Gleep beat me to it. Yes, the Personal Jukebox was the first hard drive based MP3 player. I remember before it was released, its creators were "auctioning" off a player every day for a month. Bidding was open for 24 hours, BUT it would continue if new bids were placed within a 5 or 10 minute window of eachother. The player was won when nobody bid on the player for up to 10 minutes after the last bid.

I remember seeing them sell for $1500 or more. I even threw in a few mid-day $500 bids just for kicks. But, ultimately, I didn't trust the thing. I always assumed, "rotational media can not be portable because it's to fragile. Solid state is the only way to go. Get a Rio PMP-300." That same bias turned me away from the empeg after I first saw that MKI sitting on the plush purple velvet.

Surprisingly, after brushing off hard drive based players as being "fragile as portable record players", I never heard a peep from either empeg or Personal Jukebox. Luckily I stumbled upon empeg back in Sepember 2002, which led me here. But in 6 years, this post is the first mention I've heard of the Personal Jukebox since drooling over it back in 1998 and wishing it "wasn't so fragile."

Has anyone ever owned, used, touched, or seen in person a Personal Jukebox?