What is an MP3 Player?

Updated: 08/08/2007 by ABJ

An MP3 player is basically yet another evolutionary advancement in portable music players. Compared to its predecessors though, the MP3 player is arguably the most revolutionary in terms of portability, and storage capacity.

The MP3 player is an electronic device that can play digital audio files that are encoded using MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, or in short, MP3. The compression format of MP3 files minimizes the data required to represent an audio while retaining the purity and quality of its uncompressed version. An MP3 player with the same storage capacity as that of a conventional audio CD, can store at least twice the number of songs, with relatively minimal degradation on its sound quality.

MP3 players come in different sizes, but those primarily designed for portability can easily be smaller than a quarter of the size of any of its analog or digital predecessors, like the cassette or CD player, respectively. For visualization, please refer at the picture to the right, which is a Sandisk Sansa Express MP3 player between fingers. These diminutive MP3 players typically use the very compact flash memory for digital memory storage, while those designed for larger storage rely on the higher-capacity hard drive.

Nowadays, most MP3 players are no longer confined to just playing MP3 files. It is typical for these players to support other popular compressed digital audio formats, like WMA and AAC. WMA, which stands for Windows Media Audio, is a proprietary audio format developed by MicroSoft; while AAC, which stands for Advanced Audio Coding, is a standardized audio format supported by Apple's iPod players.