The latest Casio to join CasioNova on stage is not a keyboard, nor is it a guitar, a saxaphone, calculator or any other Casio music making apparatus. It is a watch - that plays music. Yet another Casio Corporation innovation - the worlds first, and almost only, mp3 watch. It’s a heap of junk by today’s standards but before I tell you how to use it in the year ‘06 a little bit of historical contextualising ….

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE CASIO WMP-1

The male wristwatch was brought into being by Lord Cartier for his pal, and my hero, the pioneering aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, so Alberto could check how long he had been up in his dirigible without letting go of the controls to reach for his fob watch. The initial Santos Cartier watch and the Casio WMP-1 symbolise the beginning and the end of an era, starting with the dreams of Santos-Dumont and the belle epoch that were to be gradually destroyed by a century of rising greed and consumerism.

The Casio WMP-1 arrived during the peak of our global industrial civilisation, the modern era had punched its fist into the sky and on its wrist it wasnt wearing a Casio mp3 player, let alone a vidscreen communicator.

The watch as a functional device is dead, mobile phones and mp3 players are the pocket watches of our times. Casio thought they were onto a winner by making a watch that happened to play music, but what consumers wanted was music players, or telephones, that happened to tell the time. The wristwatch didn’t need tweaking while the pocketwatch/gizmo was being reinvented. The WMP-1 is a philisophical throwback to the pre-consumer-driven electronics market of the 80’s. Casio attempted to innovate again, as they did successfully in the past by putting a synthesiser inside a calculator. I’m glad they had one last stab at it but it was too late - the bean counters and marketeers have taken over consumer electronic engineering and the company was no longer a family business.

Does the end of the wristwatch, as a timekeeper, signal the end of industrial civilisation? I think there is no greater warning of the imminent demise of our profligate way of life than of the attempt and failure of the Casio Corporation in creating an MP3 playing wristwatch.

Alberto Santos-Dumont sailed to lunch dates around Paris in his little airship, powered by the recently invented internal combustion engine. As he sailed he dreamt of the day when all could share the beauty of flight - unknowing that in 2006 the fulmination of technologies that he originated can be found in smart bombs used to kill innocent people for the promise of oil to power squadrons of soccer mums.

As an old man Santos-Dumont witnessed the inventions that he gave away for all humanity used to kill. That evening he destroyed his documents and suicided. He could see that his creations would kill millions, I’m glad he didn’t also see that the internal combustion engines he loved would create a thing called climate change, the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. He is the historical figure I admire the most, he inspired the wristwatch and it is to him I dedicate this information about one of the last futile iterations of that device. Orville Wright can get fucked.

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USAGE OF THE CASIO WMP-1

Year produced: 2002
Mp3 playback - quality <=128kpbs
32MB memory (16MB on an earlier model)

The typically Casio feature is the the dancing icon in the watch display - the watch even came with software so you could make your own little dancing icon. Westerners have poo-pooed the uselessness of this but I like it, it is very Japanese. Next to the dancing icon the song title would appear - each letter of the title flashing one after another, it isnt a word, static or scrolling, but the letters of the word being revealed one at a time.

I can't read Japanese so I dont know if this feature is as useless in its native tongue as it is with Latin character sets, if it is it could be a philisophical statement on digital timetelling by a Casio engineer. Digital clocks only tell you what point of time it is at the very moment, analog clocks show you what point of time you are in in relation to all other points of time in a twelve hour period. Digital time doesnt show you where you are in relation to anything else - now is now and that is all that is important, past and future are deemed irrelevant. This is a thoroughly modern phenomena that reflects and possibly informs the suicidal philisophical underpinnings of contemporary society and politics, the past doesn't influence us and the future doesn't concern us.

The Casio WMP-1 again is signalling the logical conclusion of the industrial civilisation by having the song title flashed as letters, the semantic equivalent to digital timekeeping - meaning is abstracted and more difficult to grasp by glancing these slices of title. There can not be a better way of illustrating the diffiencies of digital timekeeping than by converting the digital time format to words inside a digital watch! Onya Casio!

Mine had a rooted battery so I took the back off, removed the dead li-ion battery (that apparently was crap anyway ) and solderd in a 9v battery clip that now hangs out the side. Since the watch band is this chunky multilayered macho thing (mulitlayered AND macho? only with casio ...) a 9V battery securely slips into the band with no extra modifications except for a peace of mind safety pin. This solution works for me since I dont use it as a watch per se.

The headphone socket is a small module that clips to the side of the watch, since you have to take it off to put the watch onto its cradle this module has a high lose me value. Odds are that you’re reading this article because you have a WMP-1 and odds are you have lost the headphone socket doo-hickey. No fear - just solder your own socket onto the three points that are on the left hand side of the watch. Piss easy, honest , anyone can learn to solder in five minutes. Theres a few lessons on the net. You have no excuse.

Now, to get music into this thing that looks like a prop from a cheap 90’s cyberpunk filmclip:

The watch fits into a cradle that is it’s interface via USB to a computer and charges it, (if you hadn’t done a weird battery mod like me). The cradle needs to be plugged into power to charge the watch, but if you aren’t charging and just downloading music into the watch then you won’t need the wall wart.

Now turn on your computer and load up the Casio WMP drivers and software.

Go on.

Try it.

Eat battery acid from my dead WMP li-ion cell you windozeXP (l)users! - you will NEVER have this baby strapped to your wrist, ’cause the only software for it was Windows98, the OS of choice for those who find their computers on hard rubbish nights.

For us Linux users and OS/2 freakazoids then it gets better - the WMP can up AND download ANY file, something even Casio couldn’t get happening.

I’ve mirrored all the necessary software - since its a bit hard to find and moves around.

Martin (Jimi) Kiewitz wrote a program called MMPORT in 2003 for the OS/2 operating system. Download it here.

Florian Schmidt used Jimi’s code to make a Linux version in January 2005 called WMP Manager.
It’s source code so no matter what flavour Linux you have just:
Download it here.

The only requirement for WMP Manager is that you need ‘libusb’ installed, (I believe you don’t even have to dick around with your kernel configuration). I use gentoo so I just typed:
emerge -s libusb
to see if it was installed, which it was. if it wasnt then one would type:
emerge libusb
Do what you have to do for your Linux distro.

Extract the wmp_manager_v0.2.tar.gz file you just downloaded, it is a directory containing the source code and make files. Do not be afraid if you are a source code scardey cat (me too!). Just open a terminal, go into the wmp_manager directory you just extracted and type the word ‘make’.
then copy wmp_manager to /usr/bin (or the required spot for executable programs for your version of linux).
Here’s what my process looked like:
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casionova@casiotown ~ $ tar -xf wmp_manager_v0.2.tar.gz
casionova@casiotown ~ $ cd wmp_manager
casionova@casiotown ~/wmp_manager $ make
g++ -o wmp_manager casio_wmp.cpp usb_layer.cpp `libusb-config –libs –cflags`
casionova@casiotown ~/wmp_manager $ cp wmp_manager /usr/bin/
casionova@casiotown ~/wmp_manager $
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All this is impossible if you haven’t got compiler programs and so forth. If you have ever recompiled your kernel, use Gentoo linux, installed source code software or installed ‘everything’ or ‘developer’ groups of software in your initial Linux installation then it should be fine. If not then forget about the Casio for now and use a ME!ME!ME!pod, things are too geeky around here at the moment.

To use WMP Manager just type, wmp_manager in a terminal
It’s not a command line tool, though it can be used as such (read the README), you will be presented with a menu of options, let me demonstrate:

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casionova@casiotown ~ $ wmp_manager
Casio WMP-1 Manager v0.1 by Florian Schmidt (schmidt_florian at gmx.de)
(based on Casio WMP-1 MMPORT Driver v1.0 - by Jimi)

Watch needs to connect to dongle…done.
Connected, waiting for watch to settle…………………..done.
current contents:
1. Album ” Artist ” Title ‘library’ size 1633kB
2. Album ” Artist ” Title ‘fanboy’ size 1328kB
3. Album ” Artist ” Title ‘lego’ size 1263kB
4. Album ” Artist ” Title ‘esky’ size 1941kB
5. Album ” Artist ” Title ’sulla’ size 1347kB
6. Album ” Artist ” Title ‘penguin’ size 2967kB
17828kB free (total: 20795kB)

1) show contents 6) dump all mmc contents to file
2) delete a file 7) write a file direct to the mmc
3) upload a new file 8) format a mmc reagion to 0
4) download a file
5) exit
select one option [1-5]:
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If that doesn’t happen (except for the song list NOT being my backing tracks :) , then you haven’t connected the cradle to your computer. If the watch never ’settles’ and the program aborts then maybe when in a fit of frustration and stupidity you dissassembled the cradle, unsoldered the tiny ribbon cable then resoldered it all back (repeat several times) a tiny blob of solder was left between the tracks. LOOK HARD and clean up your sloppy work. If that’s not the case then something must be REALLY broken. Have a cry and then buy a $30 mp3 player from the local grocery store.
BTW: To up/down load files the watch doesn’t need to have any power - either via a battery or the cradle.

Some more info is in the original mmport readme file by Jimi. Download that singular file HERE.
His email can be found in that file so send him a thankyou email if you use the software - and Florian who did the Linux port, his email you would already have in the wmp_manager README. Thanks also to Carl-Erik Kopseng for instigating and documenting the Linux port.