Saturday, January 30, 2010

MP3 Players, An Introduction

By David Morris

It's easy to enjoy music with a digital MP3 player, or MP4 player as they are sometimes called. With a shuffle function you can listen to your songs in a random order, and fit your whole music library on a pocket sized player. Have you ever wondered where your music is stored?

The first iPods, which made MP3 players popular worldwide, had inbuilt hard drive to store music. Hard drives give an MP3 player lots of memory to store files. For example both Apple and Archos have MP3 players with hard drives that have 160GB capacity. MP3 players that use hard drives are much heavier, more bulky and also use more energy than those that don't.

It's increasingly common for MP3 players now to use flash memory rather than a hard drive, to store data. In fact there are only a few manufactures still using hard drives in their MP3 players, Archos and Apple are two well known examples.

Both manufactures and consumers have found benefits with flash memory based MP3 players. As a flash memory chip is very small compared to a hard drive, it means that manufactures can create very small MP3 players. Flash memory also uses considerably less energy, and so there are big improvements in battery life.

Flash memory does have some disadvantages though. The storage capacity is significantly smaller than a hard drive, typically between 8GB - 16GB. The price for additional SD cards can be expensive.

There's more to an MP3 player than just music. Almost all MP3 players now come with a color display in a range of different sizes. The smallest are usually 1.8 inch and they can be as big as 4.3 inch or 5 inch. This has transformed MP3 players into videos players too. While watching full length movies on 1.8 inch screen may not be practical, it's still fun to watch short video clips or music videos. The larger screen MP3 players can come with 16:9 ratio screen, and it's a perfect way to watch movie.

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