SolveYourProblem eLearning Series
iPods & MP3 Players

What's The Evolution of MP3 players?
by my-tech-guide.com

Despite highly publicized legal wrangles involving MP3.com and Napster, recent understandings between these music-distribution sites and some major record companies suggest that even the music industry realizes Internet music distribution is here to stay. So odds are you'll continue to find plenty of online music to download, though it's likely less of it will be free.

To keep up with the demand for a little Net music, electronics firms are developing new personal digital audio players. For this Update, we looked at five players: the Compaq iPaq Personal Audio Player PA-1, the Sensory Science rave:mp 2300, the Iomega HipZip, the Rio 600, and the Creative Nomad Jukebox Player, one of the first high-capacity portable jukebox players.

These new players are noteworthy for their diverse storage options. So far, portable players have been hindered by their inability to hold more than an hour or two of CD-quality music, and by the high cost of removable flash-memory cards..

Only one of the new players takes the conventional approach of strong music on internal memory, removable memory cards, or a combination of both. The other players introduce new alternatives: low-cost removable disks, snap-on memory modules, and a miniature hard drive.

Low-cost disks. The tiny PocketZip drive used in the rave:mp 2300 and Iomega HipZip works with removable 40-MB rotating magnetic disks that sell for $80 to $100, depending on how many disks you buy. Price is the big advantage: You can store music for as little as 200 cents per megabyte, compared with about $20 per megabyte for memory cards. The drive, an Iomega product formerly known as the Clik! Drive, is also used by devices such as digital cameras and laptop computers.

One drawback is that the disks have moving parts and are more fragile than solid-state cards - hence the plastic cases used to protect them from dust and damage. Also, each disk can hold only 40 minutes or so of CD-quality MP3 music rather than an entire hour-long album, which 64-MB cards can generally hold.

Snap-on memory modules. Taking a different tack, the designers of the Rio 600 have taken the removable memory out of the player and housed it in a "backpack" that snaps on to the back of the unit. The backpack contains the battery for the player and varying amounts of memory. The "outboard" approach allows room for further expansion: A 340-MB backpack with a hard drive is expected this year. One concern is that the backpack is awkward to remove and replace, which you need to do to change the battery.

Miniature hard drive. The Creative Nomad Jukebox Player is one of the first portable jukebox players to arrive on the market. With a 6-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, high capacity is the Nomad's obvious advantage. It can hold 90 hours or more of MP3 music, or roughly 90 albums - a real feat, considering that most players can hold only one or at most two hours. You can't directly compare the cost per megabyte since the Nomad uses an internal hard drive, but any way you cut it, it's a small fraction of the cost of other media. The downside: It's hefty compared with other portable players - a bit larger than a CD player. It's also noteworthy that the Nomad has line inputs and outputs, so it can record and play music using a component sound system.

Other portable jukeboxes are appearing as digital music becomes mainstream. MP3 players are also showing up in other types of home and personal electronics, including component systems, portable CD players and boom boxes, personal digital assistants, and even wristwatches and cell phones. We'll test some of these products for future reports.

The design of these new players acknowledges that MP3 - currently the most popular format for compressing digital music files - may eventually be overtaken by other formats. Four of the players support Windows Media Audio (WMA) as well as MP3, and one is also compatible with Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). All five can be upgraded to accept future formats that may emerge.

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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007

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