Mp3 Players essays

Mp3 Players essays As of late, there has been a new force arising in the music industry, this being Mp3. There has been an explosion of interest in Mp3 primarily thanks to the internet. People can easily download nearly any song they want for the price of a phone call. Mp3 (short for MPEG-1, Layer 3) is compressed digital audio. Songs can be Ripped from a CD with ease. A typical .WAV (CD Audio) file would take up around 40 mb, whereas the compressed Mp3 version of the same song would take up a mere 4 mb. This is one of the reasons Mp3 is so popular. Until now Mp3 files have been confined to computers, which has been their major downfall, but over the last year the first generation of portable Mp3 players has arisen. These have been slow to take off in Australia but are experiencing huge sales internationally. One of the advantages in Mp3 players is that they have no moving parts, so there is none of the jumping or skipping found in CD players. Usually the player comes with a program designed to extract CD files, encode them to Mp3 then send them to the player. The Mp3 files are downloaded from the PC into the units memory. The type of memory is called Flash memory and the player typically comes with 32 to 64 mb base memory with the option of upgrading. A small LSD display is used and in some players there is the option of using ID3 tags which tell the listener the song details. The units are generally small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and are very economical, running for up to 16 hours on the one AA battery. One problem with Mp3 players is that there is a limit to how many songs they can hold. A 32 mb memory chip can only hold around 8 songs and when the cost of a larger chip is around two hundred dollars, this is a major downfall. The average Mp3 player costs about $300 which is less than the better sounding MD players but more than the less reliable CD players ...