What are the best MP3 Players I can buy? iPod? Sony?

Now that CDs and tapes are officially dead, MP3 music is the way to go. MP3 songs are just a special electronic file format for digitized music, allowing you to store and playback songs on your computer, portable MP3 players (like the famous iPod), your car stereo, or home stereo. So what MP3 Players are best? Depends on what your music needs are. MP3 players comes in 3 main sizes/categories right now: flash memory based, micro hard drive based, and normal hard drive based.

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Let's start with the normal hard drive based MP3 players. A little larger than a deck of cards, these music machines contain a small hard drive inside, like the ones found in laptop computers. The Apple iPod has pretty much owned this category. These players come with capacities ranging from 20-60 gigabytes (GB). An average MP3 song takes up about 3 or 4 megabytes (MB), so that means you can hold about 250 songs per gigabyte, or 5000 songs on a 20GB player. Obviously, most of us don't have more than 5000 mp3 songs in our music collections - so people like Apple are adding additional functions to their players, like the ability to store and display color photos.

A 20 GB iPod can be yours for around $275, while the 60GB iPod Photo is more like $400. A number of other companies also make this style of MP3 Player. The Creative Labs Zen Touch (40GB about $250) is a sturdy, excellent sounding player. The Dell DJ-20 comes in at under $200 for 20GB of storage. But given all the accessories available for the iPod and its dominant market position, your best bet is going with an iPod (and they work fine on Windows computers as well).

Micro Hard Drive MP3 players

While a deck of cards is small for most of us, of course in the world of micro-electronics, smaller is better. Hence, there is another family of smaller players than contain mini/micro hard drives with 4-6 GB capacity, good for carrying about 800-1500 songs in your shirt pocket. A little lighter, a little smaller, these players are great if you are not concerned with storing thousands and thousands of songs. Again, the leader in this category is the iPod Mini (6 GB, around $200, 18 hours of playback time!). Practically feather-lite in your hand (3.6oz), you can easily strap it to your arm or throw it in a pocket to go jogging, to the gym, etc. All the Apple products use the iTunes software for managing, storing, and syncing your music collection between your PC and your MP3 player. The Rio Carbon (5GB) is a cheaper alternative at about $129, and it gets great reviews for both functionality and sound qaulity.The Creative Zen Micro (5 GB, about $189) is another alternative, but again, with Apple's dominant position in this field as well, the iPod mini is generally the safest best.

Flash Memory MP3 players

The final category is the flash memory based mp3 players. Flash memory is just specialized computer memory chips used to store information. Unlike a hard drive, there are no moving parts, so they use less energy and can be even smaller in size. MP3 players using flash memory commonly come in 512KB (about 120 songs) or 1GB (about 250 songs). Many are the size of a butane lighter or even smaller. Of course Apple has a $99 product in this field called the iPod shuffle. In this case, we'd say avoid the Apple. With no LCD screen for viewing song names or playlists, you basically load on some songs and push the NEXT SONG button and that's it. Samsung offers the YEPP 1GB for around $130 (pictured at left). The YEPP uses standard AA batteries and includes an FM radio built-in - not bad. Throw excellent sound quality on top of that, and you have a great choice for an mp3 player. Creative Labs also make the tiny MuVo and Nomad players, good sound, good price, not a bad option. Sandisk makes the Digital Audio Players, with 15 hours of playback on a AAA battery (Cruzer Micro $90 for 512MB, 1GB $125). Last but not least, the Cowon iAudio U2 player (1.2 oz) is a newcomer. Connects to your PC with a USB cable, you can drag and drop files onto it. It records, has an FM tuner, and runs for about 15 hours on its lithium battery. At about $150 for the 1GB model, this might be your best bet.

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