MP3 player
A MP3 player is an electronic device that can play digital audio files. The term, 'MP3 Player' is a misnomer, as most players play more than the MP3 file format. A more accurate, but less utilized term is DAP (Digital Audio Player).
Since the MP3 format is widely used, almost all players can play that format. In addition, there are many other digital audio formats. Some formats are proprietary, such as MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Audio Codec (AAC). Some of these formats also may incorporate digital rights management (DRM), such as WMA DRM, which are often part of paid download sites. Other formats are patent-free or otherwise open, such as Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex (all part of the Ogg open multimedia project).
The first MP3 Player created was the Rio PMP300 by Diamond Multimedia, which earned the company and the device the wrath of the major record labels in 1998, but Diamond won a legal victory on the shoulders of Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, and MP3 players were ruled legal devices; Diamond and the Rio went on to establish a new segment in the portable audio player market.
There are several types of MP3 Players:
- Devices that play CDs. Often, they can be used to play both audio CDs and homemade data CDs containing MP3 or other digital audio files.
- Devices that play minidisks - small CDs about 3 inches in diameter. These are burned using a standard CD-R drive.
- Solid state devices that hold digital audio files on internal or external media, such as memory cards. These are generally low-storage devices, with 64M and 128M capacity players being fairly common. As they are solid state and do not have moving parts, they can be very resilient. Such players may also be integrated into USB keydrives.
- Devices that read digital audio files from a hard drive. These players have higher capacities, ranging from 1.5GB to 60gb, depending on the hard drive technology. At typical encoding rates, this means that thousands of songs - perhaps an entire music collection - can be stored in one MP3 player.
Generally speaking, MP3 players are portable, which means they use either internal or replaceable batteries. Typically, you listen to music through headphones, although people are increasingly hooking these players up to their car and home stereos, thereby turning them in to portable jukeboxes.
Common devices
Well-known MP3 players include:
(There are many software-based MP3 audio applications available for most computer platforms, such as iTunes for Macintosh and Windows for PCs; see media player.)
