Define "a joke". There were quite a few flash-based players that predate the ipod and a couple of hard drive based ones. Heck, Rio was three generations into their mp3 players when the ipod was released.
Apple fixed the experience for non-nerd. Instead of having to go online and find music files yourself you could just go buy them.
I had the Rio 600 before the iPod (https://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/rio600/) . It was definitely a joke, 32MB could barely fit a single CD and that was only after degrading the bitrate of the rip to a degree that it was really scratchy.
As a counterpoint, I had an MP3 discman from Rio [0], and the thing was magic. Each disc could hold 10-15 full albums, and I also made shuffle playlist CDs of 180ish tracks each. While it's obviously not pocketable, it was great for car audio, I stuck with it for a long while into the iPod era, since it had functionally infinite storage.
MP3 CD players like that don’t/didn’t get enough love. So
much capacity for next to no cost and the units I had were robust to disc abuse which surprised me.
Yeah, I was always impressed at how resilient those cheap MP3 CD-Rs were in practice. And compared to old-school DiscMans with "20 second skip protection", it was very cool that it could just buffer the entire track in memory, make bumpy roads a non-issue. IIRC it was smart enough to do that well before the track began, so it instantly started playing when you skipped forward.
The Rio had slow transfer speed (USB), hardly any storage (less than one CD), big ugly form factor... and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t rechargeable. My buddy at the time bought one. It did not impress.
The tech for the first iPod (Firewire and a 5GB hdd) made it essentially a different category of device.
I was constantly shopping around for MP3 players, they were too expensive with too little space, or not great reliability. The issue is that for a young person, such as myself, this was a big investment. The best thing to do before the iPod was really an mp3 cd player, because you could have many of these CDs.
If all we're working with anecdata, I honestly don't know anyone who didn't have an mp3 collection before the iTunes store.
Apple fixed the experience for non-nerd. Instead of having to go online and find music files yourself you could just go buy them.