MP3 Players, An Introduction

It’s easy to enjoy music with a digital MP3 player, or MP4 player as they are sometimes called. With a shuffle function you can listen to your songs in a random order, and fit your whole music library on a pocket sized player. Have you ever wondered where your music is 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.

Both manufactures and consumers have found benefits with flash memory based MP3 players. As a flash memory chip is very small compared to a hard drive, it means that manufactures can create very small MP3 players. Flash memory also uses considerably less energy, and so there are big improvements in battery life.

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.

Did you know that you use your MP3 player for more than just music. MP3 player now come with color screens. This means you can watch videos and movies, as well as look at pictures. Screen sizes vary, typical small sizes are 1.8 inch while the larger sizes can be 4.3 inch and 5 inch. Interestingly enough, Apple’s Ipod Touch has a relatively modest 3.5″ display. The bigger the screen the more you will enjoy watching movies, and the larger screens are often in 16:9 ratio too.

Learn more about MP4 players. Stop by David Morris’s site where you can find out all about anMP4 player and what it can do for you.

Technorati Tags: mp4 players