According to the music, audio and video loving public, MP3 players are one of the greatest creations ever invented. They not only allow you to build humungous sound file libraries, but you can also take those files with you and listen to them wherever you go, whether it's into the next room or an entirely different country. And actually, it's not only sound files that you can travel with. The MP3 player market has greatly expanded to include mini digital screens that allow you to store and watch videos and keep and display photo ‘albums' as well. It doesn't get much better than that in terms of convenience.



And although MP3 players are a great convenience and are not difficult to use, there are differences between them, specifically in terms of their inner workings. Let's take a look at the technological differences to get a better idea of what this means.

Hard Drive Based MP3 Players

Also referred to as Digital Jukeboxes, a hard drive based MP3 player can incorporate, nowadays, up to a 100 gigabyte memory card. That's an awesome size providing an abundant amount of space to store all of your digital files. A hard drive based MP3 player affords you with the opportunity to download and store all of your music and other digital files directly into your MP3, where they will remain for safe keeping and your listening and viewing pleasure until you either delete them, add to them or copy over them. Once the hard drive is full, it's full, however it would take a very, very long time and an enormous amount of digital files to fill up 100 gig hard drive.

There is also something called a micro-hard drive MP3 player that is available as well. These have a smaller memory capacity, but are also much lighter than the MP3 players with the larger hard drives.

Flash Based MP3 Player

Flash based MP3 players are latest craze to hit the portable audio and video device market. Unlike the hard drive based MP3 player, a flash based player only provides you with up to 4 gigabytes of memory on each card, but those cards are interchangeable. So you can still collect music, videos and photos with a flash based MP3 player, however they don't have nearly the same amount of storage space. But as mentioned, you can change the flash card as frequently as you like, almost like changing a CD on your stereo. Keep in mind that you need special, additional, compatible equipment such as a flash reader for your computer in order for you to be able to download the digital files and then transfer the card to your MP3 player.