There are lots of companies competing in the MP3 player market. The waters are becoming more murky as more companies enter the fray, so it has become difficult to sift through your options and choose an MP3 player that will deliver what you're looking for. The iRiver MP3 player is where you should start your search for a media player if you don't want to sift through all the hype and hassle of other brands, because it delivers top-knotch quality and the features you want.
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Companies are willing to try just about anything to win your patronage of their MP3 player. How often do you see ads for MP3 players that try to convince you that some new, trendy feature is exactly what you need and the reason you should buy it? Well, don't trust everything you hear in these commercials. It's up to you to educate yourself and determine what you need before you make a decision to buy.
In the paragraphs that follow, you'll learn the three most important aspects to consider when buying a new MP3 player.
1. What are the abilities of the MP3 player? 2. What is its storage capacity? 3. Is the price right?
Considering the features and abilities of the player should be your first order of business. There are many features to consider. Many people fail to realize that there is a lot more to modern MP3 players than simply playing music. Many players can store and allow you to view images. How about the ability to view video files? If you think you'd like all of these features, then you should consider an iRiver MP3 player. It has all of these features.
MP3 players come in many different variations of storage capacity. Decide whether you'll need a lot of space or only a little, as the price difference can be quite large. Don't make the same mistake I did and try to save money by going with a lower storage-capacity unit. Now my MP3 player is full and causes me quite a hassle. Videos are huge memory hogs, so if you buy a unit with not enough memory, and then you want to add videos, you will quickly run out of space. If you only plan to play music and your music library is small, then I'd recommend you choose a 2GB model from iRiver. Otherwise, roll with the 16GB model.
Next, determine how much money you're willing to pay for an MP3 player. You'll be pleasantly surprised to know that iRiver offers models that not only meet your desires and needs, but also carry price tags that are well lower than other leading brand names.
Doing your homework is the best thing you can do to prepare yourself to make an educated purchase. In this case, do your homework with an iRiver MP3 player and you'll save yourself a lot of time. There's a good reason why iRiver stands apart from its competitors. I highly recommend it.
If you have read How CDs Work, you understand how musical sounds can be turned into numbers and recorded on a CD. A CD stores music using 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample and two channels (for stereo sound). This means that a CD stores about 10 million bytes (megabytes) of data per minute of music on the CD. A three-minute song therefore requires 30 megabytes of data.
If you have ever tried to download files on the Internet, you know that 30 megabytes is huge. If you are using a modem to connect to the Internet, 30 megabytes of data would take several hours to download.
MPEG (The Moving Picture Experts Group) has developed compression systems used for video data. For example, DVD movies, HDTV broadcasts and DSS satellite systems use MPEG compression to fit video and movie data into smaller spaces. The MPEG compression system includes a subsystem to compress sound, called MPEG Audio Layer-3. We know it by its abbreviation, MP3.
MP3 can compress a song by a factor of 10 or 12 and still retain something close to CD quality. So a 30-megabyte sound file from a CD reduces to 3 megabytes or so in MP3. When you download the MP3 file and play it, it sounds almost as good as the original file. If you wanted to, you could download an MP3 file, expand it back to its original size and then record it on a writable CD so you can play it in a CD player. All that you are doing is converting back and forth between different formats to make downloading easier.
Virtually all of you have probably heard of the RIAA's quest to crush online music piracy. The illegal sharing of copyrighted songs via the MP3 format on top the Internet costs the music industry billions of dollars. This is conventionally done applying illegal file sharing programs like KaZaa and iMesh. This article explores the legal ways to download and enjoy music from the Internet.
Method 1: Try out Free Music Sites
There are many free music websites which provide free music downloads. It is not the download mp3 websites of your music pirates - it is completely legal. Do not expect to find full albums to download, particularly if the song is from a famous artist (only music pirate websites allow full album downloads). You'll only find a couple "teasers" intended to produce you wish to purchase the artists' Compact disc. Independent, less well-known artists are an exception - many of them will let you down their complete song catalog to promote themselves.
Just here are a couple of the free music websites which I personally recommend:
* AMPCAST.com
* Amazon.com Digital Music Downloads
* RollingStone.com
* ElectronicScene.com
* The Internet Underground Music Archive
Method 2: Purchase Music Online
An increasingly popular way to find and download music online is to head for legal online music services. The virtually all popular of these is the Apples iTune service. Now it will bring across 400,000 songs from all 5 major labels. Every song is available for a standard cost of ninety-nine cents every. Right here are the best online music services I have come across:
* EMusic
* iTunes
* MusicMatch Downloads
* Napster two.zero
* Rhapsody
* Weblisten
Conclusion
It's incredibly tempting to employ KaZaa and more file sharing programs to download music - however please do not. If you wrote a song and sold a Compact disc, would you be happy to see hundreds to thousands of people distributing that song for free? No. You do not have to break the law to find and download free MP3 music. There are many websites out there offering free music - you just want to find them.