Digital Audio Players aka MP3 Players

Introduction
Digital music has gained so much popularity, almost everyday we see a new portable audio player model being launched in the market. What is the latest today, a new entrant will outdate that tomorrow. So, in this age of sharp competition, the ball is in the customer's court.

The new face of portable music is Digital Audio Player (DAP), com­monly called MP3 player. MP3 is an acronym for MPEG layer 3, which is a compressed audio for­mat. A compression ratio of up to 12 to 1 compression is possible, which produces high sound quality.

These tiny little players that were once considered too expen­sive, have suddenly started making more sense than ever before. With the penetration of computers every­where, these players are the next in line to be accepted by the mass for their dose of music on the move.

For the ease of discussion, let us categorize these players into two sections - flash-based and hard drive-based players. This is because there is no direct comparison possible between the two, as the technologies used is different, resulting in disparate features and capacities.

A lot of improvements have taken place since DAPs were first introduced in the market. The capacity, for instance, has increased for flash-based players. Other additions to these players include the ability to display text files, pictures and even video. In fact, some of these devices are already beginning to blur the demarcations between portable digital audio players and the all-in-one portable enter­tainment hand-helds. A few high-end devices in this genre are including voice recorder, FM player and also a USB 2.0 stor­age device.