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Samsung Electronics doesn't want you to have to choose between size and song storage capacity in your MP3 player. On Tuesday, the company launched the latest member of its Yepp line of MP3 digital music players, aimed at offering a compromise between some of the most desired aspects in these devices.

While small size and light weight are desirable in MP3 players, they often limit memory capacity and new memory cards can cost as much, or even more, than the player itself.

The launch of MP3 CD players last year solved the latter problem, enabling hundreds of songs to be stored in MP3 format on a CD, but the resulting players became too large to fit into most pockets and were heavy to carry.

The new CD-Yepp player, which will sell in South Korea for $193, uses 8-centimeter MP3 CDs and so offers a compromise in terms of size, weight and memory capacity. An 8-centimeter CD can hold about 200MB of information or roughly one third of the data that can be stored on a conventional 12-centimeter disc. This translates into about 50 songs.

The player features an electronic skipping protection system that can store up to 100 seconds of data in memory to guard against music interruption when the CD skips. Battery life is six hours.

The MCD-MP8 CD-Yepp measures 4.4 by 1.2 by 3.9 inches in size and weighs just over five ounces. Samsung says it has no immediate plans to sell the device outside South Korea.

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