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Thursday, June 4, 2009

History of MP3 Players

By Sampson Zelder

Portable audio players are any mobile devices that are able to play digital music tracks. These can include MP3 players, cell phones or mini-disk players. The majority of portable audio players relate to those devices able to play music files, although technically a handheld digital voice recorder could also be considered a portable audio device.

These days younger people tend to take portable audio players for granted, but theyre a relatively recent addition. Not so long ago portable music for previous generations used to exist only in the form of AM/FM radio. Back in the early 1970s 8-track cassettes were all the rage. They looked a little like VHS video tapes, but back then they were considered to be a huge step for portable music. These days we can look back and realize that the technology was basic at best. When songs ended the cassette had to shift to the next track, which left several seconds of silence between the seams that were usually accompanied by the clunking of the internal mechanisms shifting.

During the 1980s the 8-track had morphed into the cassette tape. These were smaller and had far more capacity to hold more songs. These became the first real form of portable audio. While boomboxes were manufactured with inbuilt cassette players through the late 1980s and 1990s, by the mid-1980a the first forms of walkman player emerged. These allowed people to play one cassette at a time in a rather bulky, but portable player and listen through headphone-speakers.

In 1988 compact discs arrived in force on the market. People quickly realized that these digital discs didnt need to be rewound or fast-forwarded to find a track you wanted and the digital recordings meant higher quality music enjoyment too. Compact discs also didnt suffer from the tape damage that cassettes were prone to, nor could they wear out or unwind off the cassette spools.

The only real benefit that cassettes held over compact discs was that they didnt skip or jolt when the player was bumped. CD players using laser light to read each track could easily skip if the player was jostled even a little. This made them undesirable for people wanting to listen to music while cycling, skating or jogging and the cassette walkman remained the preferred option for these people.

As computers began to enter most homes for personal use, digital music and smaller memory storage devices meant that the technology surrounding digital audio jumped ahead in leaps and bounds. The MP3 file allowed people to listen to music through their computer speakers.

The MP3 player allowed people to store entire music libraries on the one players memory and also gave active people the perfect accompaniment for their sporting activities. Immune to the movement of jogging or active sports, MP3 players were light-weight and very small, which made them extremely portable and convenient. The ability to store such a vast amount of music also meant that their popularity was guaranteed. - 18418

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