MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group, Layer 3) has certainly become much more popular than anyone could have imagined it would become a few years ago. The reason for MP3’s success is that it can compress CD quality audio to about 1/11 its original size (about 1 MB/minute) and still offer almost the same quality, at least on pop music using average speakers. The low licensing costs (today a $3000 flat charge) to make an MP3 decoder/player brought us plenty of MP3 Players and recorders that could be downloaded for free over the internet. This was, and still, is extremely important for its popularity. Early on, the MP3 format was mostly used to download high quality music over a standard phone line, most of it illegal due to copyright violations. Later people started to use it to store their favorite CDs on their computer. Moving their music to the computer allowed them to create their own custom playlists where they could collect all their favorites without switching CD or having a multi-disc CD-player and without using up the massive amount of space that the wav format would use to do the same thing. The latest buzz has been to sell music online. This is still in its infancy and it’s currently doubtful that MP3s will be the common electronic music format in the future due to its lack of copy protection schemes. It’s a nightmare for the music industry that anyone can buy the music and then send a perfect digital copy of it to all their friends. Its of course possible that the MP3 algorithms for compression/decompression will be used in the future with some security addition.

While using the computer to play the music is nice, many want to take their music with them where ever they go. In 1998, the Korean company Saehan Information Systems (SIS) introduced the first portable MP3 player, that went by the name of MPMan. It could only store 32 minutes (64 minutes version also available) of CD quality music and cost a lot more than a portable CD player and wasn’t even cheaper than the portable MiniDisc players that according to most people offered better quality. While the Korean MP3 player got a lot of attention it wasn’t until Diamond introduced the Rio late 98 that we saw significant sales of portable MP3 players. They were still quite expensive at $200 and had only 32 MB of memory onboard. The price was still clearly more than portable CD players and not cheaper than low-end portable MiniDiscs that could store an entire CD. One reason people still bought it may simply be that they wanted to play the MP3 files they downloaded from the internet. However, one other major benefit of portable MP3 Players is that they don’t use any movable parts so there are no problems to run or mountain bike with it.. It’s also much smaller than a portable CD player and in most cases also smaller than the portable Minidisc players. For some reason many companies call their portable MP3 Players Digital Music Players, even if they can only play MP3 files.

Since the Rio was introduced less than 1.5 years ago we have seen many other new portable MP3 players introduced by many small and large companies. Just like the Rio, most of them use some form of flash memory card to store the MP3 files. Beyond playing MP3s and the standard features you find on any portable CD player, many of them offer features such as equalization, voice recording and FM radio. The price has also started to drop and many now offer more than 32 MB and in most cases they can also be upgraded to add more memory. Some players that have just been released or announced also feature support for formats other than MP3. These include the MS Windows Media Format (WMF), AAC, ATRAC3 (same format that the MiniDisc uses) and some of them even allow you to upgrade the firmware to support other formats in the future. This is important for buyers who expect they will buy music online in the future, since it’s quite possible one of the other formats will be the dominant format instead of MP3. If you use intend to use the MP3 player to only get the music that’s available for free on the Internet and/or from the CDs that you bought, then the lack of upgradeable firmware shouldn’t be any concern. According to analysts, even 3-5 years from now only sales of digital music is expected to represent only a fraction (a few percent) of the total music industry sales and at the moment only a fraction of all music available on CDs are also available online through legitimate commercial venues.