Listen To The Music: The Latest Features in MP3 Players |
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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. |
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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 chooseThe 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 usually ranging between 64MB - 256MB. Measuring in at CD-player size is the Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 2. It may be a bit larger than some of the newer miniscule MP3 models, but it packs an impressive 10.0GB hard drive for storing hundreds of songs. The full-featured NOMAD Jukebox 3 kicks it up a notch with a massive 20.0GB hard drive. That's enough to store around 300 hours of tunes, or roughly 4,000 songs at standard compression rates. Hard drive-based playersThough many of the 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 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 Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 3 and Apple iPod all boast huge 20.0GB hard drives — plenty of space for long-term storage. Plus, hard drive-based players feature high-speed transfer through FireWire and USB 2.0 connectivity for moving big files easily. Multimedia designsIf you want to deal with both audio and video 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) format. Some let you view digital images and graphics files, and may include a proprietary slot for a digital camera and a TV tuner. Some units can show still images via colour screen and play MPEG-4 and DVX video, while also offering a MP3 music player/recorder, still camera, camcorder and video player/recorder capabilities. Not to mention the built-in voice recorder and external hard drive functionality, 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. Improved connectivityUntil 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 boast an IEEE 1394 connection for faster music transfers from PCs with FireWire. Other high-speed connections can be made with USB 2.0. 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 optionsAnd just one more cool, gotta-have feature is recording options. Using the analog-in or digital-in connection, many units let you record directly to the hard drive from a variety of sources like CDs, tapes, albums, lectures on microcassettes, even microphones — a great way to archive your favourite recordings, then pump out the melodies through your stereo system. Auto song titling, easy file organization Using an ID3 tag from the MP3 file itself, the more advanced players, like the NOMAD Jukebox 2, NOMAD Jukebox 3 and Apple iPod, 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. 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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