HitClips - The truth behind the toy.
In 2018 I made a video about the toy/music tape cartridge format Pocket Rockers. At the end of that video I mentioned that I also planned to make a video about the later digital-age equivalent ‘HitClips’. Two and a half years later...here it is.
There was a bit more to this one than anticipated, so I’m later than usual in putting this video out.
In other news, I’ve put the Techwood/Kenmore logo I mentioned in the update on a few different types of T-Shirts on my Teespring page https://teespring.com/stores/techmoan-merch I have no idea how well it works as it’s impossible to tell from the pictures. I've ordered one of the smaller badge design ones for myself to check it out. I’d recommend waiting to see how mine looks before considering spending any of your hard earned cash on one.
Enjoy what little is left of the weekend. I’m going to have to take a couple of days out next week - I need a break from the screens.
…and hey, hey, ‘Let’s be careful out there’ (I’ve been re-watching Hill Street Blues).
UPDATE - Thanks to Magnus who spotted this article about the technical side https://ch00ftech.com/2013/12/31/reverse-engineering-a-hit-clip/ - It shoots down my suppositions and also confirms the audio as a form of PWM.
UPDATE2 - The video above is a slight re-edit as I noticed I repeated myself in the original intro.
UPDATE 3 A third edit? - Yes
Is this man incompetent - Yes
What’s different - The forgetful fool forgot to dub the playout music with the HitClips version he made so much effort recording. So he’s done that now - but while he was there he took the opportunity to add a bit about discs not playing in a disassembled cart player and also re-worded the section about the pins on the cards so he could link to the reverse engineering website. Also reduced the amount of music played and rearranged it, snipped out a repeated phrase at the end - and messed with a couple of volume levels. The George Lucas of Youtube video revisions strikes again (or Strikes Back). All this for a video destined to be less successful than HitClips discs if relaunched as a ToyRUs exclusive in 2020 during full lockdown.
Comments (97)
Oh, forgot to mention with the disc player, pull at the plastic bit around the SIM card connector, it should slide out and leave a nice hitclip sized rectangular slot in the side of the "disc" player. http://prnt.sc/ut4y0l http://prnt.sc/ut4yfu
A couple of people mentioned this and I added it to the video description on youtube. I also pinned a comment but then every tom dick and dick started replying to this with random nonsense because that’s what people do - so I unpinned it again. This always happens with pinned comments and that’s why I don’t do them any more. Back in the day on youtube you could set up a comment to be ineligible for replies - so it’s just a statement. They took that away because it was useful. Just like annotations or any other handy feature.
I see the Wiki has now been updated, good job Mr Moan. :)
I just hope all the facts I disputed were right - there are still people swearing they bought these in 1999 in McDonalds - but they've given no proof.
Hello. Hope you see this comment because, for some reason, this was a very very entertaining video from you. I am a patreon of you so obviously I like all Techmoan videos in general, but this one was especially good. I liked the fact checking for one, also you look really good (keep the beard), and the subject itself was hilarious and a very good window into the early 2000`s kids things. I’m sorry if I can’t tell you more about why I liked this one in particular, but I did, and I wanted to tell you that. Take care and cheers from Finland
Well thanks very much, it means a lot when a video is well received. I put off featuring HitClips for so long because I really thought there wouldn’t be enough to say about them. It was only when I finally started making the video that I realised how confused all the online facts were, so that made it more interesting because I had to find out the real information. Sometimes the best video ideas don’t work and then other times the seemingly bad ideas end up being the interesting ones. It’s all a roll of the dice.
Now that you have entered the low quality world of Tiger Electronics, you might want to check out VideoNow, a terrible hand held CD based video format.
After your slight down beat disillusionment a couple months back you're seeming bright and enjoying things again - great video :)
These things come in waves - we all have ups and downs throughout the course of a year...unfortunately when you're on camera they get recorded for posterity. Thanks for the positive words.
I got your reference to Evel Knievel which means I have never heard of Hit Clips. I literally burst out laughing at the audio quality. It's like hearing the same joke over and over, and even though you know the punchline, you still laugh every time. How they ever sold one minute of blown speaker quality audio like this is beyond me. Hysterical. And recording the playout music and using it in the credits was pure genius.
Best Uhura impersonation ever…
I feel responsible for that third edit, sorry!
It makes it better - I just feel guilty about losing people’s youtube comments each time I do a re-up. I could turn the comments off until the video goes live - but I forget.
Some takeaways/observations - Very good video! I love the humor (or humour, in your case.) - In the US there is a hotline you can call and listen to a random Hall and Oats song. The fidelity is better than this! - I was going to say "Ugh, what about Flexi-Disks?" But then I remembered that some of them were quite good if you could get the magazine early enough - The discs are cute! Like some kind of Clock Orange situation - The disc player reminds me a Tamagachi! (Another bit of early millennium toy-tech) - Atomic Kitten for an American market? None of their albums or singles made the charts over here! - And what 'tween doesn't love a a bit of "Piano Man" after watching an episode of Dragon Ball Z? - I'm not sure if there was ever a British analog of it, but in the US in the 70s we had a board game called "Talking Football" (In this context, I mean "gridiron" of course). The gimmick was that each play would let you pick a random 3" hard vinyl disk which you play in a small, purpose built player. Minutes of fun for some of the family. - RE: franchise crossovers - My Mircronauts would forever attempt to invade my Death Star playset. Like the beard! You will soon like Hemingway in Cuba with those shirts!
A lot to unpack there - but I’ll just say I’d be happy with the Hemingway look. One day I’ll cover Flexi-discs, if for no other reason than almost weekly someone will email me with a vague about them, thinking that they might be the only person left alive who remembers them. Growing up I couldn’t move for the things - they were all over the show. I doubt there’s a single person my age or older in the UK who has never touched one. They sounded just fine - until they didn’t.
its really nice to watch a video that has been properly researched.
Thanks for the video Mat. The August 2000 date was mentioned twice in the video - I guess somebody will have to update Wikipedia now!
My daughter wanted one of them, even though she already had a portable CD player. Instead. I got her the much cooler, "VideoNow" player that was a mini-ish DVDish player that held like 20-23 minutes of video in mono at a hideous frame rate, which I am guessing was like 14-15 fps. I did quick research on it, and apparently it was in mono because the left audio track held the video data. She watched a bunch of Drake and Josh and Spongebob on that player. It was also made by Tiger Electronics.
Nicely edited. And the HitClip Outtro music was a great idea.
You wearing that ridiculous recordable one at the end got me pretty good.
Great episode. I remember seeing ads for these but was way too old for them when they came out.
I remember seeing this and was the right age for these in 2000 but I didn't have a lot of interest in pop music and anything I did get was on cassette or CD. I got a Talkboy for Christmas in 1997 and a portable cassette/CD player in at the same time in 1999 so with those I never had much interest in anything else.
I was a senior in high school when these came out. I remember their existence, but I was outside the target "tween" demographic. I think some of the younger kids in my school may have had them. I remember that the idea of portable, digital music was interesting at the time, but the idea of "wearing" the gear was unimaginable to me. Just as well that it sounds like garbage. I already had a car and a CD player, so I had no use for one of these.
The disc product totally missed the man reason tweens actually liked these toys, which was basically being able to wear the album cover around with your idol of choice on it. And now we have the middle aged with the Pink Floyd tee shirts, which shows this may not just be a concept for tweens...
That’s what I thought - the disc stays hidden throughout. It’s an odd choice.
oh boi would i have loved listening to Vanessa Carlton's A Thousand Miles on my Hitclip had I been old enough in 2002.
The size of the discs reminded me of the DataPlay ones. That's where the similarity ends, of course!
Skimmed through the comments and I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but there's a low-frequency rumble on the right channel starting at these points: 03:30 14:30 Maybe there's more, but that's when I noticed it (wearing over-ear headphones).
My hearing wasn’t good enough to hear this when I checked through the video a few times. The audio on most of my videos is a shambles, interference, external noises, echo, reverb, crackles, peaking out and that’s the best bits.
These almost throw-away music formats are fun to hear about, though perhaps less fun to actually hear. At the other end of the decade, and for a different audience, the Mi-Vox tried to use cheap tech to shift single-use audiobook players: https://www.redferret.net/?p=10111
I bought a couple of those a year or two ago for a future video.
Seems like some kids toy indeed, but $4?!? That must have been very expensive! In my time (probably around 10 years earlier), a decent C-90 cassette tape would be cheaper... And definitely sounded better :-P But I guess this was some kind of short rage, I never heard of it anyway.
I have never in my life ever heard a song sound that bad. I don't know if I should thank you for giving us the opportunity of hearing such horrendous sounds which we wouldn't ever hear otherwise or if I should hate you for playing those horrendous sounds to us 😂
I bought a stack of these back in the day (as an adult) due to the curiosity and the fact they were "clearance" in 2004. Some songs actually sounded OK, genrally the more poppy, intrumental focussed songs rather than songs with vocals where you noticed the horrible 1-bit encoding much more. I had one of the small "walkman" type players with the single tiny earphone and the "boombox" which was basically two transistors to "amplify" the sound. The "speakers" were also just painted on, the real sound came from a plastic greeting card speaker internally with a reverberstion chamber sending sound out the centre bit. The hitclips chips have all the smarts, they basically just connect to the "player" for trigger, audio, and power via a SIM card connector (obviously using a common part to keep dev costs low) I ended up soldering direct to one once with a battery holder and speaker, it worked fine, and rather loud on 4.5V, I actually used it as a doorbell.
I’m intrigued as to which song you used on your doorbell. ‘Who let the dogs out’?
I wonder if those Hit Clips use standard chips to store music, maybe standard EEPROMs. If so, it might be possible to replace a chip in a recordable module and record an ENTIRE song. MIND BLOWN -- AN ENTIRE SONG ON A SINGLE MODULE???2???
I doubt the firmware in the recorder actually tries to dynamically obtain the size of the memory device attached to determine the writable size of the memory to write to, much the less the recording time limit. Actually for a toy, that would be generally a bad plan, as one way to cost reduce this in the future would be to swap out the EEPROM or Flash device for another compatible chip which may have more capacity in some cases. Also, for actual EEPROMs, there is no standard way to discover the size of the device; quite the opposite, you sort of need to know the size of the device in order to use it. https://www.avrfreaks.net/forum/best-way-detect-eeprom-size
Do you think that the discs are technically backwards compatible? Like if you cut a disc down to fit in the slot it would play?
I’m pretty sure it would - just a guess though.
In the 2002 song "The Sound of Muzak" there was this line: "Now the sound of music comes in silver pills, engineered to suit you building cheaper thrills." I thought that they were talking about CDs, but maybe they meant Hit Clips! instead. Anyway, I'm getting me one of those Techwood T-shirts.
So the pills are alive with the sound of muzak?
I believe Edison cylinders were available as "pre-recorded" music, so I'm going to go with those. Here's a review of newer one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9X2CS4cs8o
I’ve got some cylinders and the one benefit they have over these is that they’re the full song. Although the song was designed to fit the media rather than the other way around. I’ll do a video about this format one day.
I am from the US and remember these from the time when the stores were dumping the leftover inventory dirt cheap. I never saw the recordable units, so that was new to me. I loved all the players that looked like different things instead of just one boring player. I can honestly say I never heard a kid say "this sounds like crap", because that was not the attraction. It was a toy, THAT was the attraction. Also, for whatever reason, the kids I knew (including my inner child) loved things with cartridges. There was a lot of low quality solid state tech on sale for kids around this time including the "Juice Box" player,
My girl cousins were completely obsessed with these thing- I have so many memories of family gatherings dominated by the same repeating lo-fi clips of Backstreet Boys songs.
Hill Street Blues‽ At the time I thought that show interesting in a new, hip, quirky way, but soon thought it was trying too hard to be clever and quirky. It might be interesting viewing nowadays though, so I may seek it out.
You’ve really missed your calling as a DJ. What a dance mix! When I was a tween, my mother bought me a PlayTape 2 track player and a handful of tapes. The players were hardly hifi, but much better than this. Even Pocket Rockers sound better, and they’re awful. I cried when Michael Conrad/Phil Esterhaus died.
Another interesting tech, which yet I've never heard of! (I must be getting old..) If I might add one (very rare) remark about the video: the 'direct feed' bit was too long for my taste. I'd say about 15 to 20 seconds would be more than enough for me. (I'm thinking about the audience retention after your lecture in your previous video :)) Oh and to answer your question at the end: I really hope there isn't a format which sounds worse than this!
I didn't think 40 seconds was an excessive amount of music in a video about a music format, but I can see how it seemed like a long time. I wanted to show how each track started - include a bit of a familar section and a section that sounded particularly bad.
In the video, you quote an article that calls the HitClips a "stereo" and point out that it's mono. For a bit of context, here in certain parts of the US, "stereo" refers to basically anything that can play music, whether it's what you'd call a hi-fi or something portable like a boom box. We have a penchant for using completely inaccurate terms for things.
Its the same in the UK - it was just a tongue in cheek joke. Well it was supposed to be a joke. I suppose it depends on how funny it is - so probably not a good joke.
I thought it funny that one of the articles you show refers to "FM quality sound". Shortwave is better than Hit Clip quality.
Yes if FM sounded like this there would be even more out of work DJs.
I think the shameless cash-grab Hit Clip formula is what the 3" record format is all about, just with a different demographic. Only more expensive by far.
The quality sounds about like hold music. I wonder if these were repurposed from there, or vice versa.
Worst pre-recorded music format ever? When I was really young there were cardboard "records" you could cut out of the back of cereal boxes. Even as a 5-6 year old back in the 1970s I knew they were garbage!
I suppose I was really thinking of formats where people picked a specific recording to buy, but it would have taken so long to spell out all the qualifiers it would have been really boring for anyone to listen to, but yes point taken.
The Polish Sound Postcards were possibly worse. Or as bad.
I quite liked those - at least they were full songs. But I see that if there was a top ten of the bottom ten then they would probably be in there.
Thanks for sharing these wHITClips or should I call them s...Clips. ;-) I like your guessing of the device bitrate: "...from zero to not enough..." I don't think that a prerecorded music format can get worse than this. But if one exists, you'll find it! When I was young, I collected key chains; I would definitely wanted those.
I used to collect keyrings too - the more gadgety the better. Mini calculators that kind of thing.
This is unusual format, enjoyed the video. Hill Street blues is a classic. I saw Hilary duff in concert in Brighton but maybe that a confession I should keep to myself, the tickets were cheap lol. Do the cartridges work like games cartridges?
My first MP3 player was the Diamond Rio PMP300, I got it in 1999 for £100 from Dixons and it had a massive 64MB storage. I think they also had a 32MB version that came out the previous year. It would be good to see a video comparing all pre-ipod MP3 players and how they compare.
I think my first one was actually a CD player that could also play MP3s that were burned to disc. At the time (when flash memory was still expensive) I thought that was one of the better solutions, I could get almost the entire library of an artist on one CD! (Have fun navigating it though.) I also remember it had those "rubbery" textured surfaces that were so popular at the time but eventually decomposed into a sticky gooey mess.
Congrats on finding yet another curious piece of tech that I never knew existed (I grew up in Belgium in the late 2000s and I don't remember seeing those on sale. My memory might be flawed though). It looks like the HitClip and HitClip Disk has the exact same connector, they might've just changed the shape and kept everything else the same. I wonder what kind of digital format they're using, and how it's stored and played. Makes me want to buy a player and a clip just to poke around :)
People in the comments here are linking to a reverse engineering blog post someone did. I believe Mat added it to the video description on Youtube. Save yourself the trouble :)
I thought this would be a dull one but it was fascinating!
That’s a slight worry - because if something looks like it might be dull then far less people will take a chance at clicking on it. Perhaps it’ll be a sleeper hit.
Yes this definetly is the worst ever audio format created. The quality is appaling, it is mono and the songs are not even complete. I have never heard of those things, ever. Thanks for taking me on a journey of stuff I never knew existed. It was interesting though to find about about the engineering aspect of it. Some very good ideas in how to store some music, but executed in a very horrible way by cheaping out every bit of it. If they would not have done that, this stuff could have become much more popular than it did.
I've literally never heard of these, but this was fascinating. It really is a bit scary how quickly erroneous facts get repeated on the internet. It makes it very difficult to get to the bottom of things even if you care to try, so I appreciate your detective work there. BTW I've also been watching Hill Street Blues! (first time for me since I was a bit too young for it at the time it was new). It's definitely interesting to see it from a 2020 viewpoint. A lot of things have changed, but a lot have not.
It was by far my favourite programme when I was younger. I was ten when it started and I watched every episode over the years. Watching it again now is making me reflect on age - as when I last saw these episodes the people were older ‘grown-ups’. But now I’m watching it again and I still remember the stories and characters, but the actors are all in their thirties and forties and I’m now ten years older than them.
The audio quality on those is so bad part of me kind of wants to see if the YouTube content match could even identify it. Which is not a request or suggestion to try it.
It definitely would - take a look at the technical article I’ve added to the description. That chap reverse engineered a player - the results were terrible (even worse than the originals) and yet Bandcamp recognised the audio and took them down.
It sounds like a talking doll/bear from 1950...
I wish. They had that rich analog sound ;-)
Now i am intrigued to buy one and take it apart. o.o
If you’re doing it - I’d order one now. There aren’t too many at a cheap price on ebay - based on how the Uher guys are still working on catching up on their orders generated by my video a few weeks ago, it seems like there might be a few people out there with the same idea when the video goes live on Saturday.
Love this one, Matt! But then again I'm a Patreon...
Amazing video as always! About the teespring merch, how conceivable would it be to get the designs on a slim fit style shirt or a tank top - would love to get a few in those styles!
It’s all possible - but before I make any more designs I’m really concerned that these might look terrible, so I’ll wait until I see what mine looks like before adding any more.
Finally the HitClips video :) Well done. I liked it. You now need to see if you can change the recording on them and than have Anders release some of his songs :)
Loved the 6 million dollar man / Evel Knievel reference - happy memories.
I think kids of my era might have invented the cross-over - which could explain the recent trend in movies.
It reminds me of sugar cigarettes sweets. catch them young and they will become smokers.
That’s a good analogy - I used to have those as a child.
There is an article online from 2013 about reverse engineering these. It even has a wav file directly constructed from the digital output of one clip. Sounds pretty jarring non the less.
I wondered if it was WAV.
Wouldn't the cost/capacity of the storage chips dictate the maximum song length, and they compromised on bit rate differently on each song?
I think the length was dictated by the ‘good bit’ or the catchy bit of a song when added to a bit of melody and repeated twice.
I was an adult by the time this came out. I assumed they sounded terrible, but not this bad! They remind me of early Internet days, when we would download audio clips as .au files. 8 kHz sample rate. Everything just sounded like scuzz. Great video, fascinating stuff!
I was a tween in the early 2000's and I listened to the most egregiously low bit rate music to the point where some of the songs I liked then sound weird to my ears now when not in 64kbs off Limewire.
Given your expertise - what does this bitrate sound like to you - 32kbps?
Top form, one of you best
Thanks, it worked out pretty well - hopefully no edits needed this time.
So Ive deliberately ignored your advice and ordered a tee. I'll hold you personally and publicly responsible if I don't like it...that's how the world works now right?? /Muppetmode
The pressure is on. I just don’t know whether the mini badge is at the right height and whether the black looks right. We’ll all find out in 2022 when they arrive.
The "s" is at the wrong end of "HitClips".