MP3 Players is my thing. Or rather the mp3 player I have is my favourite travel companion. If you are looking to buy an mp3 player, you will have to choose between 3 different types or ideas, a whole big list of producers and tons of extra features.
Do not get discouraged though, here is a short overview of the three basic types of mp3 players and there advantages and/or disadvantages.
Flash Based Players
This type of an mp3 player is the smallest of all. The flash based mp3 player contains a built in flash memory chip that can have a storage capability of 32MB to as much as 2GB (be sure that as we speak a bigger one is already being produced, but that is the way with technology, it gets improved with the hours). The flash based player is great for sports activities as it comes in one piece with no movable parts. The downside of this state of art technology is that it comes as state of art prices.
These are indeed quite costly.
Hard-Drive Based Players
This type of mp3 player uses a hard disk drive for storage of your music. It can contain huge amount of mp3s. Imagine how many songs you can store in a drive of a twenty giga capacity and now what do you say for the storage space in a sixty giga! Well these are thousands upon thousands of songs. However, since this is a hard drive based player, it contains moving parts and can suffer various damages if you are to take it around.
MP3 CD Discs/Players
My good old fashioned mp3 player is of this type. I just record about 200 mp3s from my computer onto a disk and shove the disk in. The great thing about it is cost and move-ability. Although it is not as resistant to movement as the flash based player, it does have a skip protection and since I am not a real sports person, I have never experienced a problem.
OK, 200 songs are not a great number but I have many recorded discs with the different music I like in a different moment so my 200 songs are quite enough for some time. Also, the players normally have an option to re-shuffle the songs so I will not hear the songs in the same sequence over and over again.
My mp3 player has the option to play the songs and switch from a file to a file and I can chose the files with the arrows and seeing the names on the little display screen shown.
My mp3 CD disc player came with a fantastic accessory as well, it was a case – but not your usual case. The one side of the case was actually a loudspeaker and the other side of the case was containing compartments for me to store my spare CDs in. Now that is absolutely fantastic!
