MP3 Players of Yesteryear

[Ben]

While doing some end of the year organizing last week, I stumbled across this guy:



Dead as a doornail and wouldn't charge, but a little googling and I had a "non-user replaceable" battery delivered and got it installed with the help of Youtube. This is the Creative Zen Vision M, which is the tech Apple stole for their iPod. I always felt Creative had the superior player. I'm finding it still very useful. Plus as convenient as Bluetooth is, it's nice not having my phone constantly go out of range of the speaker as I move around. 

I set it up with my living room speaker and am having fun listening to some great old playlists I made from back in like 2005. Plus I have a ton of music on it that I thought I had just lost, lots of it from back in the "Napster pirating" days. It uses a 30GB hard drive, so a priority will be moving everything to new storage for just in case. But in the meantime, I'm getting quite nostalgic today with all the old tunes and thinking about where I used to listen to them.

[Doggy Daddy]

I still have my Zen Vision M around here somewhere.  Your post just might be what it takes to get me to follow in your footsteps. Right now, I can even hear the clicking sound of scrolling through the menu.  I used it with a headphone amp and pair of Shure e2 earbuds.  Wonderful sound, it was.

[Declaration Day]

I never did get a dedicated Mp3 player.  I was a CD-R holdout until I got my first smartphone in 2013.

[lee n. field]

I'll have to root around the boys' room some time.  One of them once had a big old ipod, that wouldn't take a charge.   A while back I saw a writeup about replacing its hard disk (it still boggles my mind that someone would put a spinning platter hard disk in one of those) with a solid state, and aftermarket software to make it useful.

My own mp3 players all tend to get totally battered and beat up, before replaced.

[Ben]

I'll have to root around the boys' room some time.  One of them once had a big old ipod, that wouldn't take a charge.   A while back I saw a writeup about replacing its hard disk (it still boggles my mind that someone would put a spinning platter hard disk in one of those) with a solid state, and aftermarket software to make it useful.

My own mp3 players all tend to get totally battered and beat up, before replaced.

Now I'm gonna check to see if the same thing exists for the Zen. I'd actually be interested to see if even HDDs still exist for it.

And yeah, with today's tech and hindsight, you kinda shake your head about something like this having an HDD - especially considering how they were used for active lifestyle stuff. I think I still have the armband for taking it running, which I did until Creative came out with the little flash drive (Nomad?) players. Which I also still have.

[Hawkmoon]

What people did with hard disk drives boggles the mind. I have a Minolta DiMAGE A1 digital camera around here that came to me when the original owner upgraded to a Nikon DSLR. The Minolta came to me with (I thought) a 2.2 GB type CF memory card.

It wasn't until several years after I got the camera that I discovered -- entirely by accident -- that my CF flash card was not a CF flash card. It was something called a MicroDrive, which was a highly miniaturized hard disk drive mounted in a type CF form factor housing. It looks like a (slightly thicker) type CF card, it has all the same connectors, and it behaves like a type CF flash card. But it isn't.

I actually dragged that camera out a few weeks ago and found that the memory thingie had finally died, so I replaced it with an old 64 MB type CF card I had lying around from my first Canon point-n-shoot digital camera. For the very occasional use the camera sees, that's enough memory. If not, I have an 8 GB type CF card coming from Amazon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

[dogmush]

I have one of the old 160gb iPod classics in my car as my mobile music library.  The battery still holds a charge, but not for weeks like it did new, but plugged into the car that's not an issue.  I have something like 18,000 songs on it now.

[K Frame]

Somewhere around the house I still have my old player. It wasn't a Zune... it was some other semi-knockoff...

[Perd Hapley]

This is the Creative Zen Vision M, which is the tech Apple stole for their iPod. I always felt Creative had the superior player. I'm finding it still very useful.

That sounds a lot like the Prism Duro-Sport