Also known as digital audio players, MP3 players are now as ubiquitous as televisions and computers. You'll see most people using their players as they work out at the gym, walk their dogs in the park, commute to work or school, and run errands. If you don't have an portable player yet, and you're looking for a good reason to get one, how about this: you can put a complete music library in your portable audio device and listen to it anytime and anywhere.

MP3 players have made it possible for music to be accessible to all. You can download songs from the numerous music download sites to your computer and transfer them to your player. You can then listen to songs wherever you are and anytime you want. If you ever get stuck in traffic, you can entertain yourself by listening to music loaded on your player; though I recommend you do that via an interface with your car stereo rather than donning headphones.

What is MP3?

MP3 stands for Moving Picture Experts Group layer III, and is a technology the involves fitting audio data in a small memory space without loss of quality. In raw form, audio-data is typically large and hard to use in portable devices for the obvious reason that raw audio data is too big to fit in these devices. For instance, up to 80 minutes of audio data can fit into a standard audio CD. However, with MP3, approximately 10 times more audio data can fit in memory of the same size.

MP3 players were first introduced to the market in the early 1990s. Since then, there have been contentions over audio quality. Many argue that MP3 compression adversely affects sound quality while others argue that this compression merely removes audio data frequency that people can't hear, thus there isn't any real loss in sound quality.

Types of MP3 players

Today, you'll find no shortage of MP3 players in the market. Until 2006, there were three types based on memory capacity: large players with a hard drive, micro players with a mini-hard drive, and players with flash memory. This has changed since 2006 with the expanding memory capacity of flash memory which has driven the micro players out of the market. The players with a hard drive have the biggest memory capacity and these are often called Jukebox MP3 players. Currently portable audio players with flash memory have smaller memory capacity but this will be ?null-and-void? within the next few years as technological advances increase the size capacity of flash memory to match that of hard drive players.

Which portable audio player should you go for?

If you travel a lot or you are often away from your computer for long periods, go with MP3 players that have a hard drive. You can connect these players to external speakers so you can basically listen to your favorite music in your living room or in your car. If you jog or go to the gym regularly, go with one of the MP3 players with flash memory because these are light and are practically hassle-free to use.

New Features in MP3 Players

As technology advances, more and newer features continue to be added to MP3 players. There are now MP3 players that allow you to download photos to them and view those pictures anytime and anywhere. Along with photos, you can load files to take with you from your computer to work or to a friend's house. Many players are also equipped with analog and digital radio receivers. Recently, players have been equipped with FM transmitters so you can transmit your music to your car stereo and listen to your files in your car.

What About MP4?

It's is believed that MP4 is an updated version of MP3. However, this isn't completely true. MP3 and MP4 are different from each other in terms of features. MP3 is primarily considered an audio format while MP4 is primarily regarded as a container format. Regardless of the differences, however, you can play MP3 files in an MP4 player.

One More Thing...

Keep in mind that the sound quality of your music device is only as good as the pair of headphones you use to listen with. So don't skimp on cheap headphones; invest on a quality pair.