December 21, 2001

MP3 players come in many forms

Edi­tors note: This is one of sev­eral columns that I wrote for the Colum­bia Mis­sourian. They were orig­i­nally called Your Dig­i­tal World

I want my MP3s … and if you do too, there’s more than one way to listen to them. Devices that play MP3s are very hot items this hol­i­day season.

MP3 is the pop­u­lar file format for record­ing dig­i­tal audio because it takes up very little stor­age space, while at the same time pre­serv­ing the qual­ity of the audio.

Once you’ve gotten some MP3s, (you can rip them off a CD you own, or get them from file-​sharing ser­vices like Nap­ster), you need a way to play them. For a long time the only way to listen to your dig­i­tal music was on your com­puter. Spe­cial play­ers such as Winamp on PCs and iTunes for the Mac, will play your MP3 files. These pro­grams let you orga­nize your MP3s into playlists of songs you want to hear. These pro­grams are easy to use; they have but­tons sim­i­lar to those on CD play­ers or stereos, such as play, next song, etc.

Portable MP3 play­ers are usu­ally devices about half the size of a CD player that can con­nect to your com­puter and down­load some MP3s. You’ll hear the phrase solid-​state memory bandied about in regard to these play­ers, that’s just a techno-​term for the player’s stor­age. It doesn’t have moving parts, like your computer’s hard drive, which has spin­ning mag­netic disks.

The amount of memory is the key to the number of MP3s you can put on the player. Most of your audio files are about 3 to 4 megabytes in size. If your player has 32MB of memory, you store about 9 or 10 MP3s. You can expand the number of songs by putting remov­able memory into it — depend­ing on the player this can be called Memory Stick, Com­pact Flash or Smart Media. They all do pretty much the same thing, but be sure to get the right type for your player.

The down­side to this remov­able memory is that it can be pretty expen­sive per megabyte com­pared with tra­di­tional stor­age on hard drives or CDs.

The first portable alter­na­tive to solid-​state stor­age came in the form of MP3 play­ers that had hard drives to store the files. Apples iPod, one of these “MP3 jukeboxes” holds 5 giga­bytes of MP3s — that’s about 1,000 average-​length songs. These “jukeboxes” have their down­sides, too — they cost about as much as their solid-​state coun­ter­parts, but hard drives are sus­cep­ti­ble to shock damage, and they wear down over time. You also have to con­sider trying to sift through 1,000 songs to find the one you want on a rel­a­tively small screen. How­ever, the iPod has been rated one of the best play­ers, espe­cially in menu usability.

The most excit­ing option for play­ing MP3s is the new line of hybrid CD play­ers. In addi­tion to play­ing stan­dard audio CDs, they play discs that are burned with MP3s in a data format. Usu­ally when you burn songs to discs they are con­verted from MP3 format to CD Audio format, which only gets you about 14 songs. By using a MP3-CD player and an MP3 disc, you can get about 180 songs. These play­ers come at a frac­tion of the cost of reg­u­lar play­ers with­out most of the hassle … and they play reg­u­lar CDs for when you want to kick it old school. You’ll have to factor in the cost of a CD burner if you don’t have one, but it’s becom­ing a stan­dard fea­ture on most new computers.

Filed under: Technology

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