Flash-based MP3 Players

Flash-based MP3 Players

More and more music is being converted to MP3 format every year. Whole CD libraries can be compressed down to a series of ones and zeros and take up no more space than the hard drive that holds them.

In the early days, MP3 was the compression format of choice among internet users, MP3s would be traded online and passed around schools on floppy discs. A 166 MHz penitum processor would take over 15 minutes to encode a single song. Nowadays whole albums can be ripped and encoded in half that time.

The versatility of the format began to catch on and more and more less technically minded people became interested. Manufacturers began to create digital music players that could cope the new format and, although demand was slow at the start, as the sophistication of the technology increased, so did demand.

Portable MP3 players offer anything from 64 megabytes in the most basic models to the 60GB offered by the latest players.

The difference in storage size is due to the different technology used in the players. Flash players utilise one or more solid state memory chips which can be easily and rapidly written to and rewritten many many times over. Such memory chips use very little power and as there are also no moving parts, battery life can be very high indeed.

Although commonly known as MP3 players, they are often also capable of playing other formats, WMA support is common in most players while Sony devices also support their proprietary ATRAC and ATRAC3Plus formats. The format championed by Apple on its popular iTunes store is known as AAC, but as it is a closed format like ATRAC, support is not as wide as for MP3. Native support for other open source formats like OGG and Flac is rare among consumer players but sound quality is often much better.

A flash-based MP3 player can cost from £20.