Source: NOKIA BL-4C (by IWSE Zhang - ArtStation)
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I couldn’t afford one at the time, so I didn’t really pay that much attention. I did eventually pick one up in the brief period when I had my own income but before dedicated mp3 players became a serious thing. The anti-skip didn’t work.
I had one on the very cusp of MP3s becoming mainstream. One of my first purchases when I had my own income.
It was a random Chinese “discman” with MP3 playback functionality and ID3 tag support. I also owned a CD burner.
It was pretty slick. It would only read the disc until the track was loaded to memory so coming from a cheap knockoff discman the anti skip was next level. I could actually run with this thing! I’d have to stop and let it load between tracks but no big deal.
It didn’t rock my world as hard as minidisc did, which I completely fell in love with but it was still pretty cool. I still struggle to believe that we no longer have physical media of any kind. I’m an album guy and it still feels kind of wrong.
I feel like with the cheapness of flash media these days, someone should be doing albums in mp3 on 64Mb USB sticks. At 1Mb/minute that’s only 10min less than a CD. Like the old hit clips but a full album.