How It Works: Hardware MP3 Players

MP3 Everywhere

It seems as if every company that makes home audio equipment (not to mention a host of computer peripheral vendors) makes or sells at least one MP3 player these days. You'll find portable players that let you take the music with you, components that bring MP3 files to your stereo, and even hard-drive-based units that replace your car stereo.

Thanks in part to the music file-sharing phenomenon Napster, digital music has become more mainstream, and MP3 hardware sales reflect that. Ric Dube, an analyst with Webnoize, a digital-entertainment research firm, estimates that sales of portable players increased about 150 percent from the beginning until the end of 2000.

The first widely available player came from the company then known as Diamond and now known as SonicBlue. Its portable player, the Rio, tested the market (and the limits of the law, after the Recording Industry Association of America sued the company to prevent the player's sale). Though the music industry argued that the mere existence of MP3 players encouraged music piracy, it failed to prove its case, and the floodgates opened. Now consumers can choose from a wide variety of units--in all shapes, sizes, and memory capacities--from traditional consumer audio companies such as Sony and RCA, as well as PC hardware makers such as Intel and Creative Labs.

Consider Storage, Then Price

Portable players are the most common, and most affordable, hardware MP3 player option. You'll find a wide variety of products, but the most important factor to consider when you're contemplating a purchase is storage: How much does the player have, and what kind does it use? More storage obviously equates to longer play times; assume you'll get about 1 minute of music per 1 megabyte of storage.

On the low end, SonicBlue's Rio players and D-Link's DMP-CD100 ship with 32MB of onboard flash memory and cost less than $200. SonicBlue, Creative, and others also make portables with 64MB of flash memory that cost between $200 and $300. If you want to add more memory, you must buy fairly expensive flash memory cards, which can run you $100 for 32MB. Sony products such as the $300 pen-size Vaio Music Clip use Sony's less-expensive Memory Stick for storage.

Iomega and Sensory Science make players that use Iomega's PocketZip (formerly known as Clik) removable media, which costs $10 for 40MB. For those who want serious storage, Creative's $500 Nomad JukeBox and Archos's $350 Jukebox 6000 MP offer a far cheaper option: They store music files on internal 6GB laptop hard drives--enough space to hold hundreds of hours of music.

Take Your Home and Car Stereos Digital

For your existing home stereo system, you can get players with a lot of memory and music management options. Players from Request Multimedia and Sima have hard disk storage options at 10GB, 20GB, and even 40GB capacities, as well as built-in CD players that also encode the MP3 files without requiring a PC, with prices that start at about $800. Many of these players also include ethernet networking ports so that you can download music off the Internet using the PC and easily move the files to the component; some also allow you to connect the device to a TV set so you can use an on-screen interface to better manage hundreds of files.

But you don't play music just on a portable or on your stereo; you probably also want to listen to music wherever you are, whatever you're doing. For your car, MTE's Neo and Aiwa's CDC-MP3 are in-dash, hard-drive-based players. More car players are on the way from traditional car stereo companies and the big names in the MP3 market such as SonicBlue. You download your music collection from your PC onto the player's hard disk through a USB connection and then keep the unit in the car until you build up enough new MP3s to make it worth the hassle to lug it back into the house to download more.

Your personal digital assistant can also become a portable music player, with InnoGear's $259 MiniJam MP3 Player for the Handspring and PocketPyro's $299 Pyro for the Palm. You can even get mobile phones and digital cameras that have MP3 capabilities built in.

Webnoize's Dube says that in the coming years you can expect to see MP3 players built into almost any device you can link to a PC. Of course, most of these will fail, but that doesn't mean the manufacurers won't try. Also expect to see more (and cheaper) storage, faster processors, and more features, including portable players that can encode as well as decode.

Michael Gowan is a freelance technology author based in the San Francisco Bay Area.