remember having to delete all the games from my hard drive at the time just to rip a single CD. Just to get the files on the hard drive. Then, I had a batch fiile RUN OVERNIGHT to re-encode them from WAV files to MP3. Man, I do NOT miss those days. You can now rip and encode an entire album to MP3 format in less than 10 minutes. And then there were those that argued about variable bitrate encoding sounding better than constant bitrate...
pain
@@EnheTook50Benadryl aye
I remember when WinAMP first came out. That shit was like wizardry compared to the before times.
The argument for variable bitrate back in those days was that it was the best compromise between size and sound quality. 128kbps MP3s can sound like garbage, but it makes tiny files. 256kbps sounds better, but twice the filesize. With a VBR MP3, you could get 256kbps audio quality with a file size that might be only a little bigger than 128kbps.
I remember my dad not letting me buy Ultima 6 (possibly 7?) because it required like 42MB of hard drive space and he didn't think we could spare that much.
I love how the nugget instantly says "stop" once you get it working. Almost like it wanted to stay buried in its grave. Incredible
I highly suspect you needed to connect the device BEFORE turning on the PC. I remember that problem from the Zip drive Paralell port versions. Also, there are drivers required for the paralell port interface. Were you able to get the device appear in the Device Manager?
Tried all that! I'll have to sit with my ancient computer gurus one day and work at it.
yeah, virtually nothing was hot-swap-able back then
I don't think drivers are required for parallel port for the device itself, as the program should communicate with it (on 98 most LPT communication was the programs just bit-banging it, as they get full access to the data bits). Zip drives had a driver, but it basically was just the program running in the background.
However, the laptop may have the LPT port set to a wrong mode, it may have to be in Byte or EPP mode (and it's possible that a laptop may not entirely support it)
@@PewnyPL I found some drivers for it specifically. I agree on the Paralell Port settings. It's always fun to get Paralell/Serial stuff to work.
@@DankPods can that toshiba be canonically called the EeePeeCees father?
I had a discman, my buddy had one of these. I used to give him so much crap about how long it took him to change his music while I could carry around *dozens* of albums.
I still wanted one of these.
Dude...... this is the most nostalgic video you have released. Audio catalyst.... windows 98.... this was my late teen years, the best times ever. Thank you for this trip down memory lane.
The buds were shocking in those days. But that's why one would get aftermarket headphones or earphones.
You may have needed windows 95 to get it to work properly.
Using 95 would not help him
@@coolduder1001 maybe, however mine connected through 95 back in the day.
@@coolduder1001 it might have just been that he connected the parallel port when the pc was already on. There are many many possible reasons it never worked.
That AudioCatalyst window gave me flashbacks!
I didn't know AudioCatalyst but I'm definitely familiar with the interface. Turns out it's just AudioGrabber (which I've used a lot) bundled with an MP3 encoder by Xing.
i just realized the MP3 Player is such a weird and specific term, it's like calling a screen a "JPG Displayer"
I mean, people were used to calling things record players or cassette players or CD players, and MP3 is a format just like records, cassettes, or CDs, except instead of a physical thing, it's a digital thing you put on a physical thing
Parallel ports actually have multiple modes of operation, for example ECP/EPP. You might need to take a look into your BIOS/CMOS setup to change those settings.
Also double check your windows doesn‘t have a printer configured on LPT1, otherwise that‘ll mess with it.
It looks like the device connects and the software recognises it just fine since he can see the songs already on the device. It's more likely that the scarlet fire rip has too high a bitrate for the device to handle. When he shows the ripping screen it says 128Kbit and that the finished file will be 24MB, rather large for a device with a max of 64MB storage.
And knowing Win98, you probably have to shut it down, plug in the MPMan then boot Windows
@@awesomenokes Possible, but probably not. Since the device isn't appearing in windows as a storage device like a lot of more modern devices, the mpman software probably handles any driver stuff. I could be wrong though, I've only ever used parallel once or twice and am assuming it works similar to serial.
Oh I wonder why people ran to windows XP and such, oh yeah, stuff like that was why
In the Patreon-only aftershow he tries another parallel port MP3 player and briefly shows the Windows Device Manager where LPT1 is listed as "ECP Printer Port"
I had one of these, bought it second hand sometime in 98. Absolute sorcery at the time, had to encode at 96kbps to fit your average length album on it. Transfer speed over the parallel port was soooooo sloooooow.
I love that ripping software says "This meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason"
I started using Audio Catalyst in '97 for ripping cds and it always had that weird message!
I guess there must have been some point in its development where it actually did something but god knows how far back that was!
2:07 Blurred out the MPenis
*man TM
I remember buying this with my first pay packet from my first part time job. I even got a whopping 8MB expansion card for it. If you thought the CD ripper software was bad it gets worse, it doesn’t let you rip a full CD at once, it only lets you do half the tracks at a time and they’re selected randomly so you had to restart the software to see if you got lucky and managed to be able to select the missing tracks. I can’t remember if it was a technical limitation or a licensing one though
Oh and the sales guy told me that these would be banned soon because they let you listen to pirated music.
@@adwan182 l0l0l0l0l0l0 priceless
@@adwan182 That nearly came true. Diamond got sued over their Rio player and eventually won in court but for a bit it wasn't a sure thing. LGR covers it in his video on the Diamond Rio
It was a money limitation, they supplied a limited version of the software for free as far I remember - you could buy a better version with no limitations.
I remember being in art class when I was in high school and my teacher telling me and my friend about mp3 technology. I think she had an article and we were reading about it and it was totally blowing our minds. Here we are about 25 years later and streaming uncompressed huge digital files wirelessly to our portable super computers.
Weird how that goes huh? I still vividly remember a day where me and my best friend ripped a demo cd out of a pc magazine in a shop and stole it because it had the first playable Fallout ( Yes, the very first one ) on it, and then we talked about internet stuff and I said something along the lines of : "Man, I'd sell my mom, my nonexistant little sister and both of my balls......and a kidney for a fucking 1 mbit internet connection" that was at a time when in my area ISDN dial in was still the best you could get. Nowadays I'm sporting a 200mbit glasfibre connection and I'm going "Damn, downloading this uncompressed 2k uhd movie takes two minutes, that is two minutes too long, I need faster internet!" the sheer audacity!
@twiztedharlequin4745 sorry to hear about your mom, nonexistent sister, both balls, and kidney, it was a worthwhile sacrifice.
Let’s be thankful that this channel exists and that we don’t have to touch these nuggets ourselves to know how good or bad they are.
7:28 there's something great about Dank getting all excited about it turning on and the display just says "stop" like it's a scream for help and it doesn't want to be alive
Congrats fan 👆👆🎉
You have been picked among my subscribers 🎊
You won a gift 🎁,text me with the name above to claim via telegram
“A twinkle in the milkman’s eye” had me dying!
Yup, understood
(sigh) I was 26… Do young’uns even know know what milkmen were?
@@CantankerousDave i know who they are, ive bought some from them, they delivered milk to my house
When
I am the milkman my milk is delicious
i was born in 97, and looking at this compared to the mp3 player i had as a kid that was in the shape of a usb drive... I can count my lucky stars!
Okay I definitely want that tracklist on the mp3 player...
Also parallel ports .. whew! I was 17 when this came out.. I remember those halcyon days of cd ripping/ mp3 playing...crazy times.
I used to encode MP3s on my 486. It was an event - in that it took like 5-10 minutes per song.
Fraunhofer L3enc for the win!
Same man these songs are a genuine jam
so what's the tracklist?
Yes, I had the same thought! Please share it and let us go back in time to when someone used it and carefully chose which music to put on his 32 MB
The third song is called kickin' hard by klubheads that's all the help I can give you
“Welcome to vintage Windows, where nothing’s synced together and nothing works and the computer is surprised you’re actually asking it to do things.”
Honestly i’ve never heard a truer statement.
It's crazy how revolutionary the original iPod actually was. I can and do still happily use my 1st generation iPod classic (manufacturered in November 2001!) and it just works! No fuss, no horrible controls, it just works! The audio quality is perfectly fine for me and 5GB is plenty of storage for around 600 songs give or take.
BTW The parallel port is probably in SPP (Standard) mode. You need to jump into BIOS/CMOS on the lappy and switch to ECP (Extended Capability) or EPP (Enhanced Parallel Port) mode.
In the Patreon-only aftershow he tries another parallel port MP3 player and briefly shows the Windows Device Manager where LPT1 is listed as "ECP Printer Port"
ECP should be the correct mode I would guess as its the more recent, however it might be worth trying with EPP just as a test. I remember having similar issues with an MPEG Capture device that used a parallel port interface back in 1999. Whenevr I had issues with it, I found it was almost always due to an IRQ conflict or port sharing in the OS.
for anyone interested the first song is 666 - D.E.V.I.L.
despite the first beat, it has an extremely catchy chorus bit and worth listening if you like that mind numbing dancy music
hey, any idea what those other songs were?
@@mus1c3gg sorry zero clue, I don't recognize them
I wonder if some of those songs are lost media
oh man. some ancient memories just flashed back to me
-your audio on the laptop is probably MIA because it looks like you may not have a sound driver installed at all ( I remember always looking for the little volume speaker icon everytime I reformatted a machine back then as it seemed like a gamble if windows was gona load an audio driver I swear I included on the disc lol)
-as others have said, parallel ports especially on a 98 vintage machine arnt really hot swappable and it needs a restart plus probably enabled in bios and Ive sometimes had to enable/ cycle through com ports in windows device manager
I have so much dang nostalgia for this era of computers but also its one of the few things I look back on and go "hellllllllllllll nooooooo Ill take the modern tech " so vehemently at least lol
I love that after who knows how long you awaken it from its eternal slumber and the first thing it tells you is “stop” 😂
To be fair you could get decent quality compression with the right sampling and bitrate all the way back in the 90s, and back in the 90s most MP3s were around 128kb but some were 192kb or higher. This had varying loss in quality for compression. 192kb back then was a pretty good compression rate while still having a pretty good quality for what you got.
But the problem wasn't the bitrate. The problem was that people did choose to encode to MP3 with low quality settings since the processing power meant that it took a lot of time to encode. Lower quality settings (not lower bitrate, but actual lower quality at the same bitrate settings) meant faster encoding times.
6:26 "This meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason."
It's a useless, on screen meter for no particular reason. At least the programmers were honest about it.
"What does that meter mean?"
"Ah, nothing. Don't worry about it. I just had to fill this blank area with something."
This guy is absolutely contagious. His genuine excitement gets me excited and I often don't even know why.
I love the headphone jack. It's simplicity means that you can take the first ever MP3 player, courtesy fucking 1997, jam it into a portable speaker manufactured yesterday, and have no problems whatsoever.
Bring back the headphone jack.
The main thing why you would need a headphone jack is when you record on analog magnetic recorders...it's a godsend.
@@brentfisher902 I can't even imagine how you would do it otherwise.
my fave old school mp3 player was the iriver,, the 20gb hdd in it felt absolutely friggin enormous back then
This may be one of the first nuggets you've showcased that had a decent selection of tunes onboard.
the last one was hitting
Listening to one of them right now, I can see why they put this on here. Sounds like it inspired a lot of hardbass
Man, thank you so much for this video. Really cheered me up since I'm sick! Keep it up!
That goes double from me, too. Having a _serious_ spell of depression at the moment, but this vid's perked me up a lot. ❤
I was born in 87 so I grew up with all this stuff. I remember my first CD player and then MP3 player. I never cared about the audio quality because it was just too cool.
86 here. The Toshiba Satellite hit hard
Heck yeah it's cool!
My idiot friend got a minidisc player, constantly talked about how amazing it was, brow beat me and a few friends to drop most of the little money we had saved up on a player and discs, and then less than a year later the iPod came out. I didn’t get one until the 3rd or 4th gen mini.
He absolutely hates it when we still bring it up +20 years later
Ooooooooh, that's the Neverhood on its own suitable environment! What a guy. Such a nostalgic piece of clay art
what
I know neverhood but where
9:44 "I bet a whole bunch of you's were just a twinkle in the milkman's eye."
Fun fact Serial Port Standard was 25 pins like the Paralell port, but since 9pins did the job for single direction data transfer people started using that, and it eventually became part of the standard.
Bought my first mp3 player in 2000. Claimed to be the 'slimmest' in a translucent blue, packing a massive 32mb storage. I was able to get 8 songs, AND had .5mb to spare. I'll see if I can find it, it may have turned into a discernable puddle
4:54 ah...The ePCs grandma has arrived so soon after her grandsons death.
Miss songs sounding like that. Can't wait till they make a comeback. Again.
I’m trynna figure the names they was going in lmao
@@mrkymrk1707
1. 666 - D.E.V.I.L.
2. E.F.O - Now!
4. Klubbheads - Kickin hard
@@Wilus0 wow ty v much
@@Wilus0
Comparing these to BT - Dreaming (1999) just gave me a better perspective on how big a deal he was.
@@mrkymrk1707 you're welcome
No sound/sound card errors was a common issue back in the Win98 laptop days, don’t sweat it.
We had one of these, but it was branded Eiger Labs Eigerman. The rubberized coating was absolutely disgusting but at least it came with a nice fake leather case. I don't think we used the cable once because the removable SmartMedia card was a far more straightforward to use. Windows recognized it like a regular drive so loading music was a piece of cake; easier than iTunes or any other crap music transfer app. Biggest limitation was that at the time those cards barely held much more than a CD's worth of music.
Even modern W10, you have to manually select parallel ports when using a USB to parallel or serial device, like a radio programmer.
The Frank stingers are always my favorite part, even if I sometimes spit drinks into my keyboard during the main video.
Seeing that green background gave me a nostalgia blast. For the longest time, the family computer was an old workstation running Windows NT 4.0 that could run autocad, solitaire, and paint without crashing and that was about it.
Dammit - you beat me to it! I have this up in the loft somewhere and was deffo gonna send it to you if I found it. RE: getting the bastard connected, there was some setting in the BIOS I had to change. Something about LPT modes or something. Give that a go - and good frikkin luck! I got a decent selection of about 12 songs on it and never bothered changing them because it was such a faff.
Oh, and the return to crude oil began after only about 4 years. Surprised yours wasn't a puddle.
@@Obliteratu Might have been ECP mode?
@@AxionSmurf ECP sounds familiar, quite possibly. I don't think I have anything with an LPT port any more to check :/
A friend of mine had one of the first mp3 players back in 98 or 99. I remember it. It blew my mind.
6:27 "This meter is now used by the codexc for no particual reason" Hey at least they're honest about it lmao
Ngl, this video has made me miss ripping movies from my VCR to disks then ripping them to my laptop. All for the long travels.
Truly some of the best times of my childhood.
thank you very much for this epic video!
hope you can work things out with frank.
"I bet a whole bunch of ya were just a twinkle in the milkman's eye at that point"
man i'm dead 💀💀
Great video, im happy for you that you found one!
would love the list of the songs that were on it, sounds like fire hahah
damn me too
Sounds like Wigan pier tunes
@@WetDoggo found the last one, its klubheads - kickin hard
@@WetDoggo or maybe its the first one he plays, im to stoned xD
Mp3 encoding was a black art in the early days. The computer magazine (those were blogs that updated only once a month that you could hold in your hands) Maximum PC even had a cover story and lengthy article on ripping and encoding. And it took a loooong time. This was back when mpeg2 video encoding speeds were measured in minutes per frame. Really - minutes per frame. And you needed an add-in board to play them back.
Yes, I was learning my trade as an editor back in the 90s and I needed to obtain a seriously chunky mpeg decoder card as well as a SCSI drive with constant data rate which was all it'd talk to! All to hold about an hour or so of video at a time. Ahh, those were the _very expensive_ days!
The reason I love your videos is they distract my mind to something funny and silly instead of being stressed out mess.❤
Danksy, this was truly a fun video exploring the granddaddy of the iPod (and all the other nuggs) even though you didn't manage to load Scarlet Fire. Also don't think it would have been an authentic experience without the buds getting tangled.
‘Keyboard is better than modern computers’ oh my goodness I couldn’t stop laughing how hap hazard it came across. Shout out to Frank.
Oh boy I can’t wait to listen to a whole song over and over on my 2MB mp3 player, unless it’s like longer than a minute or two
2mb was a about SD cards
I think you need to install the sound driver on that laptop, usually you see a small speaker icon down on the right side of the task bar when the audio driver is installed.
I shazam'ed one of the late 90s dance songs he played and it is called Kickin' Hard by Klubbheads, in case anyone was interested
You should really do a video on your headphone collection. It would be very interesting to watch.
7:52 666 - Get up to da track....I instantly recognized it🤣
thank you!
No joke, I'd love a copy of those 90s doof tracks.
I like the line in the MP3 ripper...."This meter is used by the codec for no particular reason"
It is amazing to see how far dank has come in the last couple of months and years keep up the amazing and entertaining videos mate.
The audio driver was clearly not installed on that computer. Even the volume speaker is missing from the task bar
7:09 No, modern Windows is still like that.
Wow! I'd forgotten about Audiocatalyst but that interface, complete with "This meter is used by the codec for no particular reason" brought it all flooding back.
NB: Listening on my new Samson SR850 headphones. Been meaning to get some for at least a year and I thought I'd treat myself. Very happy with them!
3:27 I’ve had the same philips mp4 player for years, had music videos on it and shit lol
Uh-oh - your Windows 98 laptop is missing its sound card drivers. This is the true Windows 98 experience!
Oooh, this is gonna be interesting- then again, that’s what I think every time you bless us with one of these videos. Keep up the good work, Dank!
music library:
1. My heart will go on
2. random ABBA song
3. random The Beatles song
4. random techno song that is 10 minutes and takes up the rest of memory only on here to be cool
Now THIS is the quality content I subbed for!! 😍
Lets be honest
That toshiba made the EeePeeCee in dankpods lore
Here after Cold Ones podcast, good stuff, subscribed.
0:21 T H E N U G G E T W I L D W E S T
Big Rio on his hip~
Born in 1998 I still remember my dad blasting 90s Tech in his old Audi 80 whit a massive subwoofer.
He did even got a few MP3's that even I used,cant remember what one.
But the First ever MP3 does seem good for its time.
I remember in1996 seeing an mp3 player on a TV show called "beyond 2000". I thought this is awesome 👌. No more skipping due to scratched CDs. Then I learned about bitbrates vs file size and sound quality etc...
Link
Not possible since the first portable mp3 player was created in 1997 (the one in this video).
Well, that is if you are not talking about mp3-palyers on computers, which probably was there already in 1994-95. (in November 94 mp3 was released).
@@Magnus_Loov all I remember is it was a prototype of a future project, as in the thing that came before this commercially available player... If the details were listed on IMDB, I would have found the exact episode so wouldn't have to correct me.
@@nickj2508 Ok. So it wasn't something that you could buy. It's in the same league as "The first mouse demonstration", which was done in 1968 and available to the public in the 80:s...
@@Magnus_Loov well yeah, its interesting to see new things in development before they're commercially available, like a little sneak peek for whats to come
Late 90's Toshibas had a habit of dumping drivers for no reason. I didn't have that model, but I did run into that problem back then.
dank ima need those in built mp3 tthose where jammin
3:18 after reading this article, it appears to be referring to TwinVQ, a technology added to the MPEG-4 standard almost like AAC's little brother for extreme data compression (like 8kbps extreme). the technology was later used in Vorbis and Opus
I was a teenager in the Rio diamond era. These were too expansive to be useful. Short battery life and with 128kbps MP3 (which was the norm late 90's), you could only get 8 or so MP3's. I stuck with portable CD player until 2001-ish when I got a NetMD mini disk and later a Rio Carbon (5GB HDD). Solid state players took a long time to be viable, due to storage limitation. I think 128+mb players only came down in price mid 2000's.
I was going to say that the funniest part of this video was the idea of having to put Scarlet Fire on a CD, but then I noticed the ol' chonker laptop has The Neverhood still installed on it and I don't know what to believe anymore.
11:51 "This meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason". I bet that when the devs tried to remove the meter, the whole thing would break.
I got everything from DOS 6.22 up to XP on genuine PCs... Its so fascinating to see the difference. Back in the days it was so much harder to do some simple tasks... But its tealy entertaining every now and then
NORRRRRN 3:39
6:33 LMAO, this meter is now used by the codec for no particular reason.
I got this mp3 for Christmas. It took me a week to figure her out but then I was a music wizard. Everyone else had cd players that skipped and I had 100 songs at my disposal. What a time for tech
It's just so crazy how much we as humans have developed through the years.
This year I am thankful for DankPods, and the nuggets he brings!
2:20 How I feel when my roommate does a productive that isn't his day job lmao
Was brought from a PC World store in UK. I can tell by the price label. I know, I used to work for them. 😁
Bet you could copy Scarlet Fire to a FAT32 formatted SmartMedia card and install the card in the expansion port.
I got lucky and found a 64mb SM card in some ancient VoIP equipment. USB adapters that read SmartMedia cards are pretty easy to find after finding the cards themselves.
SmartMedia feels a lot like miniature 5.25” floppy disks.
Seeing that you released a new video made my day, I had a bad thanksgiving because I had the flew the whole time. I loose my appetite when I get sick so I didn't eat, and I also slept most of the time. Thank you for making my day with that Aussie accent and hilarious video!
What is with the 666.ged file? At 8:08 I really need to know, the gedcom file format is for sharing genealogical information and was developed by the church.
666 is the name of one of the songs
I've messed around with parallel cables before and they absolutely need the screws, the cables for them are so thick that they can wrench the connector out
My god this guys say’s literally every sentence like the most exciting thing in his life is happening. Keep on keepin on my man.
This is literally the first Video I watched after updating my Pc to Windows 11 and I dont think there could be anything more fitting than looking at the nugget experience while being happy about the edges that got a lil less edgy with windows 11
I think mp3 cd players was a better option for that time period (end of 90s). Maybe you could try to find the 1st gen Soul CD/mp3 player. That was a really good player for its time from a kinda obscure brand.
Also some love to the real hdd players of the 2000s like the iRiver: Fat32 folders and m3u playlists like it should be!. none of that iTunes/Sony proprietary sync/cable/app stuff.