iPod What did you use before your iPod?

[wallaby]

I remember back in my freshman year of college tossing a portable Sony Diskman in my backpack and hoping I'd reach my destination before the CD I had brought with me had reached its end...almost always listened to burned CDs because I could get more songs on them. Getting a 1G iPod shuffle when it first came out was worlds better for me, even without the screen...it was like having 6 CDs with me at any time, with a rechargeable battery! And it even fit in my pocket! These days I have a 5.5g iPod I got for $50 with my Mac, and can't imagine not having it around...having my entire music collection at my fingertips is something I take for granted these days.

 

[Surely]

I used a Sony Discman that had a whole 40 seconds of skip delay playback so it wouldn't skip. But it still did. And it sucked batteries like a Hoover.
I did love it at the time, it was a cool purple colour and was pretty thin, and loved the remote control that was on the headphone cable that showed the track number (and the name of the track?). Couldn't get any better than that, right? Right?

Then I got my 10 GB second generation iPod in late 2002 and everything changed. My brother had the 1st generation 10 GB iPod, and I was so amazed by his, that I had to get one. I was in school living in Chicago, and when I was listening to it, I couldn't walk more than 5-10 minutes without someone stopping me and asking me what the hell it was. It came with a belt clip neoprene case, a firewire cable, and the power brick.
I remember on New Years 2002-03 I went to a party and just plugged it into the stereo and we had an instant DJ. People were almost confused by it, they couldn't believe how much music was in that little thing.

Good times.

I love my 30 GB 5G, but I'm going to invest in a new 8 GB nano in the next week or so. I need smaller now.

 

[aethelbert]

I used my computer. Pretty simple and easy, but it was Windows. Then I got my macs, then my first iPod and iPhone. Life is good now.

 

[ryannel2003]

A $15 portable CD player from Wal-Mart...

 

[apfhex]

A Panasonic portable CD player (I still have it! collecting dust...). I did burn a few CD-Rs I guess, but only in the later days before the iPod came out. I never had much of a digital music collection before then because of slow internet, small hard drives, and not bothering to rip most CDs since I'd just listen to them portably anyway.

 

[JesterJJZ]

Sony Discman FTW!

 

[bjett92]

I had some cheap portable CD player. My iPod 4th gen was my first real music player.

 

[eric55lv]

this one SanDisk mp3 player didnt like it and when I had it I still wanted a iPod badly then my sis gave me a second gen Nano black it was so much simpler than the other mp3 player

 

[levitynyc]

I used this bad boy

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...UTF8&coliid=I5VOH2JIQ892Y&colid=36U7LARASKLL0

HHAHAH I found my review of it


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
WOW A Great MP3 player for all!!!!!, February 20, 2002
By (Brooklyn, NY United States)



I am totally satisfied with this player. The memory is a little low, but that can be fixed by just buying more memory. With a 64 Meg upgrade i put about 25-28 songs on this player. It would be much higher, but i use all 192 KBS quality. If you use radio quality 64 or 128 you can easily fit 50 songs, which is way too much for my purposes.
I cant believe the price of this player. almost all other mp3 players with this amount of memory sell for much more, and they arent near the quality. Just look, this is the only player on Amazon.com that averages a 5 star rating and it shows.

Who cares that the screen isnt backlit, or that song titles dont show. They are useless features anyways. What really matters is sound and reliability...which is incredible. The headphones that come with it arent my style, but with an mp3 player you dont pay really for headphones. I still use the default headphones with my cd walkman for when i fall asleep. Otherwise spend a few bucks to get some better headphones.

Battery life is incredible. I dont know why it advertises 8-10 hours, i have gotten over 15 hours per battery...with the sound up and bass etc.

Finally the software is very easy to use. The musicmatch upgrade is well worth it. I havent experienced any of the copyright or any other problems that i read about and i can only attribute them to user mistakes, not in the software itself. Uploads take about 20 seconds per song, which is quite quick compared to other players i've seen.

All in all this is a great MP3 player that everyone can use and love. Get em quick because 2 of my local stores have sold out of them.

Thanks for reading

Hope this helps.

 

[Kashchei]

Discman and portable cassette player. When those weren't available (wife used them too) I carried around CDs and cassettes. My iPod is a quantum leap forward!

 

[hexonxonx]

I had two portable CD players that I bought at Radio Shack. I still have them in perfect condition and they still work perfectly! I couldn't bump them while playing or the CD would stop for a few seconds, no buffer on them. I think I bought them back in the late 80s.

I gave up using them sometime in the mid 90s and mostly used CDs. I bought my first MP3 player in 2004, it was an iPod, still have it, still works.

 

[David G.]

I used a Sony Walkman CD player. I thought that thing was so cool. Now look what I have (in my sig.)

 

[iBookG4user]

I actually used my PSP as my mp3 player, I haven't been listening to music while away from my computer for that many years. The PSP worked great though, good quality once you ditched the provided earbuds.

 

[ezekielrage_99]

A Kenwood Portible CD player, the CD player was ok but the headphones were awesome.... Somehow if Apple could put some good headphones in the iPod package that would be brilliant

 

[SkyBell]

A Wal-Mart brand CD player. Sucked down 4 AA's every week.

It sure sucked but it lasted two years of abuse from a 9 year old, and it got me into music.

 

[Chundles]

Sony Discman and a CD wallet.

Pain in the arse to be honest, discmans made music less portable than the walkman did. They were big, heavy, skipped and you had to be wearing big pants to fit it in your pocket.

The walkman was at least small, didn't skip and tapes are way easier to fit in your pocket than CDs.

Thank god the iPod came around. So much better.

 

[synth3tik]

A phonograph.

 

[greg555]

I used a JVC car deck that can play MP3s. The thing is so buggy it's funny. The order the songs on a disk play can't be predicted when you create it. They play in some odd order that has nothing to do with the order they are burned onto the CR-R or their name. The only solution I found was to put one song per folder and give each folder a number (songs from album 1 are in folders 100 to 113, songs from album 2 in 200 to 218, etc.).

I thought it would be neat to use the shuffle feature, but it has a bug where it breaks some MP3 songs into 2 parts* (there's a 1 second pause while the track number changes, then the song continues). I could handle this for playing songs in order (since I grew up on 8-tracks that would fade out, change track and fade back in) but on shuffle it would jump to other songs before the end. And worse yet, jump to the last part of a different song. Totally unusable.

So mostly I'd burn all the albums from one band onto a CD-R and listen to them in order.

Getting an iPod was a huge step up!

Greg

*when you first insert the CD-R it tells you the number of folders and the numbers of tracks. With my method they should be equal but generally there would be the correct number of folders reported and about 30% too many tracks due the the track-splitting bug it has.

 

[SLC Flyfishing]

I used a series of Panasonic portable CD players. I really liked them and was reluctant to switch to iPod but when the first generation Nano came out I was sold. It soon became apparent that I needed something bigger to fit all the music I wanted to have available. I finally upgraded to an 80 GB classic last month and I carry about 11 GB of music with me all the time now, I don't know how I got along without the iPod before.

SLC

 

[MartyMoe]

Sony Walkman for cassettes, also a portable radio with cassette

The CD player in my car was the first one I ever owned-- otherwise, I think the first one I used was on a Playstation (the first one... "Wow, it plays music CDs too??")

Yeah, I got a little behind the tech, dont'cha know.

 

[thebassoonist]

Freshman year of high school, I got this beauty:

40 GB RCA Lyra Jukebox

It was awesome! Most people were still listening to CDs and no one could believe mine could hold as much music as it did.

It lived for almost 4 years. I got my 5G iPod right before its death and was able to transfer my music off of the Jukebox.

Lets just say...the iPod was much more user friendly, prettier, smaller, and I wasn't embarrassed to take it to school senior year.

 

[sushi]

Record player

CD player (Numerous ones. Later got portable ones with long skip protection which helped.)

Sony NT-1 Scoopman player (very unique digital tape player. Tape is the size of a postage stamp and could hold one hour per side of digital music of DAT quality.) Picture is attached.

RIO flash memory player (256MB)

Original iPod

...and some more iPods since then.

 

[student_trap]

it all started with a cassette walkman, then a discman, then a sony minidisc player, although minidisc was the worst technology ever, i had so many players that broke within a year....kind of makes a mockery of the fuss that was made about the 3G ipods breaking!

 

[Osarkon]

Creative Zen Touch. Then when that died within 12 months, a Creative Zen Sleek Photo. That also died in less than 12 months. Then I gave up on avoiding the accursed iPods and got my 5G 30Gb. Somewhat surprisingly, it's still going and its about a year and a half old. The longest amount of time any mp3 player has lasted with me.

 

[bartelby]

This in 1980:

One of these in 1982:

One of these in 1986:

Then a Walkman Professional through to the mid 90s.

Then a Sony discman