One of my favorite techie investments has been an MP3 player. I love to put on my music and jam whilst I work. Most of these songs keep me energized or at least engaged in what I'm doing. How does this little box of sights and sounds work?
The MP3, or MPEG Audio Layer III, file format is a method of compressing files. Straight from the HSW article: "Consider that an average song is about four minutes long. On a CD, that song uses about 40 megabytes (MB), but uses only 4 MB if compressed through the MP3 format. On average, 64 MB of storage space equals an hour of music. A music listener who has an MP3 player with 1 GB (approximately 1,000 MB) of storage space can carry about 240 songs or the equivalent of about 20 CDs. Songs stored on traditional CDs are already decompressed, so it takes more CDs to store the same amount of songs. (Some CDs support MP3 files.)"
MP3 players can play more than just MP3 files! They can also play formats such as:
- WMA - Windows Media Audio
- WAV - Waveform Audio
- MIDI - Music Instrument Digital Interface.
- AAC - Advanced Audio Coding
- Ogg Vorbis - A free, open and un-patented music format
- ADPCM - Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation
- ASF - Advanced Streaming Format
- VQF - Vector Quantization Format
- ATRAC - Sony's Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding 3
It's all about portability.
Funny, when radio was invented and the amplifier was not, people needed to wear earphones to hear them. When I was a kid, people wanted big, blasting stereos. Now they're back to listening with earphones.
There's much more to the article than I cover here, of course. Have a little fun...let's learn together! Or maybe we can just listen to the podcast. (Is there one?)
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