[jazzy intro music plays]
Greetings and welcome to LGR Oddware, where we're taking a look at hardware and software
that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete.
And today we have the Audible MobilePlayer, from 1997.
And yes, it is *that* Audible.
They've been around for a long time, but back in the earlier internet days, there were just
a website that happened to sell audiobooks, and speeches, and all sorts of different things
through the website that you could download and put onto this device right here.
And yeah, this is before app stores and just sticking Audible on whatever thing you have,
or streaming it on your browser.
Or even before the days of consumer mainstream MP3 players.
Yeah! This is a fascinating device so let's take a look at it.
So, let’s talk about Audible!
And man it feels like I should be sponsored for saying that, but nope!
No sponsorships here.
We’re talking pre-Amazon, mid-90s startup Audible.
And in late 1997 they released their first product: the Audible Player, also called the
MobilePlayer, at an asking price of $199 US dollars.
“Audible, the revolutionary new www-based spoken audio technology.
Audiobooks, conferences, radio programs.”
Aw yeah, it’s a digital audio player that connects to a Windows 95 PC through a serial
cable and plays back audio downloaded from the world wide web.
How exciting, who wouldn’t want this?!
Well, most people it turns out.
Despite Audible’s considerable success as a content provider in the 21st century, Audible’s
success making hardware was... eh, they tried.
After half a year on the market Audible had sold around one thousand Audible Players,
so they weren’t exactly flying off the shelves.
Partly because they weren’t on store shelves at all.
The only way to buy an Audible Player was to order one directly through the company,
either by phone or on audible.com.
And keep in mind, this was late 1997, early ‘98!
E-commerce was in its infancy, and not everyone wanted to hand over their credit card number
to purchase a $200 gadget sight unseen.
Plus, hardly anyone understood what the darn thing actually did.
What even was an "internet-based spoken audio system” anyway?
Hehe, even the box seems unsure!
Such is the cost of arriving early to the portable media player party.
The Audible Player predated the Apple iPod by nearly four years, and MP3 players like
the MPMan F10 and the Diamond Rio
wouldn’t release in North America until later on in 1998.
So the Audible Player stood alone as a glimpse at the future, a tantalizing piece of tech
to the well-off webizen of the late 90s.
Otherwise, it was an oddity in an era where most folks were satisfied
buying audiobooks on tape and CDs.
Then once early adopters and gadget columnists got their hands on it, critics praised the
Player for its convenience and the ease at which you could download new audiobooks, but
dinged it for its steep upfront cost, low audio quality, cheap-feeling plastic components,
and tiny storage capacity.
Yeah the first Audible Player only packed four megabytes of flash memory, which equated
to around two hours of audio thanks to Audible’s proprietary audio compression.
Yet even after the MobilePlayer-Plus was made available, an upgraded $300 model holding
seven hours of audio, critics still ended up comparing Audible Players
to the Sony Walkman, rather unfavorably.
A Walkman was more affordable, could play audio in stereo and at higher fidelity, had
the ability to record, took mere seconds to swap material without a computer, had better
battery life, and didn’t require an internet connection.
Despite this, Audible kept on truckin’ through some seriously rocky times.
In 1999, Audible’s president and CEO, Andrew Huffman, suffered a major heart attack and
suddenly passed away at just 40 years old.
And even if this tragedy hadn’t occurred, the dot-com bubble was near bursting point.
Like so many internet startups, Audible’s public shares were plummeting by the end of
the year 2000, sinking 73% in value eleven months after going public, eventually dropping
to just 15 cents a share in February of 2003.
They managed to survive though, partnering with companies like Diamond to allow Audible
downloads on the Rio 500 MP3 player, releasing their own MP3 player, the Audible Otis, in
2002 to somewhat middling reviews, until finally: iTunes happened.
In October of 2003, Audible became the exclusive provider of spoken word audio to the iTunes
Music Store, apparently stemming from Steve Jobs being a fan of theirs
as Audible founder Don Katz explains.
“I get a call from Steve Jobs.
And then he basically said 'I really want to have a meeting' and so we had a meeting.
And he basically told me that he completely admired this and that’s
why I wanna work with you guys and have your service on the device I wanna make.”
So that worked out!
With Audible leaving the hardware business behind and Apple iTunes sales contributing
to five years of growth, culminating in the entire company being purchased by Amazon in
2008 for 300 million dollars, then proceeding to sponsor any content creator with a pulse
because screw you they got that Jeff Bezos money now.
Uh but yeah, anyway the Audible Player from 1997!
Humble beginnings indeed, arguably a total flop on its own, yet it set the groundwork
for greatness nonetheless.
Let’s unbox this rare creature and give it a go!
[box being boxily unboxed]
Right, so there’s the Audible Player itself, weighing just 2.5 ounces or 71 grams.
There’s a rechargeable nickel-metal hydride battery that originally boasted three hours
of battery life, a nice leathery carrying case with a visor clip around back, a docking
station for charging and syncing the device to a PC with a little spot for charging a
spare battery on its own, a 16-watt AC adapter that plugs into the dock, a serial cable that
goes between the dock and your computer, and a CD-ROM containing the Audible Manager and
related software, amusingly distributed on a CD-R
with a cheap CD Stomper printed label on top.
Finally there’s the manual, or “listening guide,” with 47 pages of guidance on listening.
And it’s a good thing mine still had this in the box because the buttons on the device
itself are rather vague.
It also came with this printout letting you know that there’s some audio already loaded
onto the Player featuring a welcome message from Don Katz.
And the previous owner also printed out some stuff from their old website, like how to
download and install the desktop version of Audible, along with some of the content available
for purchase in May of 1998.
Guess they didn’t feel like printing all 116 pages, they stopped after just four, but still.
It’s neat to see the pricing model, with offerings on the low end costing a dollar
ninety-five for shorter speeches like Barbara Jordan’s Address to the Democratic Convention,
on up to thirteen bucks for a five hour 36 minute-long reading
of Achieving Sales Excellence by Tom Hopkins.
Sounds like riveting stuff...
Oh and there was supposed to be a pair of headphones and a compact cassette adapter
in the box as well, but those were nowhere to be found by the time I got this second-hand
example on eBay a while back.
But I grabbed a couple of generic replacements because it looks like generic stuff.
And whatever, the fact that I was able to find one of these at all, much less one in
such good shape still in the box, is absolutely incredible.
Even more insane is the fact that the battery still holds somewhat of a charge, check it out!
-"The poetry of Robert Frost."
[voice of woman softly reading poetry]
Yeah I was seriously not expecting the battery to still work, but work it does, so let’s
check out what it was actually like to use Audible offline in 1997!
The power turns on when you crank up the volume past zero, illuminating a green LED that blinks
and glows amber or red for different status messages.
The large circular button in the middle is a combination play and stop toggle, among
other things as needed.
The 3.5mm jack up top outputs in mono to the speakers or headphones of your choosing.
And these four smaller buttons are for skipping to the next program, fast forwarding and rewinding
the current track either in chunks or all at once, and the bottom-left button is for
setting and skipping to virtual bookmarks you can save at any time.
Finally, around back is this little rotating disc marked ‘FM’ and yeah.
This thing has a built-in FM transmitter
letting you output radio frequencies between 88.5 and 94.1.
Pretty brilliant move to have this integrated into the main unit, I always had to use an
external battery-powered transmitter with my tape and CD players back then.
The way this works is that you hold the play/stop button while powering it on, and it’ll begin
cranking out a loud noise to the selected radio frequency.
[long tone signal]
The adjustment disc on the back doesn’t tell you what precise frequency that is so
you have to fiddle around with your radio dial and find it.
Once you’re locked onto that, you can press play to begin wirelessly transmitting audio
to your FM radio.
And while it isn’t a strong signal by any means, especially with all the interference
in my house, it’s still just awesome to have this built into the Audible Player to begin with.
[FM radio plays rather fuzzily, yet decently]
Although I’ve gotta say, I can see what the reviewers meant back in the day
regarding the plasticky build quality.
Holding it in the hands does not instill confidence in its longevity.
[chintzy plastic tapping sounds]
Yeah it simply feels cheap, with its lightweight injection molded construction making it feel
more insubstantial than what you’d expect for $200, even in 1997.
Anyway, let’s go ahead and plug it into a PC and see how that goes, cuz ya never really
know with retro devices that rely on an online account and remote servers.
Starting off the PC side of things is the installer.
It installs a handful of programs to handle transferring and playing Audible files, as
well as a copy of RealPlayer 5.0 Audible Edition, ooh.
[RealPlayer startup jingle plays]
Man, now there’s a sound I haven’t heard in decades!
So yeah, it supports certain Mobile RealAudio
and CCITT u-Law WAV files in addition to the
usual Audible stuff, we’ll have to try that out later.
But for now, with it docked and plugged into the serial port, the Audible Manager software
quickly detects the device on COM1,
and then proceeds to ask for your username and password. Welp.
Obviously that isn’t going to work seeing as it relies on who knows what kind of credentials
and ancient MobilePlayer servers, so we’ll just skip that part.
Thankfully the DRM isn’t so intense that it cuts you off from playing around with the
demo files it came with.
The Audible transfer program still allows you to manage the contents of the device without
logging in, just tap the sync button, and there you go.
Now you can create a playlist from any compatible files you wish, so long as you don’t go
over the roughly 4 megabyte limit.
If you have more than that you wanna listen to, you can simply queue things up and it’ll
transfer all it can, then once you’ve listened to that audio it’ll remember that and transfer
the next chunk of audio next time.
Really slick system for 1997, I gotta say.
As a demonstration I’m synching about one hour of stuff: the original welcome message,
and an episode of Car Talk because I miss Car Talk.
And even though this is only two megabytes, it took around ten minutes to transfer everything over.
Yeah, combine this with the fact that dial-up download speeds were between 2 to 5 kilobytes
per second back then and you can see why critics recommended a Walkman instead, especially
if you’re in any kind of a hurry.
But yeah, we’re now able to undock it from the PC and enjoy a pleasant little message
from Audible president Don Katz, and the soothing conversations of Click and Clack.
I’ve recorded directly from the Player itself here
so you can listen in all its 8-bit 8kHz monophonic glory!
[Don Katz welcome message plays]
-"Car Talk." "This is Audible!"
[clips from Car Talk play]
Now, how about those other file formats?
Well I’m sad to say that I have had zero luck with those so far.
I’ve followed the file specifications, exported using the required settings on both vintage
and modern software, but nuh-uh.
It thus far refuses to play ball so that’s unfortunate.
Out of curiosity, I also tried seeing if the modern Audible Manager software would do anything.
While it doesn’t help me with this device, I was surprised to see just how far back it
went, all the way to the Diamond Rio, the Audible Otis, and even the Tapwave Zodiac.
That is some impressive legacy support, but yeah, doesn’t help me here.
However, this is what it sounds like with my voice saved at the exact sample rate and
bit depth used by the original Audible Player.
Hehe, yeah it’s tolerable for voice recordings I suppose, but it completely makes sense that
the company deemed it unsuitable for music, check this out.
['Latin Quarters Jazz Band' by Magnus Ringblom plays]
Well that's about it for the Audible MobilePlayer for this video anyway.
And I just think this is absolutely fascinating,
something that I definitely don't remember seeing back in the day.
And considering it wasn't sold at retail, that makes sense. But y'know.
Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but I didn't hear about Audible until some time
in the 2000s when I got a PDA, or was interested in PDAs
and happened to see the Windows Mobile Version.
Obviously MP3 players completely blew away the need for a device like this, just a year
and a half, two years later.
I dunno, I appreciate they were doing this so much earlier than anyone else.
And you know, doing things that were a little bit different too, like the FM transmitter
and making sure that you were able to pick up where you left off even if you overwrite the audio.
Like, it remembers that stuff, and the bookmarks.
And it's just a really cool device, despite it being an admitted failure for, you know,
company standards in 1997. But yeah!
I hope that you enjoyed taking a look at the Audible Player.
[jazz band music continues playing]
And if you liked this video then hopefully you'll like some of the other Oddware episodes
that I've done, or any number of the other things here on LGR.
There's new videos every week.
And as always thank you very much for watching!