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Friday, May 29, 2009

History of Portable Audio Players

By Sampson Zelder

Portable audio players are mobile devices able to play digital music. There are several varieties of portable audio player that include MP3 players, cell phones, boomboxes and mini-disk players. Technically a digital voice recorder might fall into the portable audio category as well, but its a term generally considered for musical accessories.

These days younger people tend to take portable audio players for granted, but theyre a relatively recent addition. Not so long ago portable music for previous generations used to exist only in the form of AM/FM radio. Back in the early 1970s 8-track cassettes were all the rage. They looked a little like VHS video tapes, but back then they were considered to be a huge step for portable music. These days we can look back and realize that the technology was basic at best. When songs ended the cassette had to shift to the next track, which left several seconds of silence between the seams that were usually accompanied by the clunking of the internal mechanisms shifting.

During the 1980s the 8-track had morphed into the cassette tape. These were smaller and had far more capacity to hold more songs. These became the first real form of portable audio. While boomboxes were manufactured with inbuilt cassette players through the late 1980s and 1990s, by the mid-1980a the first forms of walkman player emerged. These allowed people to play one cassette at a time in a rather bulky, but portable player and listen through headphone-speakers.

By 1988 compact discs had arrived on the market. These digital discs meant that music lovers no longer had to spend time rewinding or fast forwarding unwieldy cassette tapes to find the track they wanted to listen to. Compact discs also didnt have the problems of the tape breaking or wearing out or coming off the spools. They were also much smaller than the unwieldy, fragile vinyl records.

The only real drawback to the compact disc was the fact that sporting enthusiasts couldnt enjoy portable music with the CD walkman as the laser light reading device was easily jolted, causing the music tracks to skip or jitter. For people wanting to jog or cycle or skate, then the cassette player, like the walkman, remained the portable audio device of choice.

During the 1990s, advances in computer technology and the accompanying storage devices saw the advent of the MP3 music file. People began listening to digital files directly through their computers.

As MP3 files grew in popularity and flash memory sticks became more common, the first portable MP3 players were created as a direct result. With some MP3 players as small as a pack of gum, people were now able to listen to portable audio files from gadgets that fit within their pockets. They no longer needed to change the CD or the cassette after every album, but were able to store multiple songs on a tiny flash memory drive that also didnt have the problems of breaking or jolting during activity. In order to add or remove music files from the MP3 player, a person only needed to transfer files from a computer to the portable MP3 player, which has the memory capacity to store an entire music library. Now thats convenience! - 18780

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