The spring of my freshman year, my mother sold my drum set. I used that money to buy an MP3 player. sorry. Multi-codec jukebox.
When faced with an Apple product that is sleek, friendly, and easy to use, there are types of people who rave about every feature of the product. won’t The walled garden is a trap in every way, so there’s everything you can’t do with it. This person has existed since time immemorial. I used to be that kind of guy too. It still happens sometimes, and it used to. So in the spring of 2004, two and a half years after the iPod was released, I spent $330 on the iRiver iHP-120. It rolls off your tongue.
iHP-120 was Physical. Whereas the iPod was gray and white, the iRiver was a black brick with silver rails and visible screws. It had a 1.8-inch 20GB spinning hard drive. There was a joystick on the front. There were four physical buttons and a lock slider on the side. It had an FM radio. It had an equalizer button. It also had a 3.5mm headphone jack plus A pair of optical/analog combo jacks: one for line-in and one for line-out, meaning someone else can plug in a second pair of headphones. It came with a lapel mic and a wired remote control. The remote had an LCD screen, a headphone jack, and three control dials, so I could leave the MP3 player in my backpack and take the remote out and clip it to my backpack strap.
Is this overkill? perhaps! In particular, wired remote controls tend to generate a lot of static electricity, so I didn’t use them much. I’ve never even used the optical port.
But I always used my MP3 player. Besides listening to MP3s (lossless FLAC and Ogg Vorbis are also supported!), it’s also useful for recording interviews for journalism classes. I recorded my friend talking a bit scandalous (for the record, not secret). I dragged and dropped an entire collection of questionable tagged MP3s from friends. Before I got my laptop, I used it to transfer schoolwork between my library computer and my dorm room desktop.
I got a case of gummies, and belt clip. I joined a forum about it. At some point I replaced the iRiver firmware with Rockbox. Some people replaced their hard drive with a CF card adapter and then the CF card with his SD-to-CF adapter. I never got there.
Almost forgot about rarity
Eventually, when I bought a Windows Mobile phone with a sliding keyboard in late 2006, or an iPhone in 2008, I stopped carrying iRiver with me everywhere, but I still carried it with me. That hard drive became a fossil record of my musical tastes in the years before streaming. A 4GB “various artists” folder, tons of Elliot Smith and Mountain Goats albums, and a collection of mashups from my first year in San Francisco. Metacritic’s 30 highest-rated albums of 2008, regardless of genre. A recording of my friend Bill talking about his time at Jesus People’s Commune. These are all recorded interviews and essays. From time to time, I took it out and tried to wash away the memories.
Almost forgot about scarcity. My kids have barely touched physical media. If I didn’t have a physical copy of something (a cassette or CD album, a VHS or (later) DVD movie) like I did when I was a kid, it’s hard to understand the idea that if it didn’t happen to be there, I just couldn’t access it. In high school, I carried around a portable CD player and a huge binder of his CDs. When I got my iRiver, I stuffed it with the same CD I ripped (very slowly!) to my computer, plus all his MP3s I borrowed from a friend’s computer and dorm network. It was basically a more portable version of a binder filled with CDs. I listened to what I had and what stayed there. It was a far cry from the excessive ball games we take for granted today.
The other day I took it out of the drawer and turned it back on. It worked fine, but all my files disappeared. I thought I must have deleted it at some point. I felt strangely sad. Then click the “Rebuild Database” option in the menu. In the Recycle Bin he found 1,000 files. nothing was lost.
Photo: Nathan Edwards/The Verge
