All About MP3 Players

For all practical purposes, there are two different types of portable MP3 Players, and both are excellent choices, depending on how you plan to use your player:

• Memory Card (Flash) MP3 Players
  Usually smaller in capacity and size than hard-drive players, Memory Card MP3 Players have no moving parts and are excellent for sports or more active use. [more info]
• Hard-Drive MP3 Players
  These players are larger in size and storage capacity. Because they have moving parts they're somewhat more fragile than Flash-based players. Examples are the popular Apple iPod and Creative Zen Mini. [more info]

Hard Drive MP3 Players (Jukeboxes)

The technology step that really opened the door for popularity of MP3 players was the advent of the use of small hard drives for storage instead of memory cards. Now instead of counting capacity in megabytes, it was measured in gigabytes. But the first hard drive based players were large and clunky. It took the Apple iPod, with its sleek, refined design and careful attention to user interface to really open the market.

Today, following the lead of the Apple iPod, there are a variety of small hard drive players available, each trying to outdo the others in design and user friendliness. Now, more than ever, you can take your music with you, because with a 20-gigabyte capacity, you have the equivalent of a storage rack filled with CDs all in your pocket.

See Hard Drive MP3 Players and our Recommendations for more information.

Flash Based MP3 Players

The first MP3 players of the mid-90's made use of relatively expensive solid state memory cards to save the compressed audio files. Typically, they would have capacities of 32 or 64 megabytes, and hold 10 to 20 songs, depending on the amount of compression. They were expensive and limited.

However, with technology advances in memory cards, their prices went down and their capacity increased up to 128 or 256 megabytes. An MP3 player with a 256-megabyte capacity can hold about sixty songs, again depending on their length and the amount of compression. But this capacity increase is very significant, because now you are able to bring part of your collection of music with you rather than only one album or CD's worth. The days of carrying a CD wallet or organizer with you are over.

See Memory Card MP3 Players and our Recommendations for more information.

History of Portable Music Players and MP3 Players

When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, he gave people a new-found freedom. Finally, they could listen to music played by great musicians without having to go to the theater. All the technological developments in "portable" music since that time have related to the player getting less unwieldy, the capacity for storage of music getting larger, and the sound quality getting better. Car radios and then the small transistor radios of the 1950's, were an important step in the process. In this case, you chose your favorite station to get "your" music, but you could take it anywhere.

Enter the Walkman

But it took just over 100 years from Edison's first phonograph for people to be able to easily carry their own recorded music with them with Sony's introduction of the Walkman in 1979. You could put either prerecorded tapes in the Walkman, or even make copies of your own favorite records or tracks from records, and finally take your music with you.

The transition to the digital era for portability happened with the introduction of The Sony Discman of the mid-80's. It represented an advance in sound quality and convenience by using CD audio discs instead of tape.

The Big Squeeze

When we look at a picture or listen to recorded music, we are seeing or hearing a representation of reality. In the 1940's, researchers, studying how our brains interpret these representations, noticed that some of the information could be removed and test subjects wouldn't notice the difference. The trick was in understanding which information could be eliminated, based on an understanding of how we see and hear. Over the ensuing years, they developed methods of intelligently removing "extraneous" information (compression) and then reconstructing (decompressing) both video and audio signals. The compressed signal was much smaller than the original, but people either viewing the video or listening to the audio could not tell the difference when the original signal was compared to the decompressed version.

Finally MP3

Current digital photography and the use of photographic images on the Internet both commonly make use of compressed photos which follow a compression/decompression (codec) standard developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) committee. These photos have much less information than the raw or original image. But if the person doing the compression does it carefully, you cannot tell the difference. Similarly, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) developed standards for compressing and decompressing video and audio. MP3 audio files (MPEG-1 audio layer 3) follow this standard and by doing so, allow you to store over one hundred audio files in the space where you could previously store only 10 raw or original files.

Another advantage of the MP3 audio file standard is that it allows for the inclusion of text information such as the artist name, album name, track name a nd genre in the same file as the music. MP3 players can read and display that information allowing for much easier selection and organization of your music.

Our Recommendations in Portable MP3 Players

You can find more information and product recommendations in:

• Memory Card (Flash) MP3 Players
• Hard Drive MP3 Players