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Taking a look at MP3 players and their workings can be especially important to those who have finally decided to ditch their compact disc music collection and move to these new digital audio storage devices. Gaining an understanding of how these very handy music players operate can also help when selecting one and then making the best use of it in a way that makes the most sense. Certainly, experts in the field say that this particular device has revolutionized music over the last decade.
For starters, an MP3 player has a technical name that describes its function more correctly, and that is that it is a digital audio player. Specifically, it’s one of a range of consumer electronics that stores, organizes and plays digital audio files in a variety of storage formats and audio formats, including the extremely popular MP3. Certain of these devices are also known as portable media players because they can also play videos or display images as they play their music.
In terms of its historical genesis, MP3 players are the successors to the compact disc (CD) player, which is sometimes also called a “portable audio device.” It might surprise some people to know that the first such digital audio player that could make use of digital files was invented way back in 1979. It could play about 3 1/2 minutes of audio data but did not enter any sort of commercial production. Its inventor, though, was immediately hired by a certain computer company famous for having a certain fruit as its name.
Work continued on the development of this digital audio player for the next couple of decades and the first commercially successful device made its debut in mid-1998. It used what we now call “flash memory, ” and could store a relatively paltry six to twelve songs in its 32 MB flash memory drive. At that time, this seemed revolutionary, especially as the device was extremely small and could work very well with a desktop or laptop computer.
Later that year, a different computer maker brought to the market the first MP3 player based off of a computer hard drive, which was about 2 1/2 inches in size and had about 5 GB of memory. This translated to a storage capacity of nearly 1200 songs, people. People, of course, flocked to the device and paid quite handsomely for it at the time because of its storage capacity.
2001 was the year in which the most popular MP3 player of all time made its debut, from that fruit-named computer company. It, too, made use of a hard drive-based memory storage system of about 5 GB. Over the years since, the player has evolved to the point where it can work with Windows-based platforms, which was something it was unable to do when it first was launched.
These days, an MP3 player can make use of several different methods for storing, organizing and playing digital audio files. Of course, the two most well known and common are flash memory and hard drive-based memory systems. Flash memory devices are solid-state and non-mechanical in construction. They also hold music either internally, within their memory system, or access music from storage media known as memory cards. Insertion of a card into the player allows for the display and then playing of music on the card.
Hard drive-based MP3 players, of course, make use of what is basically a very small hard disk drive (HDD), and can usually store gargantuan numbers in terms of music files, sometimes exceeding 250 GB. This means hundreds of thousands of songs are possible, though these particular players are more mechanically complex. At any rate, a good MP3 player has a universe of capabilities and functions that have served the music-listening public well over the last decade.
Understanding and fully appreciating MP3 players and their capabilities is more necessary now than ever before, more so as we move deeper into this new digital era. For sure, having an understanding a mp3 player is a must.
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