A Closer Look At MP3 Players

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?

Older MP3 players use a hard drive to store music files. Hard drives offer amazing amounts of memory for file storage. The iPod Classic has up to 160GB. However, players with hard drives are heavier, and have generally poorer battery life, as the hard drive has moving parts inside it, and requires more power to operate them.

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.

There are some important advantages to using flash memory in MP3 players, which have benefited both manufactures and consumers. Flash memory is cheaper, lighter, and smaller than a hard drive, they also use less power, which leads to better battery life; and this means that flash based MP3 players can be much smaller and cheaper than hard drive based models.

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.

MP3 players can do more than just play music. Most of them have LCD color displays ranging from a very small 1.8 inch to much larger 4.3 inch or 5 inch,. ONDA and Archos even produce MP3 players that have a 7 inch screen. This has changed the scope of MP3 players from just listing to music, to being able to watch videos too. While watching feature film on small screen may be a strain on the eyes, the larger screens are ideal.

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