One of my favorite things that I get to experience as a Youtuber (shudder) is when I write a script that's full of speculation about some weird piece of Y2K flotsam, and the video makes it back to one of the people who designed it, who then emails me and says "hey, good work, you got it all right."
To date, I have a pretty good track record of this, but usually the info is shared in confidence so I can't even tell you what the things were that I was right about. However, one of the people who worked on the MusicStore got in touch with me the other day, and he gave me permission to share the inside story!
If you haven't watched my video about the DigMedia MusicStore and Soulmate MP3 players, I suggest you do, or this won't mean much.
Email #1
Received from "Edward" (I don't have his last name.)
Hi Gravis,
I was amazed to see one of the products I worked on featured on your channel. My role was the hardware design for the main MusicStore board and the low level driver code. I wanted to write and thank you for the respectful treatment you gave a pretty flawed product. You pretty much nailed everything in your in-depth review.
There's a few details that I can fill in:
Dig in DigMedia was pronounced as in, I "dig" it or "dig" a hole.
Your patreons are right that the DSP was for running the codec and the Actel was interface logic. The MP3 DSP codec was licenced from Fraunhofer. It could only manage real time and so there was no point trying to go faster than 1x with the CD ROM drive. To go faster would have required significantly more expensive silicon. The plan was that users would rip news discs the first time they got played. As you pointed out, that doesn't help much with handling an existing music collection.
The super caps in the SoulMate should be able to keep the device going long enough to change batteries, but only if it's turned off.
The SoulMate looks like an Atari cartridge because the industrial design was contracted to a guy in the US who literally used to design them! It was always a bit of a disappointment how the product actually turned out after all the fancy CAD renders.
The USP of the product compared to the competition was the lightning fast transfer to the portable device. Flash memory at the time couldn't write anywhere near as fast as we wanted to go. DigMedia came out of a company called Memory Corporation who specialised in novel uses of partially defective DRAM. One of the engineers had an idea as to how we could use our expertise in DRAM to do something different in the new MP3 player market.
There were intended to be other accessories and enhanced products available. There's a header on the SoulMate PCB to take a daughter card with extra DRAM to make a 96MB version. The battery pack was designed to be replaced with a rechargeable unit. The IR remote control sadly never got done.
I've dug out the original development board I still have in a draw and attached a picture. You can see there's a potentiometer for a volume control on the front of the board. At that early stage we'd hoped to have a more up- market hi-fi style to the product, but that got dropped due to cost saving. On the right is the JTAG debug dongle with a reset button. The main host processor was a very early Samsung ARM that had a couple of hardware bugs that needed to be worked around.
For a small company the whole endeavour cost a huge amount and we struggled to compete once the big players like Apple started to take notice of the MP3 market. After the MusicStore there were several more conventional Flash memory based MP3 players. There were also players with 1" micro HDDs which did quite well until Flash memory density caught up.
Thanks again for taking the time to highlight some of the novel ideas that the MusicStore implemented even if the product as a whole didn't manage to deliver. Still, I was pleased to see it still worked.
Regards, Edward
Here's the image he included:

Email #2
My reply:
Edward,
Thank you so much for getting in touch. I'm sure you've realized from my videos that I think the late-90s-early-2000s period was the center of a whirlwind of brilliant ideas, years ahead of their time, that were hampered by the limitations of technology and capital, and I've been trying to focus on how clever some of the products from that era were.
If another Youtuber had covered the MusicStore, they might have spent the whole video talking about how "bad" it was, but I've fought that tendency, and I pride myself on looking for the intent behind a product and the context it was sold in. It is incredibly gratifying to find out that my inferences were mostly correct - except for the pronunciation of "dig" of course, hah!
I had a couple questions if it's not too much to ask: Are you comfortable sharing any details about how the MP3s were copy-protected? Were they properly encrypted, or was it a "security through obscurity" kind of thing?
Also, did the Internet Audio Port make it to production, and what was using it like? I could only find vague details on it, and it was tough to imagine exactly how it worked. I almost wonder if I correctly understood what it was meant to do.
Finally, would you mind if I shared this email, or would you rather keep it between us? Will understand either way, and thank you again for writing, and for having helped make the world a bit more interesting!
_CRD
Email #3
Edward's response:
Hi,
We took the encryption pretty seriously. The Actel on the MusicStore allowed us to implement a real cipher, although memory is hazy as to exactly which we picked. The only weakness were the keys that were contained in an obfuscated form in the main firmware. The host processor didn't have any sort of secure boot and the firmware image on Flash wasn't scrambled. The little PIC on the SoulMate couldn't do anything cryptographically, but I think even there we did some basic obfuscation with xoring and shifting the bits around. At the time we thought the RIAA had the muscle to shutdown all these new startups that allowed people to rip music with no restrictions and our content protection would give us an advantage in the market, even if it was a bit inconvenient for users. Of course the reality was that once people were used to ripping their own music there was no going back.
As far as I'm aware the Internet Audio Port itself never made it past the concept phase. DigMedia realised early on that almost more important than the MP3 players was content to play on them. We had anther office initially based in Edinburgh Scotland, but latterly moving to San Diego (headed up by Dave Savage) that was a digital music label. I think the intention was that the Internet Audio Port would link directly to download music from DigMedia's website. A bit like iTunes, but with a dedicated appliance. It's possible that the product made more progress that I'm not aware of after the move to California.
The hardware team I was part of did prototype a similar type of device called the Flashmailer (photo attached). It had an integrated dial-up modem (a module on the back of the board) and a Flash card reader that could be used to email photos from a digital camera without having to use a PC.
The other photo I've attached is a selection of some of the various MP3 players we did the electronics and firmware for. These were generally for companies in the Far East that would do their own industrial design. The large players have 10GB 2" laptop drives in them.
I'd be happy if you'd like to share any of this information. It's great to see some of this stuff getting documented.
Regards, Edward
And here are two more pictures he included:


