Mp3 craze

These lightweight, economical portable jukeboxes are showing up everywhere. The MP3 player is the newest rage first among electronic enthusiasts, or electrophobes but now the MP3 is a must have everybody.

The need for a MP3 player is escalating among joggers, stay-at-home moms. The MP3 craze has reached the masses who want more and more music. They want to download their entire collection of music into their player. A music junkie can have thousands of songs stored in one MP3 player. These portable, wireless wizards of entertainment have the ability to store organize and play digital music on demand.

The MP3 player has created so much mass appeal that the introduction of the MP3 player created an entirely new industry of highly profitable paid download sites. The popularity of MP3 players has exploded forcing manufacturers to become alarmed and jumping to find new uses for these products. Podcasting is one of the newest applications for the MP3. Some manufactures have incorporated an mP3 player into a telephone.

Podcasting is like a radio program or even TV like feeds are automatically downloaded into the MP3. The word Podcast refers to the most popular MP3 makers. That is the Apple Ipod. All MP3's can store several hours of podcasts to be played at the owners discretion. You can find thousands of podcasts in dozens of categories. You can download a Podcast on almost any subject because there are podcast about art, comedy, academic subjects, entertainment and politics and this is just a partial list of what is available.

There are three main types of digital audio players:

1) MP3 CD Players

A MP3 CD player (Philips Expanium) devices play CDs. Often they can play both audio CDs and homemade dataCDs that have MP3 or other digital audio files.

2) Flash-based Players (iBox Mediaman)

are solid state devices that hold digital audio files on internal or external media like memory cards.

3) Hard Drive-based Players or Digital Jukeboxes

An embedded hard drive-based player (Apple iPod) These devices read digital audio files from a hard drive. These players have higher capacities, ranging from 1.5GB to 100GB, depending on the hard drive technology.

The Apple iPod and Creative Zen are examples of the popular digital jukeboxes. Of course, the Apple's iPod is the most popular MP3 player. But there is a surprising new competitor for this market.

Surprisingly, a Korean company by the name of Cowon American, part of a Korean multimedia giant,was chosen as the second most popular MP3 player in a gallup poll like survey. It looks like Cowon may be a big player in the MP3 market. Their MP3 players are sold under the name iAudio. Some of the iAudio. The popularity of the iAudio was contributed to the fact that the player is compatible with some of the music subscription services.

Hower, a CNET review of the Cowan system seems to think that the Ipod may still win the MP3 war. "The bottom line states the reviewer, "The great-sounding Cowon iAudio X5 looks like an iPod killer on paper, but this palm-size music and video player suffers from mediocre music browsing and some key design missteps".

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