Benefits and Drawbacks of MP3 Players
Mar 30 '00
MP3's are a godsend. They enable us to listen to music on our computer using 1/10th of the hard drive space. The quality of mp3's can be so good that people decide to make portable players for the format. The fact that a small little fm radio like device can hold 10 songs is amazing even in our time. What benefits does an mp3 player have and are there any costs that you might want to take into consideration? I'll try to give you an informative aspect to these problems.
How does it work
An mp3 player involves a small player, usually the size of a portable fm radio. Some players include a little disk that can hold 30,60,120 + megs on it which are either built into the player or separate. Most are separate because that way you can upgrade to a larger capacity in the future. The players come with a wire that connects it to your computer. From there you can download mp3's from your computer to your player in a fairly quick manner. The mp3's then can be played using the interface on the player. The songs can also be removed and added at will depending on the capacity of the flash rom card you have.
Benefits
An mp3 player has a few key benefits which you might want to take into consideration before you decide whether you want to buy one or not. Mp3's are a digital format and will not skip, the file is merely being read by the machinery within the player and there isn't any room for skipping. This is a good advantage even now with all these 60 second shock protection cd players which still can skip.
Another benefit of an mp3 player is the fact that you can customize the playlist which you can't really do with a cd (unless you record your own). Also, you can add/remove songs whenever you want simply by plugging it into your pc and downloading new songs to it. One last benefit, which might not be really seen as a benefit, is the quality of the mp3's. They are as close to cd quality as you can get without actually playing a cd.
Drawbacks
These mp3 players still cost a bunch of cash right now and I don't think they'll be going down until the mp3 cd players come out (checkout one at http://www.mambox.com). I've seen these players range from 140 dollars to 300-400 dollars based on capacity and features.
All the players also have flash rom upgrade chips that can get you more disk space. These cost a lot as well and vary from 30 dollars to a few hundred dollars for a 120 megabyte rom chip. You'll quickly realize that 30 megs isn't a lot of disk space for mp3's (an average mp3 is anywhere from 3-6 megabytes).
As stated before, the quality is close to cd quality yet not cd quality. This quality difference might be enough for some not to purchase a mp3 player because mp3's are encoded at various rates and some of the lower rates almost sound radio-like. If you do get mp3's that are encoded at 192kb or higher, you're almost definitely not going to notice too much of a difference between the mp3 quality and the cd quality.
Overall
The mp3 players are great if you have the cash to spend. I personally would wait for the mp3 cd players to come out because they will definitely eclipse the capacity of these players. A nice feature of the mp3 players is that they don't skip which is a big factor for a lot of people. Usually a nice mp3 player will come with 30-60 megabytes in flash rom and you might be able to enjoy all your music on just that much space (10-20 songs). I would definitely suggest checking out the Rio and the Lyra brands before the others because they've been around for a while and are probably the best in the market.
Check the packages for capacity (how much can this player hold as far as megabytes), features (can I make a playlist?), and quality (has the company been around for a while?). If you really want to buy one, I'd suggest the Lyra. If you can wait a little while, checkout http://www.mambox.com for the new wave of mp3 players.
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
kfree
|
|
Location: Champaign, IL
Reviews written: 126
Trusted by: 64 members
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.