Listen To The Music: The Latest Features in MP3 Players
by Melissa V. Winter, BestBuy.com staff copywriter
You're a true audiophile. You've been bringing CDs home regularly for years and the storage racks are beginning to take over your living room as well as every other room in the house. From U2 to Schubert, you got 'em and you're not about to get rid of 'em. You'd love to take a hundred along on road trips, vacations and heck, just to the gym. And now you can.
A portable digital music player does the job. It allows you to store hundreds of vinyl records, CDs and tapes within an easy-to-tote, compact music player. Back when they were introduced, MP3 players could barely hold a cassette's amount of tunes. But with emerging technology this past year, more memory, more options and hard drive-based players are changing the way the music rocks you. Read on to learn about some of the latest features and products in the MP3 player arena.
Size or memory: Which do you choose
The current state of MP3 players give consumers some choices: more memory, smaller size or both?
Many of the new players are shrinking in size, yet increasing in flash, or internal memory. Samsung's yepp' Sport Digital Audio Player YP-30SH is a mere 2-1/2" high x 1-3/4" wide x 1/2" deep for fit-in-your-palm fun, yet boasts a solid 128MB of built-in memory.
Other music players that easily fit in your pocket include the svelte RCA k@zoo MP3 Digital Audio Player (shown at the top of the page). It's about 2" high x 2-1/4" wide x 1" deep and comes with a sufficient 64MB of memory for about an hour of play time, expandable to 128MB with a MultiMediaCard.
Measuring in at CD-player size is the Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox. It may be a bit larger than some of the newer miniscule MP3 models, but it packs an impressive 10.0GB hard drive for hundreds of songs. The more recent NOMAD Jukebox 3 kicks it up a notch with a massive 20.0GB of memory. That's enough to store around 300 hours of tunes, or roughly 4,000 songs!
Hard drive-based players
Though the majority of portable digital music players still use flash memory, more and more manufacturers are releasing portable players with hard drives. The advantage of a hard drive is the massive amount of storage it offers for MP3 files, as well as photos, videos and personal data.
A player with 64MB of Flash memory offers about an hour's worth of tunes, while a player with a hard disk drive can hold hundreds of hours of music. The Archos Jukebox Studio 20 and Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, as well as Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 3 and the SONICBlue's Rio Riot Digital all boast huge 20.0GB hard drives; plenty of memory for long-term storage. And once a hard drive-based player is connected to your computer, it conveniently appears as a hard drive on your desktop for easy file transfer.
Multimedia designs
If you want to deal with both audio and movie files, choose one of the new multimedia portables. Many play MP3, WAV and WMA audio files and allow you to enjoy watching full-motion videos compressed in MPEG-4 (MP4). Some let you view digital images and graphics files. An expansion slot can accommodate audiophiles who need more memory and some devices may include a proprietary slot for a digital camera, a TV tuner and wireless connectivity.
The paperback-size Archos Jukebox MultiMedia is one rockin' multimedia road show. It can show still images on its color screen and play MPEG-4 and DVX video. It's an MP3 music player/recorder, still camera, camcorder and video player/recorder in one. Oh, and it's also a voice recorder and can work as a completely external hard drive, with a whopping 20.0GB of storage. Record directly from a CD player or other music device without connecting to a computer. An expansion connector offers more ways to bypass a PC connection, with adapters that allow for direct connection to other devices, like a digital camera or TV tuner.
Panasonic's hit the combo jackpot with their 4-in-1 SV-AV10. It combines a camcorder, digital camera, digital audio player and voice recorder into a single device. The included 64MB Secure Digital (SD) card stores MPEG-4 video, MP3 and ACC audio files, JPEG stills and voice memos -- all in a gadget about the size of a small stack of business cards. Record video clips using the handy 2" LCD to guide you, then turn around and enjoy your MP3 tunes.
Improved connectivity
Until recently, all Windows- and hard drive-based MP3 players connected to your computer by USB. It's a convenient connection but leaves something to be desired regarding how fast you can transfer files. Some MP3 players on the horizon are slated to boast an IEEE 1394 connection for faster music transfers from PCs with 1394 ports.
One of the players already featuring this connection is Creative Labs' NOMAD Jukebox 3. It packs a USB port plus a FireWire/IEEE 1394 port for faster music downloads. This hard drive-based player also allows you to sync with multiple PCs (with the Creative PlayCenter software installed), which means you can trade entire MP3 collections in a short period of time. PlayCenter software also handles auto song titling and organization, music importing, CD burning and standard file transfers of any type.
A bevy of recording options
And just one more cool, gotta-have feature is recording options. Using the analog-in or digital-in connections, the Nomad Jukebox 3, Archos Jukebox Recorder 10 and 20 let you record directly to the hard drive from a variety of sources like CDs, tapes, albums, lectures on microcassettes, even a powered microphone -- a great way to archive your favorite recordings. Then pump out the melodies through your four-channel stereo system.
Auto song titling, easy file organization
The more advanced players, like the NOMAD Jukebox, NOMAD Jukebox 3 and Rio Riot from SONICBlue, highlight interfaces that display songs by artist, title or album regardless of the song's computer file name. When ripping from a CD, the computer checks for information on each track, then stores a data tag. When you load the files onto the player, this tag automatically archives a list of all the song information. How cool.
DataPlay coming our way?
DataPlay's highly anticipated recordable media will be another option for the music technojock. iRiver's iDP-100 is anticipated to be the first MP3 player to use DataPlay's tiny, write-only optical discs, which can contain up to 500MB or over 500 minutes of MP3 music, on one mini disc.
Be sure to shop our entire selection of portable MP3 players, which includes some of the players discussed here and many more.
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