MP3 player

A MP3 player is an electronic device that can play digital audio files. Since the mp3 format is widely used, almost all players can play that format; in addition, there are many other digital audio formats - some proprietary and incorporating digital rights management - that some MP3 players can recognize. These formats include Ogg Vorbis, Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Audio Codec (AAC).

There are several types of MP3 players:

• Devices that play CDs. Often, they can be used to play both audio CDs and homemade data CDs containing MP3 or other digital audio files.
• Devices that hold digital audio files on internal or external memory cards. These are generally fairly low-storage devices, with 64M and 128M capacity players being fairly common. Such players may also be inegrated into USB memory sticks.
• Devices that read digital audio files from a hard drive. These players are high-capacity, with hard drives starting at 5G and going up to 40G and 60G players. At standard encoding rates, this means that thousands of songs - perhaps an entire music collection - can be stored in one MP3 player.

Common devices

Well-known MP3 players include:

• iPod by Apple Computer
• Creative Nomad by Creative Labs
• Rio by SONICblue

(There are many software-based Mp3 players available for most computer platforms, such as iTunes for Macintosh and Windows PCs.)

Generally speaking, MP3 players are portable, which means they use batteries and you listen to music through headphones.