Rio Released

MP3 music in your pocket

Today in 1998, the Rio portable player was released to stores by Diamond Multimedia.

The Rio was the second MP3 player on the market, but the first one to be commercially successful. The device ran on a single AA battery and featured 32 megabytes of storage, enough for about a half an hour of music encoded in the MP3 compression format. It retailed for $200. A reviewer called it “a cool peripheral for the hot mp3 technology that everyone loves.”