> But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip/stop/jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag
Well, after the first generation of CD players they wised up and added high-speed drives that read into buffers ("skip-proof"/"ESP"/etc) so that skipping wasn't a big deal. Since MP3s were a smaller quantity of data, they actually worked better at this.
Ideally you wanted a player that could read CD-RWs (whether full of audio tracks or MP3 files). Still a pain in the ass but less expensive. Not all players used a laser that could read RW media. And not all media used to be readable by all drives in those days - some drives were very very sensitive. I remember the horror of desperately searching DVDR-Help.com to try and find media with good compatibility ratings.
The thing that always amused me as a kid was how indestructable my Sony Discman CD player was. I went through probably 4 or 5 off-brand CD and MP3-CD players that had skip-proof before I finally switched to MP3 players. Every time they'd conk out after a year or two and I'd have to fall back to that stupid skip-prone Discman. The thing was built like a tank and I wouldn't be surprised if it still worked today, 20 years later. When I replaced it with an early iRiver HDD player in 2003 I shelled out like two years of savings for it, and that iRiver ended up lasting a decade. It was an important lesson for young me: you get what you pay for.
> Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level.
That too, but I was really thinking about the scroll-wheel there. I can still remember the interminable pain of scrolling through a giant list of albums at about 2 per second. The iPod scroll wheel and the Zen Vision M's touch-strip were massive improvements for how they let you scroll rapidly but also have fine control.
The iRiver fixed it with firmware brute-forcing (in Rockbox). All you had was a D-pad but it would scroll exponentially faster the longer you held it down, so you could actually get where you wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time. Not elegant but it worked.
Well, after the first generation of CD players they wised up and added high-speed drives that read into buffers ("skip-proof"/"ESP"/etc) so that skipping wasn't a big deal. Since MP3s were a smaller quantity of data, they actually worked better at this.
Ideally you wanted a player that could read CD-RWs (whether full of audio tracks or MP3 files). Still a pain in the ass but less expensive. Not all players used a laser that could read RW media. And not all media used to be readable by all drives in those days - some drives were very very sensitive. I remember the horror of desperately searching DVDR-Help.com to try and find media with good compatibility ratings.
The thing that always amused me as a kid was how indestructable my Sony Discman CD player was. I went through probably 4 or 5 off-brand CD and MP3-CD players that had skip-proof before I finally switched to MP3 players. Every time they'd conk out after a year or two and I'd have to fall back to that stupid skip-prone Discman. The thing was built like a tank and I wouldn't be surprised if it still worked today, 20 years later. When I replaced it with an early iRiver HDD player in 2003 I shelled out like two years of savings for it, and that iRiver ended up lasting a decade. It was an important lesson for young me: you get what you pay for.
> Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level.
That too, but I was really thinking about the scroll-wheel there. I can still remember the interminable pain of scrolling through a giant list of albums at about 2 per second. The iPod scroll wheel and the Zen Vision M's touch-strip were massive improvements for how they let you scroll rapidly but also have fine control.
The iRiver fixed it with firmware brute-forcing (in Rockbox). All you had was a D-pad but it would scroll exponentially faster the longer you held it down, so you could actually get where you wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time. Not elegant but it worked.