MP3 Benefits and Drawbacks
Gone are the days of lugging your entire CD collection with you on trips. Now you can simply download your MP3 files into the player and leave behind your collection CD and tapes. Best of all you can reuse the player’s memory as often as you like. You can add and remove songs from your mix as often as your taste changes.
Most of the MP3 player’s are of solid state. Which means there is no skipping of the music. But there are exceptions; some MP3 players depend on other media such as CD-R (CD-Recordable) or CD-RW (CD- Re Writable) discs and players with hard drives.
Expensive memory cards ise of the most of the MP3 players in today’s market place come with drawbacks, with memory cards (such as CompactFlash and SmartCard). This deters most people from owning more than few memory cards at once.
Digital Audio Formats
While MP3 has become international standard format, new digital formats are entering the digital audio formats. The best MP3 players should have the capability to play or upgrade to new audio formats. Some of the other formats include WMA, RealAduio, MP2, G2 and more.
Memory and Recordable Capacity
The MP3 files are stored in the player’s internal memory, more memory the more MP3 files you can store into your player. Generally it is expected to record one minute of standard MP3 audio per megabyte of storage. Usually you can squeeze the equivalent of an entire CD album into 64MB of memory, a device with less memory such as 32MB is preferred as it is less expensive.
Make sure you check the amount of memory listed in the specifications is actually built into the player or exists in the form of swappable memory cards. Swappable cards can expand the amount of memory on your player, depending on your budget. MP3 player’s with integrated memory and no memory expansion slots isn’t a good buy as those players with both options.
