Diamond Rio PMP300

On September 15, 1998, Diamond Multimedia introduced an MP3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP300. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it made the MP3 player mainstream. I had one. It wasn’t exactly great, but I understand why the RIAA was afraid of it. That’s one of the main reasons I spent $200 to get one. I got mine so early the RIAA hadn’t been able to sue Diamond Multimedia yet.

Rio PMP300: dreaming in digital (or at least playing)

In the 1980s, the Sony Walkman had been ubiquitous. It was a small, portable cassette player that clipped onto your belt and allowed you to take music anywhere. Everyone had one, or an imitator.

The Rio PMP300 showed what the new century’s version of the Walkman was going to look like. Plug it into your computer, load it up with MP3 files, and take your music with you. Only now it was solid state. No tapes to wear out or lose. It was a fully digital experience.

Diamond Multimedia wasn’t a familiar name in the consumer electronics space. They were a leading maker of PC components like video cards, so designing an MP3 player wasn’t much of a stretch for them. The Diamond Rio PMP300 changed that.

How the RIAA’s lawsuit backfired

On October 8, 1998, three weeks and two days after its release, the Recording Industry Association of America asked for a restraining order to block the sale of the Rio PMP300.

The RIAA was afraid of it because it was dangerously mainstream. Diamond was a respected manufacturer of video cards and other computer accessories. It was absolutely a product that stores like CompUSA, Best Buy, and Circuit City would carry. The first MP3 player on the market was an obscure device manufactured by Samsung, but carrying a brand with no name recognition, and you had to order it. The music press talked about it, but the computer media ignored it, and so did the mainstream media. The computer media talked about the Diamond Rio. And after the RIAA sued to block its sale, the mainstream media covered it.

That made the lawsuit backfire, because Diamond won. Their device didn’t facilitate piracy. It didn’t stop you from loading pirated MP3s on it, but owning one didn’t make the actual piracy of the files any harder or easier. It wasn’t Napster. That’s why the RIAA prevailed against Napster and even against MP3.com but not against Diamond.

I think the RIAA would have been better off if they had ignored the device. Because all they accomplished was calling a lot more attention to it. Suddenly, people who had no idea what an MP3 was suddenly knew that digital music existed, and that a device sold in consumer electronics stores would play those files. But we are talking the same organization that sued a 12-year-old here, so of course they’d sue Diamond Multimedia.

The legal tactics brought the MP3 mainstream sooner than it would have otherwise. Because the Diamond Rio in and of itself didn’t do a lot to mainstream the MP3. But the publicity from the lawsuit did. It wasn’t exactly free advertising, but it was more effective than any advertising Diamond could have done on its own.

After all these legal fights, it astonishes me that when the last MP3-related patent expired, it seemed like nobody really noticed.

Weaknesses of the Diamond Rio PMP300

The Diamond Rio PMP300 plugged into your PC parallel port. USB wasn’t something everyone had yet, and Windows 95 had either no support at all for it, or very poor support, depending on which version you happened to own. Windows 98 had better USB support, but in 1998, USB was definitely the connection of the future, not the present.

The parallel port was the best existing choice to plug your Diamond Rio in. Problem was, it was a crowded place. It was intended for printers. But if you had a scanner or a Zip drive, those wanted to plug into the parallel port as well. Chaining two devices off the parallel port usually worked. Chaining three was asking for trouble.

The Music Match software it came with to transfer files worked, but it wasn’t exactly elegant. I was able to figure it out, and I don’t recall it ever giving me trouble, but I was an IT professional.

On top of all that, it had very limited capacity. It had 32 MB of storage, enough to hold 30 minutes of music at 128 kbit/s. I re-encoded my MP3s at 64 kbit/s so I could carry an hour of music with me.

It wasn’t something I’d recommend to everyone. I had some friends who could totally figure it out. Other friends would have just gotten frustrated with it.

My experience with a Diamond Rio PMP300

It was the absolute epitome of a minimum viable product. At first I liked being able to load my selection of MP3s on it and rotate them as I got tired of one song and wanted to bring another one in. But eventually I got tired of that process, especially the part of needing to re-encode the music at a lower bitrate. In an era of 400 MHz CPUs being mainstream, the re-encoding process took some time.

I ended up loading it up with some all-time favorites that I wasn’t likely to get tired of, and using it to supplement the radio. If there was nothing decent on the radio, I fired up the Rio.

And then, one day, I brought it in from the car for the last time. I had no idea that was the last time. But I brought it in, and set it down on my desk so it would be ready when I wanted to load some different songs on it. And then I never got around to it. Eventually, instead of plugging it into my computer, I picked it up off my desk and put it in the drawer.

And I think that’s why it sold 200,000 units and quickly fell by the wayside. It was fine for an early adopter type, but the general public needed something a little more refined. Eventually even I wanted something a little more refined. I was happy with SanDisk’s players but of course the Apple iPod was the device that became the market leader.

My neglected Rio PMP300 sat in that desk for 10, maybe even 15 years. I moved from my apartment to my house, put the desk in the den, then later we moved the desk into the basement. Eventually my wife decided she wanted to use the desk, including the storage, so she cleared out the stuff that was in it. Among the things she found were my Diamond Rio, my Swatch watch, and my Walkman knock off. Kind of a strange mix to wind up in the same drawer together.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.