Years ago, each time I'd get in my car, I'd pull out from under the passenger seat a Buster Brown Shoes box that contained maybe 40 cassettes, which I'd then rummage through to find something to listen to, take the tape from its usually broken plastic cover, and swap it with the tape that was already in the car's tape player, find that tape's broken plastic cover and toss it back into the Buster Brown Shoes box, fast-forward to the song I wanted to hear -- oops, not on that side, flip the tape over, rewind -- and set off on my drive to work.
Much has changed since those mornings in my driveway. Audio cassette tapes have given way to compact disks, CD changers have replaced Buster Brown Shoes boxes and now computer hard drives are beginning to replace CD changers. I also no longer have a car. Despite this, I'm able to take my entire music collection -- some 150 or so CDs -- with me everywhere I go. It fits in my pocket.
Thanks to a digital compression standard called MP3 and a rapidly expanding array of portable MP3 players, music lovers can carry some or even all of their favorite tunes with them anywhere. MP3 greatly reduces the amount of space a music file occupies on a hard drive by removing all the sound which the human ear cannot hear. (Dogs probably don't enjoy the standard that much.) An MP3-compressed file is generally one-twelfth the size of an uncompressed song on your hard drive.
This has enable millions of music lovers to store their entire music libraries on their home computers. Many have gone a step further and bought a hard drive-based, portable MP3 player. These differ from CD-based players and flash memory-based players in that they do not play CDs and can hold up to 40 gigabytes of music or over 8,000 songs (the most common 64MB flash memory-based players hold maybe 15 songs)
Hard disk-based portable players range from slightly larger than a deck of cards to the size of a traditional portable CD player and have the added benefit of being able to hold more than just music. Because they are essentially hard drives, they can usually store any type of file, making it possible to transport or back up large amounts of data.
Among the companies producing hard drive-based MP3 players, three stand out. Creative's Nomad Jukebox offers 10GB of storage for over 2,500 songs on average (they used to make a 6GB player but have since stopped) and allows you easy navigation of your library by title, artist, album or genre. It also offers excellent sound control. You can speed up or slow down songs at a constant pitch, adjust sound using the equalizer settings, create wider stereo with spatialization and define environmental settings.
Another cool feature is the line-in jack, which lets you to attach a powered microphone and record live audio to WAV at various quality settings. The 10GB Nomad Jukebox retails for about US$250, or US$500 for up to 40GB and can support Windows and Mac operating systems.
The Archos Jukebox 6000 starts out at 6GB of capacity (but also comes in 10GB and 20GB models) at a slightly smaller size and weight than the Nomad and offers more battery time -- nearly 10 hours before having to recharge. Your music is just as easy to navigate using an LED screen, but sound control is considerably more limited than with the Nomad. Also missing is an input jack for direct recording (though this is available on the 10GB and 20GB models). The Archos Jukebox retails for about US$200 and supports Window or Mac.
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