Hard Drive-based Players

Flash-based players can offer all the comforts of having a portable digital audio player that is rugged and can withstand the roughest of shocks, but it can never offer the capacity of a hard drive-based player. Hard drive (HDD) players can hold your entire music collection, and more. So what is the latest in the HDD-based portable players' scene? Well, a lot, we must say. Let's find out.

Display
Hard Drive-based Players with OLED screen having 262K color depth is now available. However, most of the players still feature the regular LCD screens and some changing lights. Just two-line LCD screen is also found. This, although serves the purpose, view­ing tracks on the player becomes cumbersome since you can only check two track names at a time when scrolling.

Playback
In fact the best product supports AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF, Audible formats. Most of the players sup­port only MP3, WMA, and in some cases, WAV playback.

Battery Type
Only a few players feature a removable Li-ion battery, which comes bundled with the player. Removable Li-ion battery packs are also available with a few products. Generally all the players come with regular internal Li-Ion batteries.

Extras
Most of the players have custom equalizer. A few have a game feature. Some of the sets allow playing video, viewing pho­tos and reading text files. Some players can act as USB hosts, which let you connect specific models of digital cameras directly to the players and transfer images to those. Generally, a pair of earphones with the player comes as a part of the package.

Performance
HDD-based portable audio players generally have to be used more carefully than flash-based players. This is because the HDD based players not only cost more, but are also more fragile due to moving parts. However, the newer generations of players are hell bent on proving this wrong.