A portable media player (PMP) (also including the related digital audio player (DAP)) is a portable
consumer electronics
Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic ( analog or digital) equipment intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications and recreation. Usuall ...
device capable of storing and playing
digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored on a
compact disc
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Oc ...
(CD),
Digital Video Disc
The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...
(DVD),
Blu-ray Disc (BD),
flash memory,
microdrive
The Microdrive is a registered trademark for miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots. The release of similar drives by other ...
, or
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
; most earlier PMPs used physical media, but modern players mostly use flash memory. In contrast, analogue
portable audio player
A portable audio player is a personal mobile device that allows the user to listen to recorded audio while mobile. Sometimes a distinction is made between a ''portable'' player, battery-powered and with one or more small loudspeakers, and a ''per ...
s play music from non-digital media that use
analogue media, such as
cassette tapes or
vinyl record
A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English), or simply a record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts nea ...
s.
Digital audio players (DAP) were often marketed as MP3 players even if they also supported other
file formats and media types. The PMP term was introduced later for devices that had additional capabilities such as
video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...
playback. Generally speaking, they are portable, employing internal or replaceable
batteries, equipped with a 3.5 mm
headphone jack
A phone connector, also known as phone jack, audio jack, headphone jack or jack plug, is a family of electrical connectors typically used for analog audio signals. A plug, the male connector, is inserted into the jack, the female connect ...
which can be used for
headphones or to connect to a
boombox,
shelf stereo system, or connect to
car audio and home
stereos wired or via a wireless connection such as
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...
. Some players also include
radio tuners,
voice recording and other features.
DAPs appeared in the late 1990s following the creation of the
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
codec in Germany. MP3-playing devices were mostly pioneered by
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eas ...
n startups, who by 2002 would control the majority of global sales. However the industry would eventually be defined by the popular
Apple iPod.
In 2006, 20% of Americans owned a PMP a figure strongly driven by the young, as more than half (54%) of American teens owned one as did 30% of young adults aged 18 to 34. In 2007, 210 million PMPs were sold worldwide, worth $19.5 billion.
[https://www.germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/publication/2252.pdf ] In 2008 video-enabled players would overtake audio-only players.
Increasing sales of
smartphone
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
s and
tablet computer
A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being com ...
s have led to a decline in sales of PMPs, leading to most devices being phased out, such as the iPod
Touch
In physiology, the somatosensory system is the network of neural structures in the brain and body that produce the perception of touch ( haptic perception), as well as temperature ( thermoception), body position (proprioception), and pain. It ...
on May 10, 2022, though certain flagship devices like the
Sony Walkman
Walkman, stylised as , is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term fo ...
are still in production. Portable DVD and BD players are still manufactured.
Types
![Expanium](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Expanium.jpg)
Digital audio players are generally categorised by storage media:
*Flash-based players: These are non-mechanical
solid state devices that hold digital
audio files
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, ofte ...
on internal
flash memory or removable flash media called
memory card
A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a so ...
s. Due to technological advances in
flash memory, these originally low-storage devices are now available commercially ranging up to 128 GB. Because they are solid state and do not have moving parts they require less battery power, are less likely to skip during playback, and may be more resilient to hazards such as dropping or fragmentation than hard disk-based players. Some of these may be styled just as
USB flash drive
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply ( interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A bro ...
s.
*
Hard drive-based players or digital jukeboxes: Devices that read digital audio files from a
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
(HDD). These players have higher capacities ranging up to 500 GB. At typical encoding rates, this means that tens of thousands of songs can be stored on one player. The disadvantages with these units is that a hard drive consumes more power, is larger and heavier and is inherently more fragile than solid-state storage, thus more care is required to not drop or otherwise mishandle these units.
*
MP3 CD/DVD players: Portable CD players that can decode and play MP3 audio files stored on CDs. Such players were typically a less expensive alternative than either the hard drive or flash-based players when the first units of these were released. The blank
CD-R
CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can be written once and read arbitrarily many times.
CD-R discs (CD-Rs) are readable by most CD readers manufactured prior to the i ...
media they use is very inexpensive, typically costing less than US$0.15 per disc. These devices have the feature of being able to play standard "Red book"
CD-DA
Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the ''Red Book'', one of a series of Rainbow Books (named ...
audio CDs. A disadvantage is that due to the low rotational disk speed of these devices, they are even more susceptible to skipping or other misreads of the file if they are subjected to uneven acceleration (shaking) during playback. The mechanics of the player itself however can be quite sturdy, and are generally not as prone to permanent damage due to being dropped as hard drive-based players. Since a CD can typically hold only around 700 megabytes of data a large library will require multiple disks to contain. However, some higher-end units are also capable of reading and playing back files stored on larger capacity DVD; some also have the ability to play back and display video content, such as movies. An additional consideration can be the relatively large width of these devices, since they have to be able to fit a CD.
*
Networked audio players: Players that connect via (WiFi) network to receive and play audio. These types of units typically do not have any local storage of their own and must rely on a server, typically a personal computer also on the same network, to provide the audio files for playback.
*
USB host
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
/
memory card
A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a so ...
audio players: Players that rely on USB flash drives or other memory cards to read data.
History
Today, every smartphone is a portable media player; however, prior to the smartphone explosion in the 2007-2012 time frame, a variety of handheld players were available to store and play music. The immediate predecessor in the market place of the digital audio player was the
portable CD player
A portable CD player is a portable audio player used to play compact discs. The first audio player released was the Discman D-50 by Sony.Lungu, R"History of the Portable Audio Player." 2008-11-27.
Features
The basic features of a portable CD ...
and prior to that, the
personal stereo
A personal stereo, or personal cassette player, is a portable audio player using an audiocassette player, battery power and in some cases an AM/FM radio. This allows the user to listen to music through headphones while walking, jogging or relax ...
. In particular,
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...
's
Walkman
Walkman, stylised as , is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for p ...
and
Discman
Discman was Sony's brand name for portable CD players. The first Discman, the Sony D-50 or D-5 (depending on region), was launched in 1984. The brand name changed to CD Walkman, initially for Japanese lineups launched between October 1997 and Ma ...
are the ancestors of digital audio players such as
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
's
iPod.
There are several types of MP3 players:
* Devices that play
CDs
The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in Octo ...
. 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 card
A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a so ...
s. 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
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
. 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.
Early digital audio players
British scientist
Kane Kramer
Kane Kramer is a British inventor and businessman. He is credited with the initial invention of the digital audio player, in 1979.
Invention of the DAP
In 1981 Kramer filed for a UK patent for his newly conceived digital audio player, the IXI ...
invented the first digital audio player,
which he called the
IXI. His 1979 prototypes were capable of approximately one hour of audio playback but did not enter commercial production. His UK patent application was not filed until 1981 and was issued in 1985 in the UK and 1987 in the US. 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.
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
hired Kramer as a consultant and presented his work as an example of
prior art
Prior art (also known as state of the art or background art) is a concept in patent law used to determine the patentability of an invention, in particular whether an invention meets the novelty and the inventive step or non-obviousness criteria ...
in the field of digital audio players during their litigation with
Burst.com almost two decades later. In 2008, Apple acknowledged Kramer as the inventor of the digital audio player
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 3 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.
The Listen Up Player was released in 1996 by Audio Highway, an American company led by
Nathan Schulhof. It could store up to an hour of music, but despite getting an award at CES 1997 only 25 copies were made. That same year
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...
developed the FlashPAC digital audio player which initially used AT&T
Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC) for music compression, but in 1997 switched to
AAC. At about the same time AT&T also developed an internal Web based music streaming service that had the ability to download music to FlashPAC. AAC and such music downloading services later formed the foundation for the Apple iPod and iTunes.
The first production-volume portable digital audio player was The Audible Player (also known as MobilePlayer, or Digital Words To Go) from
Audible.com
Audible is an American online audiobook and podcast service that allows users to purchase and stream audiobooks and other forms of spoken word content. This content can be purchased individually or under a subscription model where the user receiv ...
available for sale in January 1998, for US$200. It only supported playback of digital audio in Audible's proprietary, low-bitrate format which was developed for spoken word recordings. Capacity was limited to 4 MB of internal flash memory, or about 2 hours of play, using a custom rechargeable battery pack. The unit had no display and rudimentary controls.
The MP3 standard
MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
was introduced as an
audio coding standard in 1994. It was based on several
audio data compression
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressi ...
techniques, including the
modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT),
FFT
A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). Fourier analysis converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in the ...
and
psychoacoustic
Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of sound perception and audiology—how humans perceive various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated wit ...
methods.
The first portable MP3 player was launched in 1997 by
Saehan Information Systems, which sold its "
MPMan F10" player in parts of Asia in spring 1998. In mid-1998, the South Korean company licensed the players for North American distribution to Eiger Labs, which rebranded them as the EigerMan F10 and F20. The flash-based players were available in 32 MB or 64 MB (6 or 12 songs) storage capacity and had a LCD screen to tell the user the song currently playing. The 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 3 GB 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.
![Diamond Rio PMP300](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Diamond_Rio_PMP300.jpg)
MP3 became a popular standard format and as a result most digital audio players after this supported it and hence were often called "MP3 players". Noticeably, major technology companies did not catch on with the new technology, and instead young startups would come to dominate the early era of MP3 players. The
Rio PMP300
The Rio PMP300 is one of the first portable consumer MP3 digital audio players, and the first commercially successful one. Produced by Diamond Multimedia, it was introduced September 15, 1998 as the first in the "Rio" series of digital audio p ...
from
Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackS ...
was introduced in September 1998, a few months after the MPMan, and also featured a 32 MB storage capacity. It was a success during the holiday season, with sales exceeding expectations. Interest and investment in digital music were subsequently spurred from it. Because of the player's notoriety as the target of a major lawsuit,
the Rio is erroneously assumed to be the first digital audio player. 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
''Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.'', 464 U.S. 417 (1984), also known as the “Betamax case”, is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that the making of individual copies of complete television s ...
'' and MP3 players were ruled legal devices. Eiger Labs and Diamond went on to establish a new segment in the portable audio player market and the following year saw several new manufacturers enter this market. The player would be the start of the
Rio
Rio or Río is the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese word for "river". When spoken on its own, the word often means Rio de Janeiro, a major city in Brazil.
Rio or Río may also refer to:
Geography Brazil
* Rio de Janeiro
* Rio do Sul, a ...
line of players.
Other early MP3 portables include Sensory Science's Rave MP2100, the I-Jam IJ-100, the
Creative Labs Nomad and the
RCA Lyra. These portables were small and light, but had only enough memory to hold around 7 to 20 songs at normal 128 kbit/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
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...
and
NT operating systems, which did not have native support for
USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
connections. As more users migrated to
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...
by 2000, most players transitioned to USB. In 1999 the first
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
based DAP using a 2.5" laptop drive was made, the
Personal Jukebox
The Personal Jukebox (also known as ''PJB-100'' or ''Music Compressor'') was the first consumer hard drive-based digital audio player. Introduced in 1999, it preceded the Apple iPod, SanDisk Sansa, and other similar players. It was designed and d ...
(PJB-100) designed by
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
and released by
Hango Electronics Co with 4.8 GB storage, 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
The Empeg Car was one of the first in-car MP3 players developed. Originating in a personal project to build an in-car system that could perform MP3 playback in software, a British company called ''Empeg'' was formed in July 1998 to build a commerci ...
and Rio Car (renamed after it was acquired by
SONICblue
SONICblue Incorporated (NASDAQ:SBLU) was a public company based in Santa Clara, California. The firm was a manufacturer of home audio/video equipment with an estimated revenue of $100M - $250M and approximately 700 employees.
SONICblue first fil ...
and added to its Rio line of MP3 products) offered players in several capacities ranging from 5 to 28 GB. The unit didn't catch on as SONICblue had hoped, though, and was discontinued in the fall of 2001.
![Ipod backlight transparent](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Ipod_backlight_transparent.png)
For the next couple of years, there were particularly much output from
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eas ...
n companies, namely the startups
iRiver (brand of Reigncom),
Mpio
MPIO or Mpio ( Hangul: 엠피오) was a South Korean consumer electronics brand and company. Established in 1998 by Woo Jung-Ku, it was one of Korea's early manufacturers of MP3 players and was known for producing portable digital audio players, ...
(brand of DigitalWay) and
Cowon
Cowon Systems, Inc. (simply known as Cowon) is a South Korean consumer electronics and software corporation. The company’s initial focus was software development and microelectronics, specializing in speech synthesis and speech recognition tec ...
. At its peak, these Korean makers held as much as 40% world market share in MP3 players. These manufacturers however lost their way after 2004 as they failed to adapt to new
iPods - they were also overtaken by the South Korean giant
Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of the Samsung chaebol, a ...
by 2006.
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...
entered the digital audio player market in 1999 with the
Vaio Music Clip and Memory Stick
Walkman
Walkman, stylised as , is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for p ...
, however they were technically not MP3 players as it did not support the MP3 format but instead Sony's own
ATRAC format and
WMA. The company's first MP3-supporting Walkman player did not come until 2004. The new Walkman players were originally referred to as "Network Walkman", with the introduction of the NW-MS7. This DAP plays audio files using ATRAC compression stored on a removable
Memory Stick
The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage capacity an ...
. Over the years, various hard-drive-based and flash-based DAPs and PMPs have been released under the Walkman range, albeit MP3 support only came in 2004.
Designed by
Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of the Samsung chaebol, a ...
, the
Samsung YEPP
Yepp was Samsung Electronics' digital audio player brand until Samsung decided to retire most of their family brands in February 2011. From then on, their MP3 players were simply branded "Samsung" worldwide until they discontinued all of them i ...
line were first released in 1999 with the aim of making the smallest music players on the market. In 2000,
Creative released the 6GB hard drive based
Creative NOMAD
The NOMAD was a range of digital audio players designed and sold by Creative Technology Limited, and later discontinued in 2004. Subsequent players now fall exclusively under the MuVo and ZEN brands.
The NOMAD series consisted of two distinct bran ...
Jukebox. The name borrowed the
jukebox
A jukebox is a partially automated music-playing device, usually a coin-operated machine, that will play a patron's selection from self-contained media. The classic jukebox has buttons, with letters and numbers on them, which are used to sele ...
metaphor popularised by ''Remote Solution'', also used by ''Archos''. Later players in the Creative NOMAD range used
microdrive
The Microdrive is a registered trademark for miniature, 1-inch hard disks produced by IBM and Hitachi. These rotational media storage devices were designed to fit in CompactFlash (CF) Type II slots. The release of similar drives by other ...
s rather than laptop drives. In October 2000, South Korean software company
Cowon Systems released their first MP3 player, the CW100, under the brand name
iAUDIO. Since then the company has released many different players. In December 2000, some months after the Creative's ''NOMAD Jukebox'',
Archos released its
''Jukebox 6000'' with a 6GB hard drive.
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...
also released a player called the Rush.
While popularly being called MP3 players at the time, most players could play more than just the MP3 file format, for example
Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The ...
(WMA),
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.
AAC has been stan ...
(AAC),
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...
,
FLAC,
Speex
Speex is an audio compression codec specifically tuned for the reproduction of human speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm.Xiph.OrIntro ...
and
Ogg
Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality di ...
. Many MP3 players can
encode
The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) is a public research project which aims to identify functional elements in the human genome.
ENCODE also supports further biomedical research by "generating community resources of genomics data, software ...
directly to MP3 or other digital audio format directly from a line in audio signal (radio, voice, etc.). Devices such as
CD player
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audio ...
s 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
Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a s ...
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).
Growth of market
On 23 October 2001,
Apple Computer unveiled the
first generation iPod, a 5 GB hard drive based DAP with a 1.8"
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
and a 2" monochrome display. With the development of a spartan
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
and a smaller form factor, the iPod was initially popular within the
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...
community. In July 2002, Apple introduced the second generation update to the iPod, which was compatible with
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
computers through
Musicmatch Jukebox
MusicMatch Jukebox was an audio player made by San Diego-based MusicMatch, Inc. It contained features commonly found in jukebox software such as the ability to manage digital audio files and playlists, audio file conversion, an online music s ...
. iPods quickly became the most popular DAP product and led the fast growth of this market during the early and mid 2000s.
![Bärbar mp3-spelare Archos typ Jukebox 6000](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/B%C3%A4rbar_mp3-spelare_Archos_typ_Jukebox_6000.jpg)
In 2002,
Archos released the first "portable media player" (PMP), the
Archos Jukebox Multimedia with a little 1.5" colour screen. Manufacturers have since implemented abilities to view images and play videos into their devices. The next year, Archos released another multimedia ''jukebox'', the
AV300, with a 3.8" screen and a 20GB hard drive. In the same year,
Toshiba
, commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, ...
released the first
Gigabeat
The Gigabeat was a line of digital media players by Toshiba.
Gigabeat
The Gigabeat was first called the MobilPhile and later renamed to Gigabeat. It contained a monochrome LCD with blue backlighting, and a 5 GB removable PCMCIA hard drive. I ...
. In 2003,
Dell launched a line of portable digital music players called Dell DJ. They were discontinued by 2006.
The name "MP4 player" was a marketing term for inexpensive portable media players, usually from little known or generic device manufacturers. The name itself is a
misnomer, since most MP4 players through 2007 were incompatible with the
MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streaming ...
or the ''.mp4'' container format. Instead, the term refers to their ability to play more file types than just MP3. In this sense, in some markets like Brazil, any new function added to a given media player is followed by an increase in the number, for example an MP5 or MP12 Player, despite there being no corresponding MPEG-5 standard (, the current standard, still being developed, is
MPEG-4).
iriver of South Korea originally made portable CD players and then started making digital audio players and portable media players from 2002. Creative also introduced the
ZEN
Zen ( zh, t=禪, p=Chán; ja, text= 禅, translit=zen; ko, text=선, translit=Seon; vi, text=Thiền) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School (''Chánzong'' 禪宗), and ...
line. Both of these attained high popularity in some regions.
In 2004,
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...
attempted to take advantage of the growing PMP market by launching the
Portable Media Center
Portable Media Center (PMC) is a portable media player (PMP) platform developed by Microsoft. Announced at the 2003 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and released in early 2004, it was originally positioned as a competitor to Apple's iPod. All it ...
(PMC) platform. It was introduced at the 2004
Consumer Electronics Show with the announcement of the
Zen Portable Media Center, which was co-developed by
Creative. The Microsoft
Zune
Zune is a discontinued line of digital media products and services marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until its discontinuation in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, digital media player software for Windows Per ...
series would later be based on the
Gigabeat S, one of the PMC-implemented players.
In May 2005, flash memory maker SanDisk entered the PMP market with the
Sansa line of players, starting with the e100 series, and then following up with the m200 series, and c100 series.
In 2007, Apple introduced the
iPod Touch, the first iPod with a multi-touch screen. Some similar products existed before such as the
iriver clix in 2006. In South Korea, sales of MP3 players peaked in 2006, but started declining afterwards. This was driven partly by the launch of mobile television services (DMB), which along with increased demand of movies on the go led to a transition away from music-only players to PMPs. By 2008, more video-enabled PMPs were sold than audio-only players.
Brands and popularity throughout the world
By the mid-2000s and the years after,
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
with its iPod was the best selling DAP/PMP by a significant margin, with one of out four sold worldwide being an iPod. It was especially dominant in the United States where it had over 70% of sales at different points in time,
is nearest competitor in 2006 being
SanDisk
SanDisk is a brand for flash memory products, including memory cards and readers, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and digital audio players, manufactured and marketed by Western Digital. The original company, SanDisk Corporation was acquir ...
.
Apple also led in Japan over its homegrown makers
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professiona ...
and
Panasonic
formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb ...
during this time,
although the gap between Apple and Sony had closed by about 2010. In South Korea, the market was led by local brands
iriver,
Samsung
The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...
and
Cowon
Cowon Systems, Inc. (simply known as Cowon) is a South Korean consumer electronics and software corporation. The company’s initial focus was software development and microelectronics, specializing in speech synthesis and speech recognition tec ...
as of 2005.
European buying patterns differed; while Apple was in a particularly strong position in the United Kingdom, continental Western Europe generally preferred cheaper, often Chinese rebranded players under local brands such as
Grundig
Grundig (; ) is a German consumer electronics manufacturer owned by the Turkish Arçelik A.Ş., the white goods (major appliance) manufacturer of Turkish conglomerate Koç Holding. The company made domestic appliances and personal-care prod ...
.
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe including Russia, higher priced players with improved design or functionality were preferred instead, and here Korean makers like iriver and Samsung were particularly popular, as well as such OEM models under local brands.
Creative was the top selling maker in its home country of Singapore. In China, local brands Newman, DEC and Aigo were noted as the top vendors as of 2006.
PMPs in other categories
''Samsung SPH-M2100'', the first mobile phone with built-in MP3 player was produced in
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eas ...
in August 1999. ''Samsung SPH-M100 (UpRoar)'' launched in 2000 was the first mobile phone to have MP3 music capabilities
[ ()] in the US market. The innovation spread rapidly across the globe and by 2005, more than half of all music sold in South Korea was sold directly to mobile phones and all major handset makers in the world had released MP3 playing phones. By 2006, more MP3 playing mobile phones were sold than all stand-alone MP3 players put together. The rapid rise of the media player in phones was quoted by Apple as a primary reason for developing the
iPhone. In 2007, the number of phones that could play media was over 1 billion. Some companies have created music-centric sub-brands for mobile phones, for example the former
Sony Ericsson
Sony Mobile Communications Inc. ( ja, ソニーモバイルコミュニケーションズ株式会社) was a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1, 2001, as a joint venture between Sony Group Corporation and Ericsson. ...
's
Walkman
Walkman, stylised as , is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for p ...
range or
Nokia
Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...
's
XpressMusic
XpressMusic was a brand name for a line of Nokia mobile phones that were specially designed for music playback. All of the XpressMusic handsets came with expandable MicroSD memory slots and dedicated music keys, so these phones could also be used ...
range, which have extra emphasis on music playback and typically have features such as dedicated music buttons.
Mobile phones with PMP functionalities such as video playback also started appearing in the 2000s. Other non-phone products such as the
PlayStation Portable and
PlayStation Vita have also been considered to be PMPs.
Decline and contemporary
![NW-A35](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/NW-A35.png)
DAPs and PMPs have declined in popularity after the late 2000s due to increasing worldwide adoption of
smartphone
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
s that already come with PMP functionalities. Sales peaked in 2007 and market revenue (worth $21.6 billion) peaked in 2008, albeit notably mobile phones that could play music outsold DAPs by almost three to one as of 2007.
In the
EU, demand for MP3 players peaked in 2007 with 43.5 million devices sold totalling 3.8 billion euros. Both sales and revenue experienced a double-digit shrinkage for the first time in 2010. In India, sales of PMPs decreased for the first time in 2012, a few years after developed economies. The market was led by Apple with a share of about 50%, while Sony and Philips were the other major brands.
Meanwhile, sales of the best selling product, the iPod, was eclipsed by the company's
iPhone smartphone by 2011.
DAPs continue to be made in lower volumes by manufacturers such as SanDisk, Sony, IRIVER, Philips, Apple, Cowon, and a range of Chinese manufacturers namely Aigo, Newsmy, PYLE and ONDA. They often have specific selling points in the smartphone era, such as portability (for small sized players) or for high quality sound suited for
audiophile
An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. An audiophile seeks to reproduce the sound of a piece of recorded music or a live musical performance, typically inside closed headphones, In-ear monitors, open ...
s.
Typical features
PMPs are capable of playing
digital audio,
images
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...
, and/or
video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...
. Usually, a colour
liquid crystal display (LCD) or
organic light-emitting diode
An organic light-emitting diode (OLED or organic LED), also known as organic electroluminescent (organic EL) diode, is a light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that emits light i ...
(OLED) screen is used as a display for PMPs that have a screen. Various players include the ability to record video, usually with the aid of optional accessories or cables, and audio, with a built-in
microphone
A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...
or from a
line out cable or
FM tuner. Some players include readers for
memory card
A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a so ...
s, which are advertised to equip players with extra storage or transferring media. In some players, features of a
personal organiser
A personal organizer, datebook, date log, daybook, day planner, personal analog assistant, book planner, year planner, or agenda (from Latin ''agenda'' – things to do), is a small book or binder that is designed to be portable. It usually con ...
are emulated, or support for
video games
Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This feedbac ...
, like the
iriver clix (through compatibility of
Adobe Flash Lite
Adobe Flash Lite (formerly Macromedia Flash Lite) was a lightweight version of Adobe Flash Player, a software application published by Adobe Systems for viewing Flash content. Flash Lite operates on devices that Flash Player cannot, such as mobi ...
) or the
PlayStation Portable, is included. Only mid-range to high-end players support "savestating" for power-off (i.e. leaves off song/video in progress similar to tape-based media).
Audio playback
![SONY Walkman NW-A1000](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/SONY_Walkman_NW-A1000.jpg)
Nearly all players are compatible with the MP3 audio format, and many others support
Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs. The ...
(WMA),
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate.
AAC has been stan ...
(AAC) and
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...
. Some players are compatible with open-source formats like
Ogg Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...
and the
Free Lossless Audio Codec
FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...
(FLAC). Audio files purchased from
online store
Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the r ...
s may include
digital rights management (DRM) copy protection, which many modern players support.
Image viewing
The
JPEG format is widely supported by players. Some players, like the
iPod series, provide compatibility to display additional file formats like
GIF,
PNG, and
TIFF
Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word process ...
, while others are bundled with conversion software.
Video playback
Most newer players support the
MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual (formally ISO/ IEC 14496-2) is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine ...
video format, and many other players are compatible with
Windows Media Video
Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...
(WMV) and
AVI. Software included with the players may be able to convert video files into a compatible format.
Recording
![IRiver iFP-190TC,1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/IRiver_iFP-190TC%2C1.jpg)
Many players have a built-in
electret microphone
An electret microphone is a type of electrostatic capacitor-based microphone, which eliminates the need for a polarizing power supply by using a permanently charged material.
An ''electret'' is a stable dielectric material with a permanently em ...
which allows recording. Usually recording quality is poor, suitable for speech but not music. There are also professional-quality recorders suitable for high-quality music recording with external microphones, at prices starting at a few hundred dollars.
Radio
Some DAPs have
FM radio tuners built in. Many also have an option to change the band from the usual 87.5 – 108.0 MHz to the Japanese band of 76.0 – 90.0 MHz. DAPs typically never have an AM band, or even
HD Radio since such features would be either cost-prohibitive for the application, or because of AM's sensitivity to interference.
Internet access
Newer portable media players are now coming with Internet access via
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...
. Examples of such devices are
Android OS
Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open-source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Android is developed by a consortium of deve ...
devices by various manufacturers, and
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...
devices on
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
products like the
iPhone,
iPod Touch, and
iPad
The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating ...
. Internet access has even enabled people to use the Internet as an underlying communications layer for their choice of music for automated music randomisation services like
Pandora, to on-demand video access (which also has music available) such as YouTube. This technology has enabled casual and hobbyist DJs to cue their tracks from a smaller package from an Internet connection, sometimes they will use two identical devices on a crossfade mixer. Many such devices also tend to be
smartphone
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
s.
Last position memory
Many mobile digital media players have
last position memory, in which when it is powered off, a user doesn't have to worry about starting at the first track again, or even hearing repeats of others songs when a playlist, album, or whole library is cued for
shuffle play, in which shuffle play is a common feature, too. Early playback devices to even remotely have "last position memory" that predated solid-state digital media playback devices were tape-based media, except this kind suffered from having to be "rewound", whereas disc-based media suffered from no native "last position memory", unless disc-players had their own last position memory. However, some models of solid-state
flash memory (or
hard drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
ones with some moving parts) are somewhat the "best of both worlds" in the market.
Miscellaneous
Media players' firmware may be equipped with a basic
file manager
A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or pr ...
and a text reader.
Common audio formats
There are three categories of audio formats:
* Uncompressed
PCM audio: Most players can also play uncompressed
PCM in a container such as
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...
or
AIFF
Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File ...
.
*
Lossless audio
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...
formats: These formats maintain the
Hi-fi quality of every song or disc. These are the ones used by CDs, many people recommend the use of
lossless audio
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...
formats to preserve the CD quality in audio files on a desktop. Some of them are:
Apple Lossless
The Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), also known as Apple Lossless, or Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE), is an audio coding format, and its reference audio codec implementation, developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music ...
(proprietary format) and
FLAC (Royalties free) are increasingly popular formats for lossless compression, which maintain the
Hi-fi quality.
*
Lossy compression
In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...
formats: Most audio formats use
lossy compression
In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...
, to produce as small as possible a file compatible with the desired sound quality. There is a
trade-off
A trade-off (or tradeoff) is a situational decision that involves diminishing or losing one quality, quantity, or property of a set or design in return for gains in other aspects. In simple terms, a tradeoff is where one thing increases, and anot ...
between size and sound quality of lossily compressed files; most formats allow different combinations—e.g., MP3 files may use between 32 (worst), 128 (reasonable) and 320 (best) kilobits per second.
There are also royalty free lossy formats like
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...
for general music and
Speex
Speex is an audio compression codec specifically tuned for the reproduction of human speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm.Xiph.OrIntro ...
and
Opus
''Opus'' (pl. ''opera'') is a Latin word meaning "work". Italian equivalents are ''opera'' (singular) and ''opere'' (pl.).
Opus or OPUS may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Music
* Opus number, (abbr. Op.) specifying order of (usually) publicatio ...
used for voice recordings. When "ripping" music from CDs, many people recommend the use of
lossless audio
In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compressio ...
formats to preserve the CD quality in audio files on a desktop, and to transcode the music to
lossy compression
In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size ...
formats when they are copied to a portable player.
The formats supported by a particular audio player depends upon its
firmware; sometimes a firmware update adds more formats. MP3 and
AAC are dominant formats,
[ and are almost universally supported.
]
Software
PMPs were earlier packaged with an installation CD/DVD that inserts device drivers (and for some players, software that is capable of seamlessly transferring files between the player and the computer). For later players, however, these are usually available online via the manufacturers' websites, or increasingly natively recognised by the operating system through Universal Mass Storage (UMS) or Media Transfer Protocol
The Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is an extension to the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) communications protocol that allows media files to be transferred automatically to and from portable devices. Whereas PTP was designed for downloading pho ...
(MTP).
Hardware
*Storage
As with DAPs, PMPs come in either flash or hard disk storage. Storage capacities have reached up to 64 GB for flash memory based PMPs, first reached by the 3rd Generation iPod Touch, and up to 1 TB for hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
PMPs, first achieved by the Archos 5 Internet Tablet.
A number of players support memory card slots, including CompactFlash
CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994.
CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the e ...
(CF), Secure Digital
Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices.
The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanD ...
(SD), and Memory Stick
The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage capacity an ...
s. They are used to directly transfer content from external devices, and expand the storage capacity of PMPs.
*Interface
A standard PMP uses a 5-way D-pad
A D-pad (short for directional pad or digital pad; officially referred to by Nintendo as a +Control Pad) is a flat, usually thumb-operated, often digital, four-way directional control with one button on each point, found on nearly all modern vid ...
to navigate. Many alternatives have been used, most notably the wheel and touch mechanisms seen on players from the iPod and Sansa series. Another popular mechanism is the swipe-pad, or 'squircle', first seen on the Zune
Zune is a discontinued line of digital media products and services marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until its discontinuation in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, digital media player software for Windows Per ...
. Additional buttons are commonly seen for features such as volume control.
*Screen
Sizes range all the way up to 7 inches (18 cm). Resolutions also vary, going up to WVGA. Most screens come with a colour depth of 16-bit, but higher quality video-oriented devices may range all the way to 24-bit, otherwise known as true colour, with the ability to display 16.7 million distinct colours. Screens commonly have a matte finish but may also come in glossy to increase colour intensity and contrast. More and more devices are now also coming with touch screen as a form of primary or alternate input. This can be for convenience and/or aesthetic purposes. Certain devices, on the other hand, have no screen whatsoever, reducing costs at the expense of ease of browsing through the media library.
*Radio
Some portable media players include a radio receiver, most frequently receiving FM. Features for receiving signals from FM stations on MP3 players are common on more premium models.
*Other features
Some portable media players have recently added features such as simple camera, built-in game emulation (playing Nintendo Entertainment System or other game formats from ROM images) and simple text readers and editors. Newer PMPs have been able to tell time, and even automatically adjust time according to radio reception, and some devices like the 6th-gen iPod Nano
The iPod Nano (stylised and marketed as iPod nano) is a discontinued portable media player designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. The first generation model was introduced on September 7, 2005, as a replacement for the iPod Mini, usin ...
even have wristwatch bands available.
Modern MP4 players can play video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syst ...
in a multitude of video format
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...
s without the need to pre-convert them or downsize them prior to playing them. Some MP4 Players possess USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
ports, to allow users to connect it to a personal computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
to sideload
Sideloading describes the process of transferring files between two local devices, in particular between a personal computer and a mobile device such as a mobile phone, smartphone, PDA, tablet, portable media player or e-reader.
Sideloading ...
files. Some models also have memory card slot
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
s to expand the memory of the player instead of storing files in the built-in memory.
Chipsets
Chipsets and file formats that are particular to some PMPs:
*Anyka is a chip that's used by many MP4 Players. It supports the same formats as Rockchip.
* Fuzhou Rockchip
Rockchip (Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Fuzhou, Fujian province. Rockchip has been providing SoC products for tablets & PCs, streaming media TV boxes, AI audio & vision, IoT hardware ...
Electronics's video processing In electronics engineering, video processing is a particular case of signal processing, in particular image processing, which often employs video filters and where the input and output signals are video files or video streams. Video processing ...
''Rockchip
Rockchip (Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Fuzhou, Fujian province. Rockchip has been providing SoC products for tablets & PCs, streaming media TV boxes, AI audio & vision, IoT hardware ...
'' has been incorporated into many MP4 players, supporting AVI with no B frames in MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual (formally ISO/ IEC 14496-2) is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosine ...
(not Part 14), while MP2 audio compression is used. The clip must be padded out, if necessary, to fit the resolution of the display. Any slight deviation from the supported format results in a ''Format Not Supported'' error message.
*Some players, like the Onda VX979+, have started to use chipsets from Ingenic
Ingenic Semiconductor is a Chinese fabless semiconductor company based in Beijing, China founded in 2005. They purchased licenses for the MIPS architecture instruction sets in 2009 and design CPU-microarchitectures based on them. They also design ...
, which are capable of supporting RealNetworks's video formats. Also, players with SigmaTel-based technology are compatible with SMV (SigmaTel Video).
AMV
The image compression algorithm of this format is inefficient by modern standards (about 4 pixels per byte, compared with over 10 pixels per byte for MPEG-2). There are a fixed range of resolutions (96 × 96 to 208 × 176 pixels) and framerates (12 or 16 frames) available. A 30-minute video would have a filesize of approximately 100 MB at a 160 × 120 resolution.
MTV
The MTV video format (no relation to the cable network
Networking cables are networking hardware used to connect one network device to other network devices or to connect two or more computers to share devices such as printers or scanners. Different types of network cables, such as coaxial cable, op ...
) consists of a 512-byte file header that operates by displaying a series of raw image frames during MP3
MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
playback. During this process, audio frames are passed to the chipset's decoder, while the memory pointer of the display's hardware is adjusted to the next image within the video stream. This method does not require additional hardware for decoding, though it will lead to a higher amount of memory consumption. For that reason, the storage capacity of an MP4 player that uses MTV files is effectively less than that of a player that decompresses files on the fly.
Operation
Digital sampling is used to convert an audio wave to a sequence of binary numbers that can be stored in a digital format, such as MP3. Common features of all MP3 players are a memory storage device, such as flash memory or a miniature hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
, an embedded processor
An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...
, and an audio codec
A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder.
In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or ...
microchip to convert the compressed file into an analogue sound signal. During playback, audio files are read from storage into a RAM
Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to:
Animals
* A male sheep
* Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish
People
* Ram (given name)
* Ram (surname)
* Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director
* RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch
* ...
based memory buffer, and then streamed through an audio codec to produce decoded PCM audio. Typically audio formats decode at double to more than 20 times real speed on portable electronic processors
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, ...
, requiring that the codec output be stored for a time until the DAC can play it. To save power, portable devices may spend much or nearly all of their time in a low power idle state while waiting for the DAC to deplete the output PCM buffer before briefly powering up to decode additional audio.
Most DAPs are powered by rechargeable batteries
A rechargeable battery, storage battery, or secondary cell (formally a type of energy accumulator), is a type of electrical battery which can be charged, discharged into a load, and recharged many times, as opposed to a disposable or prima ...
, some of which are not user-replaceable. They have a 3.5 mm stereo jack; music can be listened to with earbuds or headphones, or played via an external amplifier and speakers
Speaker may refer to:
Society and politics
* Speaker (politics), the presiding officer in a legislative assembly
* Public speaker, one who gives a speech or lecture
* A person producing speech: the producer of a given utterance, especially:
** I ...
. Some devices also contain internal speakers, through which music can be listened to, although these built-in speakers are typically of very low quality.
Nearly all DAPs consists of some kind of display screen, although there are exceptions, such as the iPod Shuffle
The iPod Shuffle (stylized and marketed as iPod shuffle) is a discontinued digital audio player designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. It was the smallest model in Apple's iPod family, and was the first iPod to use flash memory. The firs ...
, and a set of controls with which the user can browse through the library of music contained in the device, select a track, and play it back. The display, if the unit even has one, can be anything from a simple one or two line monochrome LCD display, similar to what are found on typical pocket calculators
An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics.
The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-sized ...
, to large, high-resolution, full-color displays capable of displaying photographs or viewing video content on. The controls can range anywhere from the simple buttons as are found on most typical CD players
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or aud ...
, such as for skipping through tracks or stopping/starting playback to full touch-screen controls, such as that found on the iPod Touch or the Zune HD
The Zune HD is a portable media player in the Zune product family released on September 15, 2009, by Microsoft. It was a direct competitor with Apple's iPod Touch series of mobile devices. It was initially released in 16 and 32 GB capacities. A ...
. One of the more common methods of control is some type of the scroll wheel with associated buttons. This method of control was first introduced with the Apple iPod and many other manufacturers have created variants of this control scheme for their respective devices.
Content is placed on DAPs typically through a process called "syncing", by connecting the device to a personal computer, typically via USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
, and running any special software that is often provided with the DAP on a CD-ROM included with the device, or downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Some devices simply appear as an additional disk drive on the host computer, to which music files are simply copied like any other type of file. Other devices, most notably the Apple iPod or Microsoft Zune
Zune is a discontinued line of digital media products and services marketed by Microsoft from November 2006 until its discontinuation in June 2012. Zune consisted of a line of portable media players, digital media player software for Windows Per ...
, requires the use of special management software, such as iTunes or Zune Software, respectively. The music, or other content such as TV episodes or movies, is added to the software to create a "library". The library is then "synced" to the DAP via the software. The software typically provides options for managing situations when the library is too large to fit on the device being synced to. Such options include allowing manual syncing, in that the user can manually "drag-n-drop" the desired tracks to the device, or allow for the creation of playlists. In addition to the USB connection, some of the more advanced units are now starting to allow syncing through a wireless connection, such as via Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...
or Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...
.
Content can also be obtained and placed on some DAPs, such as the iPod Touch or Zune HD by allowing access to a "store" or "marketplace", most notably the iTunes Store
The iTunes Store is a digital media store operated by Apple Inc. It opened on April 28, 2003, as a result of Steve Jobs' push to open a digital marketplace for music. As of April 2020, iTunes offered 60 million songs, 2.2 million apps, 25,00 ...
or Zune Marketplace
Zune is a discontinued media management software for Microsoft Windows that functions as a full media player application with a library, an interface to the Zune Marketplace, and as a media streaming server. The software is used to sync with all ...
, from which content, such as music and video, and even games, can be purchased and downloaded directly to the device.
Digital signal processing
A growing number of portable media players are including audio processing chips that allow digital effects like 3D audio effect
3D audio effects are a group of sound effects that manipulate the sound produced by stereo speakers, surround-sound speakers, speaker-arrays, or headphones. This frequently involves the virtual placement of sound sources anywhere in three-dimensio ...
s, dynamic range compression
Dynamic range compression (DRC) or simply compression is an audio signal processing operation that reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds, thus reducing or ''compressing'' an audio signal's dynamic range. Compression is ...
and equalisation of the frequency response
In signal processing and electronics, the frequency response of a system is the quantitative measure of the magnitude and phase of the output as a function of input frequency. The frequency response is widely used in the design and analysis of s ...
. Some devices adjust loudness based on Fletcher–Munson curves
An equal-loudness contour is a measure of sound pressure level, over the frequency spectrum, for which a listener perceives a constant loudness when presented with pure steady tones. The unit of measurement for loudness levels is the phon and i ...
. Some media players are used with Noise-cancelling headphones Noise-cancelling headphones reduce unwanted ambient sounds using active noise control. This is distinct from passive headphones which, if they reduce ambient sounds at all, use techniques such as soundproofing.
Noise cancellation makes it possible ...
that use Active noise reduction
Active may refer to:
Music
* ''Active'' (album), a 1992 album by Casiopea
* Active Records, a record label
Ships
* ''Active'' (ship), several commercial ships by that name
* HMS ''Active'', the name of various ships of the British Royal ...
to remove background noise.
De-noise mode
De-noise mode is an alternative to Active noise reduction
Active may refer to:
Music
* ''Active'' (album), a 1992 album by Casiopea
* Active Records, a record label
Ships
* ''Active'' (ship), several commercial ships by that name
* HMS ''Active'', the name of various ships of the British Royal ...
. It provides for relatively noise-free listening to audio in a noisy environment. In this mode, audio intelligibility is improved due to selective gain reduction of the ambient noise. This method splits external signals into frequency components by "filterbank" (according to the peculiarities of human perception of specific frequencies) and processing them using adaptive audio compressor
Dynamic range compression (DRC) or simply compression is an audio signal processing operation that reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds, thus reducing or ''compressing'' an audio signal's dynamic range. Compression is ...
s. Operation thresholds in adaptive audio compressors (in contrast to "ordinary" compressors) are regulated depending on ambient noise levels for each specific bandwidth. Reshaping of the processed signal from adaptive compressor outputs is realised in a synthesis filterbank. This method improves the intelligibility of speech signals and music. The best effect is obtained while listening to audio in the environment with constant noise (in trains, automobiles, planes), or in environments with fluctuating noise level (e.g. in a metro). Improvement of signal intelligibility in condition of ambient noise allows users to hear audio well and preserve hearing ability, in contrast to regular volume amplification.
Natural mode
Natural mode is characterised by subjective effect of balance of different frequency sounds, regardless of level of distortion, appearing in the reproduction device. It is also regardless of personal user's ability to perceive specific sound frequencies (excluding obvious hearing loss). The natural effect is obtained due to special sound processing algorithm (i.e. "formula of subjective equalisation of frequency-response function"). Its principle is to assess frequency response function (FRF) of mediaplayer or any other sound reproduction device, in accordance with audibility threshold in silence (subjective for each person), and to apply gain modifying factor. The factor is determined with the help of integrated function to test audibility threshold: the program generates tone signals (with divergent oscillations – from minimum volume 30–45 Hz to maximum volume appr. 16 kHz), and user assess their subjective audibility. The principle is similar to in situ audiometry, used in medicine to prescribe a hearing aid. However, the results of test may be used to a limited extent as far as FRF of sound devices depends on reproduction volume. It means correction coefficient should be determined several times – for various signal strengths, which is not a particular problem from a practical standpoint.
Sound around mode
Sound around mode allows for real time overlapping of music and the sounds surrounding the listener in their environment, which are captured by a microphone and mixed into the audio signal. As a result, the user may hear playing music and external sounds of the environment at the same time. This can increase user safety (especially in big cities and busy streets), as a user can hear a mugger following them or hear an oncoming car.
Controversy
Although these issues are not usually controversial within digital audio players, they are matters of continuing controversy and litigation, including but not limited to content distribution and protection, and digital rights management (DRM).
Lawsuit with RIAA
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit in late 1998 against Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackS ...
for its Rio
Rio or Río is the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese word for "river". When spoken on its own, the word often means Rio de Janeiro, a major city in Brazil.
Rio or Río may also refer to:
Geography Brazil
* Rio de Janeiro
* Rio do Sul, a ...
players,[ alleging that the device encouraged copying music illegally. But Diamond won a legal victory on the shoulders of the ]Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios
''Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.'', 464 U.S. 417 (1984), also known as the “Betamax case”, is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that the making of individual copies of complete television s ...
case and DAPs were legally ruled as electronic devices.
Risk of hearing damage
According to the , the risk of hearing damage from digital audio players depends on both sound level and listening time. The listening habits of most users are unlikely to cause hearing loss, but some people are putting their hearing at risk, because they set the volume control very high or listen to music at high levels for many hours per day. Such listening habits may result in temporary or permanent hearing loss, tinnitus
Tinnitus is the perception of sound when no corresponding external sound is present. Nearly everyone experiences a faint "normal tinnitus" in a completely quiet room; but it is of concern only if it is bothersome, interferes with normal hearin ...
, and difficulties understanding speech in noisy environments.
The World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of ...
warns that increasing use of headphones and earphones puts 1.1 billion teenagers and young adults at risk of hearing loss due to unsafe use of personal audio devices. Many smartphone
A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...
s and personal media players are sold with earphones that do a poor job of blocking ambient noise, leading some users to turn up the volume to the maximum level to drown out street noise. People listening to their media players on crowded commutes sometimes play music at high volumes feel a sense of separation, freedom and escape from their surroundings.
The World Health Organization recommends that "the highest permissible level of noise exposure in the workplace is 85 dB up to a maximum of eight hours per day" and time in "nightclubs, bars and sporting events" should be limited because they can expose patrons to noise levels of 100 dB. The report states
The report also recommends that governments raise awareness of hearing loss, and to recommend people visit a hearing specialist if they experience symptoms of hearing loss, which include pain, ringing or buzzing in the ears.
A study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health found that employees at bars, nightclubs or other music venues were exposed to noise levels above the internationally recommended limits of 82–85 dB(A per eight hours. This growing phenomena has led to the coining of the term music-induced hearing loss, which includes hearing loss as a result of overexposure to music on personal media players.
FCC issues
Some MP3 players have electromagnet transmitters, as well as receivers. Many MP3 players have built-in FM radios, but FM transmitters aren't usually built-in due to liability of transmitter feedback from simultaneous transmission and reception of FM. Also, certain features like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can interfere with professional-grade communications systems such as aircraft at airports.
See also
*Comparison of portable media players
The following comparison of portable media players compares general and technical information for notable digital playback devices.
General
Technical specifications
Synching and transfer
Wi-Fi connectivity
Audio formats
Vide ...
* Digital video recorder
*Internet radio device
An Internet radio device, also called network music player is a hardware device that is capable of receiving and playing streamed media from either Internet radio stations or a home network.
Background
Streaming media became mainstream with the ...
* Mixtape
*Notel
The Notel, also called NoteTel (a portmanteau of "notebook" and "television"), is a brand of portable media player made in China which is popular in North Korea. The device has USB and SD ports, can play DVDs and EVDs (enhanced versatile discs, whi ...
* Portable DVD player
*Walkman Circ
The Walkman E Series is a line of digital audio (DAP) and portable media (PMP) players, marketed by Sony as part of its Walkman range. E Series devices have been marketed since 2000, although in its current form since 2008 as entry-level, candyba ...
References
External links
Collecting MP3 Portables – Part I
an
– Richard Menta's three-part article covers the first digital audio players on the market with pictures of each player.
{{Media player (application software)
MP3
Boombox culture
Audio hobbies