The biggest name in portable music today is Apple’s iPod. With two new versions of the iPod, the 20 GB and 40 GB versions, Apple has maintained their dominance of the MP3 player market. However, there is plenty of competition for Apple, especially if you don’t want to spend over $230 for your music player. Before we spend any money on an MP3 player, let’s understand what makes an MP3 player cool to have. First, depending on the memory capacity of the MP3 player, you can take a ton of music wherever you go. Some of the least expensive MP3 players come with 64 or 128 MB of storage. Assuming that an average song requires about 3.5 MB, a budget-minded 128 MB MP3 player can store around 36 songs which should be around 3 albums of songs. The larger MP3 players, such as the aforementioned iPods, use really tiny hard drives to store over thousands of songs (20 GB yields about 5700 songs). While the hard drive-based models have higher capacity, they tend to skip when bounced around a lot (jogging, exercising, etc). The smaller models often use flash memory making them a good choice for the workout crowd. The idea is that you can take either a few precious albums or your entire music catalog, depending on your budget and needs, wherever you go. To play your MP3’s in the car, consider using a wireless FM transmitter. Just plug the transmitter into the headphone jack of the MP3 player, select one of the preset FM frequencies and tune your radio to that frequency. It’s a little like having your own radio station – well, at least you can control the playlist and keep it commercial free.
|
