A Brief History Of Mp3 Players And Their Capabilities
What to know about MP3 players and their operation can be very important these days as we begin to almost entirely eliminate analog data storage in this new millennium. Being able to understand how these extremely versatile music players work can help in picking out and then making the best use of a device that many music experts say has revolutionized the music industry, in mostly positive ways.
For starters, an MP3 player has a technical name that describes its function more correctly, and that is that it is a digital audio player. Specifically, it’s one of a range of consumer electronics that stores, organizes and plays digital audio files in a variety of storage formats and audio formats, including the extremely popular MP3. Certain of these devices are also known as portable media players because they can also play videos or display images as they play their music.
In terms of their historical development, MP3 players are considered to be the successor to CD players, which are still somewhat popular among audio enthusiasts. Compact disc players are also known as portable audio devices, though they are somewhat limited due to their bulkiness, it must be said. The first actual digital audio player was invented in 1979, though it could only play about 3.5 minutes of digital data back. Its inventor was quickly signed by a certain computer company with an apple for part of its name.
Work continued on the development of this digital audio player for the next couple of decades and the first commercially successful device made its debut in mid-1998. It used what we now call “flash memory, ” and could store a relatively paltry six to twelve songs in its 32 MB flash memory drive. At that time, this seemed revolutionary, especially as the device was extremely small and could work very well with a desktop or laptop computer.
Later that year, a different computer maker brought to the market the first MP3 player based off of a computer hard drive, which was about 2 1/2 inches in size and had about 5 GB of memory. This translated to a storage capacity of nearly 1200 songs, people. People, of course, flocked to the device and paid quite handsomely for it at the time because of its storage capacity.
The most wildly successful MP3 player of all time made its debut in 2001 — and it was marketed by that same fruit-named computer company — with a 5 GB hard drive of about 1.8 inches in size. Gradually, this device has evolved and now features the ability to interface with Windows-based systems, which it couldn’t do when it was first launched those several years ago.
These days, an MP3 player can make use of several different methods for storing, organizing and playing digital audio files. Of course, the two most well known and common are flash memory and hard drive-based memory systems. Flash memory devices are solid-state and non-mechanical in construction. They also hold music either internally, within their memory system, or access music from storage media known as memory cards. Insertion of a card into the player allows for the display and then playing of music on the card.
Hard drive-based MP3 players, of course, make use of what is basically a very small hard disk drive (HDD), and can usually store gargantuan numbers in terms of music files, sometimes exceeding 250 GB. This means hundreds of thousands of songs are possible, though these particular players are more mechanically complex. At any rate, a good MP3 player has a universe of capabilities and functions that have served the music-listening public well over the last decade.
Understanding and appreciating MP3 players and their capabilities is more necessary now than ever before, especially as we move deeper into this new digital era. For sure, having an understanding a mp3 player is a must.
