MP3 Players, An Introduction
Set your music free with a new digital audio player, or MP3 player, as they are commonly known. With an MP3 player it is easy to shuffle your songs in any order and you can hold your entire music collection the palm of your hand. But where is your music actually 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.
Flash memory players have several advantages, they can be much smaller and lighter. Flash memory uses much less power than a hard drive, so batteries last longer. The player can also access your files more quickly from flash memory than from a hard drive.
Flash memory does have it’s constraints. Mainly that that the memory capacity is much less than a hard drive. Flash memory usually comes in 8GB and 16GB sizes, which is much smaller than a 160GB player from Apple. Also, additional flash memory cards to add to your MP3 player 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.
Learn more about MP4 players. Stop by David Morris’s site where you can find out all about anMP4 player and what it can do for you.
