Come back with me to a time before smartphones — heck, before the iPod. It was 1999, and my portable CD player was getting on my nerves. Taking the N train from Queens to Manhattan every morning was a crowded, jostling experience. With every nudge, my CD player would skip, even though it was supposedly shake-resistant.

Enter the mp3 player. My little Rio600 had 32 MB of storage, which by today’s standards is scant. But back then, I could load up my player with an album’s worth of songs. Incredible.

I lost that player long ago, but a few years ago I acquired a “new” one at Goodwill for a whopping $5. It didn’t work, and last week I finally took a look at repairing it. On the journey, I acquired a second Rio to aid in the fix, which meant I had to do some Frankensteining. And now I have one fully functional mp3 player that I can load up with songs for my Dell laptop and Windows XP!

If you’d like to hear about the process, I posted a video about my experience:

Did you ever have one of these? Some other kind of mp3 player? Tell me about it in the comments!