Evolution of MP3 Players

The earliest precursors to portable digital audio players were portable CD players and mini disk players. The Eiger Labs MPMan F10, a 32 MB portable digital player, was one of the earliest non-mechanical digital audio players in the American market and was released in 1998.

The first big selling Digital Audio Player (DAP) was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, intro­duced in September 1998. The huge success of the Rio player brought about a large amount of interest and investment in the digital music sec­tor. Other early DAPs included Sensory Science's Rave MP2100, the l-Jam IJ-100, and the Creative Labs Nomad. These portables were small and light, and could hold around 7 to 20 songs at normal 128 Kbps com­pression, and had compact flash memories for storage.

By 2000 when USB ports had gained popularity and were increasingly used to transfer data, digital audio players came integrat­ed with them. At around this time a company called Remote Solutions made a significant improvement in the storage problems faced by DAPs by using a laptop hard drive for storing songs rather than the low-capacity flash memory. The Personal Jukebox (PJB-100) had 4.8 GB of storage space, and held about 1,200 songs. This was the beginning of what would be called the jukebox segment of digi­tal audio players. This seg­ment eventually went onto become the domi­nant one in MP3 players.

Apple Computers then released their iconic iPod in 2001, along with the iTunes music download service. They also released versions that could hold over 30 GB of data including images and music files. This opened the floodgates of the industry and the market was soon inundated with players offering various storage capacities and also recording and playback capabilities.
In a reversal of sorts, with advances in flash memory technolo­gies, companies today are heading back to flash storage from solid state storage devices. The recently released iPod Nano has up to 4 GB of flash-based storage capacity.

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.