The latest tech trend flourished in stores this past holiday season. According to an associate at RadioShack in Fashion Square Mall, the store sold out of digital music players for the Christmas season. And it's no wonder. Lightweight and handheld, the digital devices steadily are becoming the rage with University joggers around Grounds.
Digital music players, also called MP3 players, allow the user to copy and conveniently transport music downloaded from the Internet. MP3 is the best known and perhaps most popular Internet music format, but some players also handle other formats, such as Microsoft's Windows Media format.
MP3 players have no moving parts. Instead, music is stored in the device's internal memory, preventing vibrations that cause disc skipping on portable CD players. Although sound quality is richer, price is a major downside to MP3 players. They range from $85 to $400.
But some students believe that the process of erasing old play lists and creating and copying new play lists is not as time efficient as popping in a CD.
"The one aspect that is really inconvenient is the small amount of music that can be stored," second-year College student Suzanne Palmer said. "I can only store an hour of music, and if I want to put more songs on I have to erase all the old ones first."
A 64-megabyte model holds roughly 20-24 songs at standard MP3 compression (128 kilobytes per second). MP3 players with a larger internal memory sell for up to $400 and additional memory chips and cards are available separately.
Still, high prices have not driven down demand. Strong salespredict that MP3 players are becoming must-have gadgets, with sales expected to hit $1.25 billion in 2002, up from $126 million in 1999 when they first hit the market, according to Cahners In-Stat Group.
"A lot of people are moving towards MP3s. It's becoming more standard," second-year Engineering student Sol Chea said. Chea owns the Creative Nomad II MG. "The player is superior to a Discman: It'll never skip, it's smaller, and it's faster than burning a CD. I can just pop them off my MP3 player"
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