MP3 Players

The world of portable music or the art of listening to music while you are on the go has been revolutionized forever since the advent of MP3 players in the mid 1990s. These MP3 players enable you to create customized playlists and carry your entire music library with you on the street, the bus, the train or the plane.

MP3 players are light and portable and often weigh less than an ounce and this is the main reason for their huge popularity. These devices now come bundled with compatible technologies like a cell phone and WiFi Internet and other multimedia capabilities like video and photo displays.


This MP3 file format revolutionized the way music was distributed in the late 1990's when file swapping websites like Kaazaa and Napster were all the rage. The term MP3 or MPEG Audio Layer III refers to compressed audio files. While the term MPEG refers to the Moving Picture Experts Group which developed the compression systems for most audio and video data. This compression technology shrinks the number of bytes that are used in a song recording. This compression however does not affect the CD quality of the song. This compression also allows you to download music quickly and easily from the Internet.


MP3 players can usually play a variety of file formats like :-

  1. WMA - Windows Media Audio
  2. WAV - Waveform Audio
  3. MIDI - Music Instrument Digital Interface.
  4. AAC - Advanced Audio Coding
  5. Ogg Vorbis - A free, open and un-patented music format
  6. ADPCM - Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation
  7. ASF - Advanced Streaming Format
  8. VQF - Vector Quantization Format
  9. ATRAC - Sony's Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding 3

Though many MP3 players can play many different formats all MP3 Players cannot play all these different file formats.

Mp3 players are of various types are the main varieties are

MP3 Players with Flash drives

MP3 Players are equipped with flash drives and these flash drives enable the player to be very light and portable. Most Apple Ipods including the Itouch a use flash drives. Many models which have 8 GB of storage and are capable of storing up to 2000 songs and they have video and photo capabilities as well. Most Zen Mp3 players which are made by Creative and the Sansa MP3 players made by Sandisk also use flash drives.

MP3 Players with Hard Drives

The Apple iPod Classic is equipped with a hard drive and has 160 GB of storage which enables you to carry almost 40,000 songs with you. Many Microsoft Zune MP3 players are also equipped with hard drives which offer greater song storage capacity. These players however tend to consume more power and have moving parts that may skip when you are on the go. Hard Drive equipped Mp3 players are also heavier and larger than flash drive equipped MP3 players.

MP3 CD Players and MiniDisc MP3 Players.

Some CD players can play MP3 files which are burned onto CD's from existing CDs in your collection. These players tend to be much cheaper than MP3 players which have flash and hard drives and can hold up to ten hours of music. Similarly Sony's minidisk walkman supports Minidisc technology. This MP3 player plays a file code which was developed by Sony – ATRAC3 but it also can play MP3, WMA and WAV formats.

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