Jan 28
How the music started – not with Apple
Music is a huge part of my life — as much as computers, without a doubt.
It began in or around 2003 – John had an MP3 player that would, in fairness, be scorned at. It had a memory of 320 MBs (if memory (no pun intended) serves me right), which, in comparison to the 120 GBs (that’s 327,680 MBs) iPods that they have today.
He was selling it so that he could purchase an iPod Nano (which was chubby in those days! and the screen was in black & white!). He set down a cool €100 asking price which I agreed to. Upon asking Dad, he gave me the money but suggested I try haggling. So I did.
9 year old me: How about €90?
John: Nah. €100 or nothing.
9 year old me: Ok so.
As you can see, 9 year old me was one cool customer, and a force not to be reckoned with…
But there it was — my first MP3 player, and I was in awe. Powered by an AA battery, its little pixelated ticker-tape display proudly showed what song you were playing. You controlled it by a little cog wheel and with the volume keys.
Not having a computer (or music tastes) of my own, I promptly handed it back over to him to put some music on it. I only vagually remember what it was he put on – I know some Red Hot Chili Peppers were on it.
Over the next few years, I moved onto an iPod Shuffle (which I bought from Patrick for the slightly-less extortionate price of €30), an iPod Nano (a leaner cousin of John’s one, but not as wafer-thin as the current model) and finally onto the iPhone I have today.
Were your MP3 player beginnings Apple dreams or were they AA powered machines?
January 28th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Neither- I started with a sony. Still have that sony. Unless you count my discman
January 28th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
My first mp3 player was virgin media
January 28th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
I had a blue cassette player with really, really painful headphones. Then a Walkman, before the Apple love in began. :D
January 29th, 2010 at 10:56 am
My musical devices have grown with me. I had a walkman to play my spice girls tapes, the world’s first discman (before the invented shock absorption) which skipped every time your breathing nudged the headphones and my first mp3, a 64MB darling which held 16 songs which I systematically changed every morning to allow for musical variation. My iPod serves me well these days :P
January 29th, 2010 at 11:27 am
@Kate that totally reminds me of what I did with the stick MP3 player – give it to John every weekend with the instructions to ‘give me new stuff’ :)
January 31st, 2010 at 1:55 am
I started off with an MP3 CD player. I dumped a load of MP3s onto a disk and it was horrible really. Then I moved up to a 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M, and now I just use my iPhone, and from time to time, my Zen
January 31st, 2010 at 8:21 am
Alot of bloggers are not very happy with this new iPad.There was 2 much hoopla over it and alot people got disapointed.You see, I for one see great deal of the awesome potential uses of this device. Third-party applications for making tunes, games, newspapers and magazine and books, all sorts of good stuff, but IMHO they failed to sell it very well (excluding the books). It smells rather not finished
January 31st, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Wow, you’re brothers are natural businessmen, selling you hand-me-downs. I would never get away with that. My first mp3 player was a cute little blue one with about 1 GB. I got my music from my aunt, including some post-modern stuff from Air, a French band, which I used to read without getting distracted or carsick
January 31st, 2010 at 9:36 pm
I had 2 Creative Zen Micro’s and then moved on to a 80gb iPod….IMO you really can’t beat the iPod
January 31st, 2010 at 9:43 pm
Wondering if we’ll get anyone come along and say “my first one was MTV”…