MP3 & Media Players

Buying Guide - MP3 & Media Players

First Steps: Brainstorming - Or: How To Find Your Perfect Product?

Your first thought should not be what kind of design or brand it could be but how – and for what exactly – you are going to use your new MP3- or Media player. Do you want it to be your companion during your work-out? Do you want to store your complete music collection on it? Are you also planning to watch videos on it (which is great for long distance travelling)? Would you like to make it your portable photo collection? Wanna listen to audio books? Do you wish any other functions like voice recording, radio reception, wireless capability (wireless music purchasing and downloads, song sharing), voice recording or personal information management (phone books and schedules).

This automatically leads to the questions whether you need big storage capacity or whether it is more important to have easy-to-use controls.

Basic distinction of the three types:

Memory Flash Players
These players offer those with integrated memory, separate memory cards and USB drive MP3 players and are the most affordable and the smallest in size. With few moving parts they are ideal for every day listening and during exercise.

Hard Drive Players
If you want your portable music library, this is the type of player you need. Hard drive players store between 1,000 to over 15,000 tracks depending on their capacity. Storage size can vary from 2GB to over 40GB. Hard drive players usually offer small screens displaying track and artist details plus a user-friendly menu system to choose songs.

Multimedia Players
These players use large hard drives and are bigger and heavier than other MP3-Players. This size and storage capacity is to enable the displaying of photographs and video playback. With these devices you can enjoy watching your favorite movies or music videos. One single portable device offers access to your favourite music, videos and photos.

Display
Next to size and design, an important factor to consider is the display. It is useful to have it big enough to show the entire song title and have it readable under all conditions including outdoors. In case you want to watch videos and photos on your MP3-Player big display is a crucial factor.

Weight
The weight of MP3 players starts at about 40g per player for small integrated memory players, but is usually more in the range of 300g for a large multimedia player. The greater the storage capacity of the player the larger the size and the heavier the weight. Following the current development of storage technology size and weight is constantly reduced.

Capacity
The memory capacity of your MP3 Player is essential for the amount of music storage. The basics you need to know to understand what is behind the abbreviations is "MB" as the abbreviation for megabyte which it basically speaking a unit for measuring data. "GB" means gigabyte, which is a larger measurement of data stored. 1 gigabyte is equivalent to 1024 megabytes.

Average speaking you can assume that one song on a MP-Player needs approximately 4 MB memory size (a rule of thumb is that 1 minute of music = 1 MB), meaning that a 512 MB Player offers space for approximately 130 songs.

Capacity	Hours of MP-Music
128 MB	2 hours
256 MB	4 hours
4 GB	66 hours
20 GB	333 hours
40 GB	666 hours

Audio Formats
The MP3 music format is currently the most widespread but many of the online music providers offer other formats such as WMA or AAC. These formats have been developed as they provide better sound quality at the same size. Plus they provide a royalties protection system which makes them very successful within musical spheres. Other formats are e.g. Ogg Vorbis and the Sony format ATRAC. Please check the compatibility with the player you are interested in.

Battery Life
The life of a battery is linked to memory storage. Big hard drive players mostly use in-built rechargeable batteries, which last between 8 and 20 hours each time. But they cannot be replaced easily, so once the battery life has expired, one needs to buy a whole new player. Batteries of Flash memory players (usually recognizable due to their stick construction) last much longer, depending on the level of volume.
Please keep in mind that the life expectancy of a rechargeable battery decreases with time.

Sound Quality
Sound quality is mainly dependant on the quality of the headphones (or speakers) you are using.
Another contributing factor to the quality is the data transfer rate, the so-called “bitrate” which is measured in kilobits per second (kb/s).
The higher the bitrate the higher the sound quality – but the higher the bitrate, the higher the amount of data that has to be saved on your MP3-Player. Using 192 Kbit/sec needs a third more saving space than the 128 Kbit/sec you usually can find in the internet but you then have sound data in the quality of a CD.

Interface / Connection:
In order to transfer data from you PC / Mac to your MP3-Player, most of the devices can be easily connected via USB. Read the product descriptions for details in order to avoid unpleasant surprises. This is especially relevant for hard drive and multimedia players where the amount of data transferred is quite considerable.

Firmware:
The operating system of a MP3-Player is called „firmware” which is either already pre-installed or can be easily downloaded from the web pages of the manufacturers. In order to update please visit the corresponding websites.
This is especially important for MP3-Players with an internal hard disk.