A Closer Look At MP3 Players

January 30, 2010 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Music 

Time to release your music on an MP3 player which are also known as MP4 players. The clever random mode on an MP3 player shuffles up your songs, playing them randomly. You can also store all your songs on a player small enough to fit in your pocket. But where does your MP3 player hold all your music?

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.

More recently MP3 player manufactures have started using flash memory to replace mini hard drives. There are now very few MP3 players that use hard drives. Instead they have an inbuilt flash memory chip and often have a slot to hold a second flash memory card, thereby increasing the player\’s memory.

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 some disadvantages though. The storage capacity is significantly smaller than a hard drive, typically between 8GB – 16GB. The price for additional SD cards 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.

Want to find out more about cheap MP3 players, then visit David Morris\’s site on how to choose the best MP4 Player for your needs.