About
When was the last time you saw somebody with a portable CD player? Just a couple of years ago, and it seems like ages. MP3 players are dominating the portable music world these days.
The first MP3 players were installed into mobile phones in South Korea in 2003 and the first artist to sell songs as MP3 file downloads directly to mobile phones was Ricky Martin. The innovation spread rapidly and by 2005, more than half of all music sold in South Korea was sold directly to mobile phones. The idea spread across the globe and by 2005 all major handset makers had released musicphones. By 2006, more MP3 players were sold in musicphones than all stand-alone MP3 players put together. Steve Jobs and Apple took MP3 player concept to a different level with the iPhone, and in 2007, the installed base of cell phones with built-in MP3 player passed the 1 billion mark.
All MP3 players have a memory storage device, such as flash memory or a miniature hard disk drive, an embedded processor, and an audio codec microchip to convert compressed sound into analogue form that is then played through the speaker jack to earphones or a stereo speaker system.
MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) is an audio-specific digital encoding format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group of several teams of engineers mostly in Germany and USA.
The use in MP3 of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners. True audiophiles do not consider MP3 compressed music as high fidelity audio.
MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital audio and digital video streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, MPEG-4 Part 14 allows streaming over the Internet. The official filename extension for MPEG-4 Part 14 files is .mp4, thus the container format is often referred to simply as MP4.
Some devices advertised as “MP4 players” are simply MP3 players that also play AMV video and/or some other video format, and do not play MPEG-4 part 14 format.
