The First Mp3 Player

A digital audio player, usually referred to as an MP3 player is an electronic device that is used for storring, organizing and playing audio files. Some of the MP3 players are also known as portable media players, as they include functions enabling to preview images or to play video files. Its predecessor in the market is the CD player, who covered the same form of entertaining but with less functions.
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The first MP3 player was invented by Kane Kramer in 1979, and it was called IXI. The devices that he developed was able to play 3.5 minutes of recorded sound thus not very attractive to the population, thus it failed to make it to commercial production. The first company in the world that announced a portable MP3 player and the attendant system for uploading MP3 audio content to a personal computer and then downloading it onto a personal MP3 player was Audio Highway. With the help of the Audio Highway CEO Nathan Schulhof, they lunched the first commercial portable MP3 player to the market on September 23, 1996.

The Listen Up portable MP3 player was an innovation at that time and got Audio Highway 2 awards for its ingenuity. Audio Highway won an innovation award at Consumer Electronics Show on September 23, 1996 and People's Choice award 2 years later in 1998 at the annual Internet Showcase conference, an event hosted by David Coursey and produced by Upside Media Inc. Schulhof is sometimes referred to as "the father of the MP3 player industry".

One of the chips making it possible to create portable MP3 players before the market for mass produced devices took off was the Micronas MAS3507D Application-specific integrated circuit ASIC MP3 Decoder chip. With the help of this chip, the microcontroller was allowed to read data from a flash memory and feed the decoder chip, creating a low power solution. The second MP3 player that hit the market was the MPMan player developed and designed by a South Korean company named Saehan Information Systems in the middle of 1998. The MPMan portable MP3 player was later licensed at Eiger Labs which distributed them under the brand of Eiger Labs MPMan F10. This MP3 player had the capability of storring 32mega bytes of audio files or 6 songs, at that time revolutionary. Nowadays MP3 players being able to store over 1000 songs.

MP3 players were later installed into phones in South Korea, and the first artist to sell songs as MP3 file downloads directly to mobile phones was Ricky Martin. The idea spread across the globe and by 2005 all five major handset makers, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and SonyEricsson had released musicphones. By 2006, more MP3 players were sold in musicphones than all stand-alone MP3 players put together. The MP3 player was truly an innovation and will continue to be a form of entertaining for the public.