Digital - MP3 Players

Ecodigital's Guide to MP3 Players

What is an MP3 player?

An MP3 player is the common name for a digital audio player and this is a device that stores and plays music that has been encoded as digital music files. These files are frequently encoded in the MP3 format hence the name for the player. The encoding process includes advanced compression where the sounds your ear can't really hear are removed and the rest it compressed so you can fit approximately ten times the amount of music into the memory compared to a conventional CD. In addition the players can often handle other formats such as WMA (Windows Media Audio) and AAC (Advanced Audeo Codec). The MP3 format was invented and standardised in 1991 by a team of engineers working in the framework of the ISO/IEC MPEG audio committee. An average music track will use between 3mb and 5mb of space.

What different types of player are there?

The two main types of digital audio players are:-

Flash-based Players - Solid state devices that store digital audio files on internal or external media, such as memory cards. They usually have a capacity ranging from 128MB-4GB. They have no moving parts so this makes them very hard wearing.

Hard Drive-based Players or Digital Jukeboxes - Devices that contain hard drives to store the digital audio files. As they have hard drives they have a large capacity, ranging from 1.5GB to 100GB. In practice this means that they can store thousands of songs. A classic example of this device is the iPod.