Buying Mp3 Players
Portable music has come a long way since the days of the Walkman, and today there are many options for consumers looking for entertainment on the go.
However, given the sheer number of devices on the market, finding the perfect player can be a daunting experience.
This article discusses the features available in today's devices and describes some possible pros and cons in order to remove some of the guesswork of buying MP3 players.
One of the first features to take note of is the capacity of the device.
Today, this can range anywhere from megabytes to gigabytes of storage.
What does this mean, though, in terms of practical use? This can depend heavily on your listening habits and the quality of MP3s you already own.
MP3s are encoded at various qualities (or "bitrates"), ranging from 96 kbps (sub-CD quality) to 256 kbps (the typical bitrate for songs sold in digital music stores) and above.
A higher bitrate means better audio fidelity, but also means that individual tracks will take up more space on your device.
Assuming a bitrate of about 256 kbps, about 9.
3 hours of music fit into 1 gigabyte of storage.
Because of this, the capacity of the player must take into account both the number of songs in your collection and the quality at which they are encoded.
However, music is not the only media that can be played on a MP3 player.
With brighter and sharper screens, MP3 players are now full-fledged multimedia devices that have the ability to display pictures and play video.
To utilize these features though, one should be aware that movies generally take up a great deal of space - even a compressed video file can be around 300 megabytes (0.
3 gigabytes) per hour.
If the video features would be used frequently on the device, the storage capacity must accordingly be larger.
The desired capacity of the MP3 player can also determine the type of hardware that make up the internals of the device.
Generally there are two types of MP3 players; devices that use flash storage, and devices that utilize a miniaturized hard drive.
Each of these have their own pros and cons.
The hard drive offers capacious storage (up to 120 gigabytes at the time of this writing), but have a larger footprint, resulting in larger form-factor players.
In addition, because hard drives store data on a physically spinning disk, they are more fragile and less able to take shocks.
In this respect, flash media is much more robust and durable.
However, the higher cost of the electronic chips that make up flash memory means that MP3 players utilizing such technology generally have smaller capacities (32 gigabytes is typical).
There are many factors to consider while buying MP3 players, and today's marketplace offers any combination of features, capacities, and form factors one could hope for.
Ultimately though, the ideal device is one specifically tailored for the user's needs and must be chosen with the above elements in mind.
However, given the sheer number of devices on the market, finding the perfect player can be a daunting experience.
This article discusses the features available in today's devices and describes some possible pros and cons in order to remove some of the guesswork of buying MP3 players.
One of the first features to take note of is the capacity of the device.
Today, this can range anywhere from megabytes to gigabytes of storage.
What does this mean, though, in terms of practical use? This can depend heavily on your listening habits and the quality of MP3s you already own.
MP3s are encoded at various qualities (or "bitrates"), ranging from 96 kbps (sub-CD quality) to 256 kbps (the typical bitrate for songs sold in digital music stores) and above.
A higher bitrate means better audio fidelity, but also means that individual tracks will take up more space on your device.
Assuming a bitrate of about 256 kbps, about 9.
3 hours of music fit into 1 gigabyte of storage.
Because of this, the capacity of the player must take into account both the number of songs in your collection and the quality at which they are encoded.
However, music is not the only media that can be played on a MP3 player.
With brighter and sharper screens, MP3 players are now full-fledged multimedia devices that have the ability to display pictures and play video.
To utilize these features though, one should be aware that movies generally take up a great deal of space - even a compressed video file can be around 300 megabytes (0.
3 gigabytes) per hour.
If the video features would be used frequently on the device, the storage capacity must accordingly be larger.
The desired capacity of the MP3 player can also determine the type of hardware that make up the internals of the device.
Generally there are two types of MP3 players; devices that use flash storage, and devices that utilize a miniaturized hard drive.
Each of these have their own pros and cons.
The hard drive offers capacious storage (up to 120 gigabytes at the time of this writing), but have a larger footprint, resulting in larger form-factor players.
In addition, because hard drives store data on a physically spinning disk, they are more fragile and less able to take shocks.
In this respect, flash media is much more robust and durable.
However, the higher cost of the electronic chips that make up flash memory means that MP3 players utilizing such technology generally have smaller capacities (32 gigabytes is typical).
There are many factors to consider while buying MP3 players, and today's marketplace offers any combination of features, capacities, and form factors one could hope for.
Ultimately though, the ideal device is one specifically tailored for the user's needs and must be chosen with the above elements in mind.
