MPEG this you greedy WAV files!Jul 26 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Portable MP3 players are a blast and easy to understand. But first you need to know what an MP3 is...
Yes, indeed, WHAT is a portable MP3 player?! Lately, upon myself buying a brand new one, there's been a lot of 'huh?'s and 'what?'s. The question wasn't so much what is an MP3 player, but rather, what is an MP3? So I'll tackle both of these. If you're looking for a review on Choosing an MP3 player, please look in that category, I won't write anything about that due to such a huge number of possibilities and options. The digital sound revolution, MP3 is to WAV as JPG is to BMP. If you don't understand that, don't worry, I shall explain. A BMP file is a picture file on a computer, standing for bitmap. A bitmap is perfect color quality, but, because of it's utter precision, the file is large. Standard BMPs can be a couple megabytes, that can add up very quickly on a computer. So JPGs came around, a way to remove certain elements of the picture to reduce the filesize greatly with minimal loss of quality. Simply put, BMPs offer perfect quality, JPGs offer fair quality, but much less hard drive space. This battle waged on into the music department, people were introduced to a wonder, the WAV file. A WAV is a digitally recorded sound stored on a computer. Later on, this became used to actually record an entire song on a computer in WAV format. The WAV file is the BMP of music, no loss of quality at all, but they're ridiculously large files. Well people needed a hero. Only 10-15 songs could be stored at once without taking up your entire computer's hard drive space. Well a little group from Germany came up with a brilliant strategy. The Motion Pictures Experts Group set out to fix this problem. We found our hero. MPEG released the MPEG file format. A wonderful way to condense video and audio by taking out visual or audible elements that can not be detected by normal human senses. Specifically for WAV, they released the MPEG-Layer 3 format. And if you look carefully, you don't have to wonder what MP3 is short for anymore. MP3 introduced a brand spanking new way to condense WAV files to 1/11 their normal size. By removing inaudible frequencies from the songs, the file size could be greatly reduced. By doing this, a certain amount of sound quality is lost, but if used appropriately, the difference is undetectable. All you needed was a program, a computer, and some CDs. Ripping began (Ripping: The process of digitally recording songs from a CD or other audio source onto a computer file.). There were now many choices to make. MP3's offered options towards file size versus quality. You could select from different settings to choose how much quality you wanted compared to the file size. Obviously, the higher the quality, the bigger the file size. Options in numbers like 32, 64, 96, 128, 160, 192, and 256 came around. (Those all stand for the number of kilobytes per second transferred in a song. kb/s) 128 was a great compromise, virtually CD quality music with about one megabyte per minute of a song. Above 128 it became pretty much impossible to hear the loss of quality. Below 128 is where it did start to decrease in quality, but much smaller files. 128 was the happy median for a long time. But people got tired of it. Now 128 was too big a file. We wanted technology to save us again. This brought about several people willing to try and take away MPEG's monopoly. Most well known was Microsoft, introducing the WMA, or Windows Media Audio. They made boasts such as WMA 64 quality sound is equal to MP3 128! Hah! And the battle waged on, later I will discuss WMA versus MP3 on computers and portable MP3 players. So we had digital music. Yay? Nay, they could only be played on computers! Not everyone had a CD burner, myself included, and wanted an answer. Music companies saw this need, AND the need for a skip-free player for joggers and runners. CD players can only offer so much skip-free capability, so what was the answer? Use a digital file that plays with no moving parts whatsoever. MP3. And so became the birth of the portable MP3 player. Simply put, a portable MP3 player is literally that, a small little player that is capable of receiving songs from your digital computer song collection, and playing them through normal headphones and batteries on the move. The requirements for an MP3 player were rather vast, and only a small amount of disc space was available to make it portable at all. Again, I will discuss this later. MP3 players hook up to your computer in various ways, USB and parallel port being the biggest. You are usually supplied with the player, the connection cables, and a program to transfer songs to your player. You simply load it up, pick the songs, and click 'upload'. The entire process is fairly simple once you get the hang of it, and very worthwhile. MP3 players offer skip-free running abilities, and the ease of being able to simply delete or add songs without erasing everything off the disc. MP3 players began to take off as the minidisk revolution became old and obsolete. That's really all there is to know! Again though, that's just what they are, if you want advice on picking an MP3 player for your needs, you've read the wrong article. Portable MP3 players are easy to understand, but you need to know what an MP3 is! And MP3s are complicated to learn and understand, but I hope I've done a fair job here. Unfortunately I can't describe everything, and if you have further question, I would be more than happy to answer anything I can by e-mail. You can find my address in my member profile. Now, for people who know about this stuff, and have begun, here's some interesting tidbits regarding the future of MP3s and WMA. WMA claims to have better sound quality at a smaller bitrate (that level of quality; 96, 128, 160..etc.). Therefore, better sound with smaller files. I was very skeptical at first about this, there was only so much that could be done. So I tried it out, my MP3 collection is all encoded at 128 kb/s, CD quality sound. But those were big for my portable MP3 player, only being able to get 9-10 songs on a disc. So I converted a bunch to 96 for more songs on the disc, still keeping my 128s. MP3 96 offered fair sound with good storage capabilities, but I wasn't 100% satisfied. I looked around a lot and found WMA. I tried an experiment, I converted one song to MP3 96, WMA 64, and WMA 96. I listened to them all and compared on computer and portable MP3 player. WMA 64 was not good enough, however, WMA 96 sounded just as good as MP3 128. I tried it with other songs and was happy. I tried WMA 128 and have actually noticed sound is a bit drier, which brought me to a conclusion; use both. For CD burning purposes and computer listening, I use my MP3 128 files. Good quality from a trusted source. For my MP3 player, I use WMA 96. It offers good quality, a bit drier than MP3s, but still good sound with little disc space. Go out and give WMA a shot, you may not like it yourself, but in a world of constant variable and always-new technology, MP3 will be dead fairly soon. Which leaves me my last comment, if you choose to buy a portable MP3 player and do not read up on it at all, make sure you get one that will support future file formats. Your money will depend on it. Thank you for reading, this is still very vague in the MP3 world, but as I said, I will be happy to answer any questions about them! Boy, that was hard...  |
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