"Children's" Formats
There have been several audio formats introduced that have been primarily targeted to kids. In 1967, the Playtape format was introduced. In 1988, Fisher Price introduced the "Pocket Rockers" format. In 2000, Tiger Electronics introduced the HitClips format. And in 2005, Disney introduced the Mix Clips format.
As shown in the chard below, each of these formats had limitations, in terms of capacity, sound quality and/or availability of prerecorded music.
Number of Songs |
Sound Quality |
Recordable | Availability of Prerecorded Music |
|
Playtape | Variable (usually 4 or more) | cruddy | No | Very large |
Pocket Rockers | 2 | lousy | No | Limited |
HitClips | Less than 1 (contains a 60 second or less edit of a single song | crappy | Yes and No. Standard HitClips were read-only and most of the hardware permitted playback only. But for a short time when the format was first introduced, there were special recordable clips that were larger than the standard size. | Limited |
Mix Clips | Variable (full album length) | very good | Yes (sort of). There was no media that was sold as a blank Mix Clip. But Mix Clips were standard SD Memory Cards, and so any WMA audio could be put on them using a PC and a standard SD card reader. | Limited |
Back to the Home Page
Back to the Vintage Audio Home Page
Last Updated
10 June 2007
Copyright 2004-2007