The reason that you can carry thousands of songs around with on your MP3 player is because the music files are compressed. In order to compress the music, the number of bytes per song are drastically reduced. However, this does reduce the quality of the music slightly, but is described as ‘near-CD’ quality, and it is the compromise we make for the practicability and convenience of the MP3 player.

For example, the 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. The advantages are clear to see. Imagine carrying all of your MP3 music around with you in CD format!

The technology behind MP3 players is fascinating. All previous music players, such as; cassettes, CD’S and minidisks required moving parts, but MP3 players do not, as they use solid state memory.

The MP3 player is best described as a data storage device which allows information to be transferred from the computer to the device. Perhaps the most interesting point to be made about the technological advancement of MP3 players is that none of the components are revolutionary. Components such as; a data port, a microprocessor and playback controls were already in use with other music players. But what makes the MP3 player revolutionary is the combination of all these components so as to produce a truly innovative device.