Raves have been occurring for many years across the world. They usually happen in large warehouses, miles away from civilisation and have an engrained drug culture. One thing they are famous for however is the noise, ear shattering, high decible noise that makes the whole venue shake.

However a new craze that started in Europe and has now made it to the States is the silent rave. That’s right, a rave where not a sound can be heard. The idea is that everyone who attends the rave brings their iPod or MP3 player, and dances along to their own music.

As weird as it sounds, it’s a concept that has really caught on. Last month a silent rave took place in New York’s union square, where more than a thousand ‘silent ravers’ showed up and raved the night away until 1 am, on the street, in full view of passers by.

Mr. Wesson is an exchange student from London, and he organised the New York silent rave:

It sounds sort of phony, but it really is a liberating experience. You wouldn’t just dance on the street on your own at any time, so the fact that you do it at this event, it’s just really fun.

One thing that always been the scourge of the raver however is the authorities. Gaining approval from the authorities for a silent rave is something that remains a grey area.

He said he didn’t get approval from police for the New York event because he hadn’t anticipated such a massive turnout, but police did show up anyway.

Police only turned up two hours into it, and as far as I know no arrests were made. People were just dancing. They weren’t doing anything wrong. The police stood by and some of them even started dancing themselves.

The MP3 player has been with us for ten years now, and it’s become an integral part of our pop culture. We use it when we ride our bike, go to the gym, sit on the bus, type on the computer and whenever we want to drown out the world around us. It’s as if we’ve never been without the little box that single handedly killed off personal stereos, personal CD players and mini-disc players.

It almost never happened though. The MP3 player was very nearly stopped in its tracks before it even got started, and it was the player’s versatility that almost proved its downfall.

California based company Diamond released the Rio PMP300 in 1998. It featured 32MB of storage and was the first MP3 player released in the United States that was manufactured by a company with a US office.

This is where it all so very nearly went wrong.

The Recording Industry Association of America saw the device as a direct threat to the whole music industry. They applied for a restraining order barring sale of the device in the US, claiming that it contravened the Home Recording Act from 1992, because owners of the device would be able to copy music from one format to another. Incredibly a US court granted a temporary order, blocking the sale of the Rio.

They did however retract the order after they had decided that Diamond could not be held responsible for the actions of consumers who bought their MP3 player.

Once this ruling had been made, the MP3 player market exploded in the US. Accompanied by the fact that people were going online very quickly in America, file sharing sites sprang up to feed the MP3 player owner’s market.

Music sharing on a grand scale was born.

Then came Apple, and in 2001 the iPod took the market on to the next level.

Japan may be the home of technology and the source of all of the best inventions of recent years, but the Japanese government is looking to introduce a tax on MP3 players. This tax, if successfully imposed, would see MP3 players and the newly released DVRs increase in price for the gadget hungry nation.

The report was published in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper. It claims that the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan is looking to introduce a tax system whereby MP3 player manufacturers would have to pay a fee, or royalty charge, to the music copyright holders to make up for the deemed loss of profits they would incur as a result of the digital download format.

Although no figures have been decided upon, it is expected that the tax may be as high as several hundred Japanese Yen per MP3 player. This cost would then of course be passed on to the customer.

Japan has taxed other digital recording devices in the past, with cassette players and mini-disc players carrying a tax of several percent since 1993.

The government in Japan attempted to extend the law to cover digital media devices in 2005, but failed.

The Music Business Group in the UK is attempting to do the same thing in the UK by persuading the British government. If Japan is successful, the MBG will gain encouragement for their proposals.

Apple’s iPod has long since been THE MP3 player to have. The name has become synonymous with digital music and everyone interested in music on the go either owns, or has at least considered owning one.

However Apple recently skipped on a few paces with the release of the iPhone, a touch pad iPod mixed with a mobile phone. The iPhone is more of a personal computer than an iPod, capable of browsing the web, sending emails, taking photos, making phone calls and yes, even playing digital music.

But will the iPhone spark an end to the common MP3 player? The type of technology that plays music, and only plays music?

Hailed by many, including ‘The Gadget Show’, and the best piece of technology of the year the iPhone was released to great praise and huge public demand, yet its saturation hasn’t quite reached the levels of the iPod. Nor in fact has it proved as popular as other mobile handsets such as the Sony Walkman range, or Nokia’s impressive N-95.

No, what is really holding the iPhone back, despite the hefty price tag of course, is the fact that the handset itself is tied in to O2, when a great many potential customers are already involved in contracts with other network providers such as Vodafone and Orange.

Remarkable piece of kit that the iPhone is, for it to truly be successful in the UK and to reach the kind of saturation levels that the iPod has enjoyed, it surely must be opened up to be cross network compatible.

Although this bank holiday Monday isn’t the ideal day to be thinking of exercise and of shedding those Winter pounds, it might give you comfort to know that MP3 players can help you get fit and shape up for the Summer month’s lazing around on the beach.

Melanie Shernofsky is a group fitness co-ordinator at the Mansfield Club in Montreal, Canada. She says that clients in their fitness centre rely heavily on MP3 players and the inspirational power of music to help them through a difficult routine.

Nine out of 10 people workout with an iPod or MP3 player.

Although it has to be acknowledged that MP3 players haven’t created the surge in fitness fanatics using music to help through routines. For the last few decades music has been used in roller rinks and aerobics classes, whether it be Buddy Holly, the Pointer Sisters or Amy Winehouse.

Music helps people concentrate on what they are doing and block out the physical pain of exercise.

Jim Gavin is a clinical psychologist of health at Concordia University:

Music takes us away from the physical discomfort and the process of exercise itself. Music tends to separate us from what we are physically doing and leads us further away from how we are feeling.

Psychologically people find it easier to work out to music as it makes the time fly by quicker and detracts from the monotony of the task in hand, though there is no data to suggest that listening to music can make you work out for longer.

Salford based band ‘Ting Tings’ have been chosen to provide the music for Apple’s next iPod and iTunes TV advert.

The track is called ‘Shut Up and Let Me Go’ and features on the Salford based band’s debut album, entitled ‘We Started Nothing’; released on May 19th.

The Ting Tings are made up of two members, Jules De Martino and Katie White. They got together to form the Ting Tings in 2006 while they lived in Islington Mill, Salford, Manchester.

They are set to release their debut album, We Started Nothing, in May 2008.

Previous singles from the Ting Tings have failed to chart in the UK, but with the boost a TV commercial for Apple will give them, expect to hear a lot of the Salford band in the coming months.

The TV commercial will air in the UK and across 22 countries in Europe in the next few weeks, and is already being shown now in the USA.

Previously Apple has used bands such as Feist, CSS and Brendan Benson for adverts for their iPod.

That’s the rather surprising news coming from Australian police. They claim that MP3 players can be responsible for deaths in the shape of pedestrians knocked down by cars while crossing the road.

So serious are the Australian police force that they are running advertisements in the shape of hard hitting poster campaigns, across New South Wales warning of the dangers of listening to your iPod while crossing the road.

They want music lovers to avoid changing tracks on their MP3 players while they are out on the street so that they pay more attention to the dangers of the traffic around them.

The posters show what appear to be dead bodies lying on the roads, marked in an outline with a white iPod cable in place of the typical white chalk outline.

The Chief Traffic Services Commander of New South Wales, John Hartley, claims that the increasing amount of MP3 players and iPods that are being sold and used across Australia means that people should be made more aware of the dangers of using them while out and about. The campaign aims to target motorists as well as pedestrians.

Strangely enough John Hartley didn’t reveal any road death stats that were attributed to MP3 players.

Freddie Tall is nine years old, and after being born with Down’s Syndrome has struggled to hear normal speech throughout his life. Now, thanks to a new style hearing aid that transmits sound directly through his skull and into his inner ear, he is finally able to hear for the first time in his life.

Freddie underwent an operation to have the device fitted, allowing him to experience sound for the first time.

Freddie past a hearing test when he was born, but his condition caused his hearing to worsen, as he got older, meaning he never developed proper speech.

His mother, Annabel said:

He couldn’t hear most normal speech.

His speech was extremely delayed, even for a child with Down’s Syndrome and he couldn’t even say ‘yes’.

Now Freddie has had bilateral bone anchored hearing aids (BAHAs) fitted into his head. The incredible devices have allowed Freddie to discover music for the first time, which he listens to by plugging his MP3 player directly into his hearing aid.

His mother says the improvements in his hearing have been incredible since he has had the device fitted.

Now he can say ‘yes’ as clearly as you or me, and in a matter of months he has developed a vocabulary of hundreds of words he could not speak before. It’s been amazing.

The incredible technology that is the BAHA system sends signals directly through the person’s skull, into their inner ear and the cochlea.

Freddie’s school work has improved because he now hear his teacher clearly with the aid of a device that broadcasts her voice, and plugs directly into his hearing aid.

It’s Freddie’s love of music that his mother says is the best thing.

He absolutely loves music. He always quite liked it but now he loves it because he can hear singing and all the other things he couldn’t before.

At Christmas it was just lovely to see him singing, because he had never sung.

To test whether the aids are working in the morning I turn them on and put my ear on Freddie’s head so I can hear what he is hearing - it sounds like a radio.

And we can plug him directly into music systems - the first time he heard music there was such a look of wonder on his face.

They size doesn’t matter, but bragging about your size when it’s not quite as big as you’re claiming can land you in hot water. That’s just what happened to Creative when they ‘misrepresented’ the size of their MP3 players, and the number of files they were capable of holding.

Apparently they’d exaggerated about their size by as much as 50%. As a result, anyone who purchased a Creative MP3 player in the US between May 5th 2001 and April 30th 2008 could receive a financial settlement.

Creative have now been ordered to make disclosures on the size and capacity of their models. They also have to offer customers who had purchased their players between those dates the opportunity to purchase a new 1GB MP3 player for half price, or if they prefer to receive a 20% discount on any of their products.

Any consumer wishing to claim must do so by August 7th, and they’re entitled to one claim per player bought.

According to Creative:

Creative has denied and continues to deny each and all of plaintiffs’ claims, and denies that anyone has been harmed or deserves compensation.

Seagate previously had to settle over exaggerated claims on the size of the capacity on their hard drives.

If you’ve ever wanted your MP3 player to be a little more, well, robotic, then the new Wall-E robot MP3 player may be just what you’re looking for.

Robot lovers everywhere will be able to listen to their MP3 music while their robot dances in front of them. Naturally this Wall-E comes from the people at Disney, and is the star of the latest Pixar movie, so you can expect this MP3 player to be a serious hit this Christmas.

Wall-E is an animated MP3 Player, who takes the guise of a fully functioning robot. His name, Wall-E, stands for:

Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth Class

He’s fairly cheap too in the US, at just $25. Considering there is also a full functioning $190 Ultimate Wall-E robot also available, the 8-inch MP3 player, dancing robot is something of a bargain.

Wall-E plus into your iPod and acts as a dancing robotic speaker system.

Your children will want for nothing else!