MP3 player

An MP3 player is an electronic device that can play MP3 digital audio files. It is a type of digital audio player (DAP), or portable media player. Most players play more than the MP3 file format, such as Windows Media Audio (WMA), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Vorbis, FLAC, Speex and Ogg.

A Creative MuVo (2002–2009), a small solid-state MP3 player in a USB Flashdrive form-factor

History

Digital audio player
Further information: Portable media player

In 1981, Kane Kramer filed for a UK patent for the IXI, the first Digital Audio Player.[1] UK patent 2115996 was issued in 1985, and U.S. Patent 4,667,088 was issued in 1987.[2] The player was as big as a credit card and had a small LCD screen, navigation and volume buttons and would have held at least 8MB of data in a solid-state bubble memory chip with a capacity of 3½ minutes' worth of audio. Plans were made for a 10-minute stereo memory card and the system was at one time fitted with a hard drive which would have enabled over an hour of recorded digital music. Later Kramer set up a company to promote the IXI and five working prototypes were produced with 16-bit sampling at 44.1 kilohertz with the pre-production prototype being unveiled at the APRS Audio/Visual trade exhibition in October 1986. However, in 1988 Kramer's failure to raise the £60,000 required to renew the patent meant it entering the public domain, but he still owns the designs.

In 1987 a German research institute, part of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, started the research program for coding music with the high quality and low bit-rate sampling at its institute. The project was controlled by an expert in mathematics and electronics, Karlheinz Brandenburg.

The Listen Up Player was released in 1996 by Audio Highway. It could store up to an hour of music, but despite getting an award at CES only 25 copies were made.[3][4]

MP3 player

MP3 was introduced as an audio coding standard in 1994. It was based on several audio data compression techniques, including the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), FFT and psychoacoustic methods.[5]

In 1997, the world's first MP3 player, the MPMan F10, was developed by a South Korean company SaeHan Information Systems.[6][7] The world's first car audio hard drive-based MP3 player was also released in 1997 by MP32Go and was called the MP32Go Player. It consisted of a 3GB IBM 2.5" hard drive that was housed in a trunk-mounted enclosure connected to the car's radio system. It retailed for $599 and was a commercial failure.[8] The first handheld portable MP3 player released on the American market was the Eiger Labs F10, a 32MB imported version of the MPMan F10 that appeared in the summer of 1998. It was a very basic unit and wasn't user-expandable, though owners could upgrade the memory to 64MB by sending the player back to Eiger Labs with a check for $69.00 plus $7.95 shipping.

Another early MP3 player needed was the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia, introduced in September 1998. The Rio was a big success during the Christmas 1998 season as sales significantly exceeded expectations, spurring interest and investment in digital music. The RIAA soon filed a lawsuit alleging that the device abetted illegal copying of music, but Diamond won a legal victory on the shoulders of Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios and MP3 players were ruled legal devices. Eiger Labs and Diamond and went on to establish a new segment in the portable audio player market and the following year saw several new manufacturers enter this market.

Other early MP3 portables include Sensory Science's Rave MP2100, the I-Jam IJ-100 and the Creative Labs Nomad. These portables were small and light, but only held enough memory to hold around 7 to 20 songs at normal 128kbit/s compression rates. They also used slower parallel port connections to transfer files from PC to player, necessary as most PCs then used the Windows 95 and NT operating systems, which did not support the then newer USB connections, at least well. As more users migrated to Windows 98 by 2000, all players went USB.

In 1999 the Personal Jukebox (PJB-100) designed by Compaq and released by Hango Electronics Co from had 4.8GB, which held about 1,200 songs, and invented what would be called the jukebox segment of digital music portables. This segment eventually became the dominant type of digital music player.

Also at the end of 1999 the first in-dash MP3 player appeared. The Empeg Car and Rio Car (renamed after it was acquired by SONICblue and added to its Rio line of MP3 products) offered players in several capacities ranging from 5GB to 28GB. The unit didn't catch on as SONICblue had hoped, though, and was discontinued in the fall of 2001.

There are several types of MP3 players:

  • Devices that play CDs. Often, they can be used to play both audio CDs and homemade data CDs containing MP3 or other digital audio files.
  • Pocket devices. These are solid-state devices that hold digital audio files on internal or external media, such as memory cards. These are generally low-storage devices, typically ranging from 128MB to 1GB, which can often be extended with additional memory. As they are solid state and do not have moving parts, they can be very resilient. Such players are generally integrated into USB keydrives.
  • Devices that read digital audio files from a hard drive. These players have higher capacities, ranging from 1.5GB to 100GB, depending on the hard drive technology. At typical encoding rates, this means that thousands of songs—perhaps an entire music collection—can be stored in one MP3 player. Apple's popular iPod player is the best-known example.

Equipment

Generally speaking, MP3 players are portable, employing internal or replaceable batteries and headphones, and may be connected to car and home stereos via a wireless connection such as bluetooth. Some MP3 players also include FM radio tuners.

Many MP3 players can encode directly to MP3 or other digital audio format directly from a line in audio signal (radio, voice, etc.).

Devices such as CD players can be connected to the MP3 player (using the USB port) in order to directly play music from the memory of the player without the use of a computer.

Modular MP3 keydrive players are composed of two detachable parts: the head (or reader/writer) and the body (the memory). They can be independently obtained and upgradable (one can change the head or the body; i.e. to add more memory).

gollark: You can't usefully encrypt it, unless the user is required to enter a password or the OS does FDE-type things.
gollark: It seems kind of odd, but not incredibly bad.
gollark: So, that seems unrelated to your complaint about backup recovery codes being stored unencrypted, and also what?
gollark: ... how do you want them to protect them against things running with the same permissions on the same computer, exactly?
gollark: This seems dubious.

See also

References
  1. "Briton Invented iPod, DRM and On-Line Music in 1979". Wired.com. 2008-09-09. Archived from the original on 2017-03-27. Retrieved 2017-04-03.
  2. "Patent US4667088 - Portable data processing and storage system - Google Patents". Google.com. 1983-07-01. Archived from the original on 2016-12-29. Retrieved 2017-04-03.
  3. "Teknik vi minns – 14 prylar som var före sin tid". idg.se. Archived from the original on 13 April 2018. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
  4. Ha, Peter (25 October 2010). "All-TIME 100 Gadgets - TIME". Archived from the original on 20 October 2017. Retrieved 8 May 2018 – via content.time.com.
  5. Guckert, John (Spring 2012). "The Use of FFT and MDCT in MP3 Audio Compression" (PDF). University of Utah. Retrieved 14 July 2019.
  6. "Bragging rights to the world's first MP3 player". cnet.com. 25 January 2005. Archived from the original on 31 December 2017. Retrieved 8 May 2018.
  7. Parc, J. 2019, “Between Technological Advancement and Protectionism: The Bumpy Evolution from MP3 Players to Smartphones in Korea”, Kritika Kultura 32: 6-13.
  8. "Ten years old: the world's first MP3 player". theregister.com. 10 March 2008. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
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