What was the first commercially available hard disc based Mp3 player was it the Mk1?

No it was the ipod you would think that from taking with the general public anyway. The MK1 was the first one I ever heard of. I should have kept mine

The guys from SSI America like to claim that they were first with the Neo but that has never really tallied in my mind.

Rob

Certainly the Mark1 was before the Neo, right?

when did the first Mk1 leave your hands to a customer

Well the first review on the bbs is dated 12/08/99 by RobS, and I got mine (number 64) a week or two after that.

That was after what seemed like a lifetime waiting in the queue

The geek site says Christmas 1998 for the first prototype, and August 1999 for the first shipping players.

I'm getting all nostalgic now...

"Honey, does it really matter if there were others before you? The important thing is that we have each other now, and nobody else can compare to you. Those others meant nothing to me."

The Personal Jukebox, or PJB, was created as a prototype personal audio appliance by Compaq's Systems Research Center (SRC) and Palo Alto Advanced Development group (PAAD). The PJB project started in May 1998, and the PJB-100 product shipped in November 1999.
The PJB is a portable music player built around a small disk drive. A 30 GByte PJB will hold 550 hours of CD-quality audio. The battery lasts 10 to 11 hours on a single charge. The player weighs 9.5 ounces and can fit your jacket pocket. The audio quality is generally regarded as excellent, and the user interface is remarkably easy to learn and use. A 20 GByte PJB currently sells for around $550; the 6 GByte version is under $500.



Stereo Review's Sound & Vision magazine said:
In my 20 years of covering audio and video equipment, I can count on the fingers of one hand those products that gave me a spine-tingling "this changes everything" feeling. Now I can add the PJB-100 to the list.



The PJB100's biggest claim to fame in my opinion is that from day 1 it would play back albums gapless!

Note that the 12/8/99 date is August, not December.

Darn screwy date formats.

"Honey, does it really matter if there were others before you? The important thing is that we have each other now, and nobody else can compare to you. Those others meant nothing to me."

He represents all that is souless and wrong!!

/me waves hand over head and makes "whoosh" noise.

In reply to:

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Note that the 12/8/99 date is August, not December.

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Oops, I forgot about that, sorry... four days earlier or four months later and I'd have got away with it

/me waves hand over head and makes "whoosh" noise.

Office Space quote. Shame on you for not recognizing it!

Agreed, shame on me. I should have realized.

/me makes note to watch the DVD yet again...

Gleep beat me to it. Yes, the Personal Jukebox was the first hard drive based MP3 player. I remember before it was released, its creators were "auctioning" off a player every day for a month. Bidding was open for 24 hours, BUT it would continue if new bids were placed within a 5 or 10 minute window of eachother. The player was won when nobody bid on the player for up to 10 minutes after the last bid.

I remember seeing them sell for $1500 or more. I even threw in a few mid-day $500 bids just for kicks. But, ultimately, I didn't trust the thing. I always assumed, "rotational media can not be portable because it's to fragile. Solid state is the only way to go. Get a Rio PMP-300." That same bias turned me away from the empeg after I first saw that MKI sitting on the plush purple velvet.

Surprisingly, after brushing off hard drive based players as being "fragile as portable record players", I never heard a peep from either empeg or Personal Jukebox. Luckily I stumbled upon empeg back in Sepember 2002, which led me here. But in 6 years, this post is the first mention I've heard of the Personal Jukebox since drooling over it back in 1998 and wishing it "wasn't so fragile."

Has anyone ever owned, used, touched, or seen in person a Personal Jukebox?

Gleep beat me to it. Yes, the Personal Jukebox was the first hard drive based MP3 player.

Since when did we re-write the 1999 calender?

Last time I checked, August 1999 came before November 1999. Empeg shipped in August.

Yes, we have his and hers. I first bought one when they were 6gig units (the originals were 4.7) I too held off thinking they would be too fragile, but after I finally broke down and bought one I wished I had gotten it sooner. Our current units are the newer backlight ones. One has a 30gig drive the other has a 40gig drive. I have heard of people successfully upgrading to 80gig drives. I would have replaced my PJB with a Karma but I am not willing to downgrade from 40gig to 20gig. Especially since I can upgrade my PJB to 60 or 80.

I remember those Ebay auctions. It was just before Christmas and they were the NEW thing. Some went for at or near $3000. After seeing one go for a price I would have paid, I bid on a few units, never enough.

I did get one from HanGo after the 20 Giggers became available.

Gleep: Awesome, makes me wish I had one. 80 gig portable, mmmmmmm.

gbeer: $3000? Haha, wow, that's so much. I remember seeing the auctions not on EBay, but on some other small auction site. The ones there only went for like $1500. Haha, maybe people picked them up there and REsold them on EBay for twice as much.

Hm. I don't see any on EBay right now, but I'll keep looking. Wouldn't be a bad score for the right price.

As mentioned earilier they are easy to use. Just bulky.

Bulky by Karma and iPod standards, but certainly not compared to the Creative players or a Discman. I had two PJB-100s and I loved them (one 4.8 gig, then a 6 gig backlit, upgraded later to 20). Until the Karma, they were the closest thing to the empeg in my opinion in terms of database driven music organization. Of course, you were limited to two levels of heirarchy in the organization, and there was no searching, but you could have multiple references to a file, and the thing played gapless.

I seriously loved it, and it changed my life. Music became more of a "soundtrack to my life" kind of thing for me, since I had so many choices available to me. I sold my second one with some reluctance in order to get a Karma, which was the first player to be able to provide what I liked so much about the PJB.

If you do see one on ebay, don't hesitate to pick one up. You'd rarely see one over $150. Alternatively, if you really want one go over to the PJB-100 Yahoo group, and post a request there. I'm sure someone's got something they're not using and would want to get rid of it.

Of course, you were limited to two levels of heirarchy in the organization,

Thats still better then the majority of players today. How is it we went backwards in options to organize music?

If it wasn't for jEmplode, the Karma wouldn't support a heirarchy either...

i don't know if we went backwards or the rest of the world ain't caught up with the empeg yet which has been out of production for almost 3 years

or maybe Jo public can't handle it yet

You made me go look http://www.pjbox.com

I hadn't realized the pjb had been EOL'd. I wish they still had the downloads page available.

If you click deeper you find it's been replaced with the RipDrive. Interesting that you can buy one without a drive at all. $250.

That is a really nice device! If they only produced a interface to pilot it from major brand headunits (Alpine, Becker, Pioneer, etc.), it could be a decent replacemente for the empeg... Plus, of course, portable, voice recorder (and quality recorder with that additional microphone...)

Too bad it does not have a nice look and interface as the iPod...