On April 3, 2005, I received my first MP3 player as a gift for my 18th birthday. It was a Rio Carbon — a 5GB digital audio player that could play MP3 and WMA files. I was immediately enamored. The ability to hold my entire music collection in the palm of my hand was an exciting prospect.
I hadn’t used a digital audio player before, but I was familiar with the technology because of the heavy marketing of the iPod. It seemed like something I would enjoy, but I never considered owning one because of the price. At the time, I was working at McDonald’s making around $300 a week. Even the iPod Shuffle would be an intimidating purchase on that salary. Instead I spent most of my money on anime DVDs.
Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we have a record of what Apple’s website looked like on my 18th birthday.
The Rio Carbon was likely a response to the iPod Mini. It was released within six months of the first generation iPod Mini with similar specs and price point. I suspect the reason that my mom bought the Rio Carbon over the iPod Mini was because it was on sale.
The timing of this gift was a blessing and a curse. In a few months, I would forget my CD booklet in the bathroom at school. With one stupid mistake, I lost my entire music collection. The good news is that because I was using the Rio Carbon as my primary listening device, my collection was already digitized but the time this happened. The bad news is that the Rio Music Manager ripped CDs in WMA format. It was a smart workaround for the 5GB limitation, but it meant that the quality of my archive was seriously lacking.
There’s a few things about this event that I’m unsure of. For one, I don’t know why I was still bringing my CD booklet to school when I could fit my entire collection on the Rio Carbon. It’s possible that I still preferred listening to CDs in my car, but then why would I be carrying them with me during the day? The only thing I can think of is that the Rio Carbon was actually a graduation gift, and the reason I was digitizing my collection was so I could make mix discs and burn copies for friends.
The other problem is that I eventually met the person who found my CDs and they didn’t give them back. And I can’t remember why. It’s not like they were some bully either. He was in my band; the band that eventually became Everything is Unfamiliar. It came up in conversation on the way to Warped Tour. I put on some music and he said, “How do you know about this band? The only reason I even know about this band is because I found their CD in the bathroom at school.”
I enjoyed the time I spent with the Rio Carbon, but it wasn’t without its problems. There was nothing inherently wrong with the user experience; in fact, the UI was really good for its time. It just kept breaking. There’s a wheel on the top right corner that’s used to scroll through menus. That wheel was a common failure point. Whoever sold the Rio Carbon to my mom must have warned her about this, because she paid extra for the replacement plan. Normally, I find plans like this to be a scam — Would you like to pay $35.99 to protect your SM58 for up to 36-months? — but this is the rare situation where it was the right call.
The terms of the Best Buy replacement plan seemed too good to be true. For 24-months, they would exchange the broken item for a new one. As many times as it broke. No questions asked. The plan also extended the return window of the covered item for the duration of the plan. Best Buy must have rewritten the terms of their replacement plans around this time, because when I attempted to use it to exchange my Nintendo DS Lite when one of the shoulder buttons cracked, they told me my only option was to buy a new one.
Over the next year, I exchanged the Rio Carbon at least three times. The first time it broke, it didn’t bother me. Shit happens. Maybe I pressed the wheel it too hard. When it happened a second time, it was a little annoying, but — whatever — I have the replacement plan, and I already know that they’ll give me a new one. But when it kept breaking in the same way from normal use, I knew it was time to move on.
It was time to get an iPod.