How
MP3 players work
Many people who start collecting MP3 files find
that they want to listen to them in all kinds of places. Small,
portable MP3 players answer this demand. These players are
like portable cassette or CD players, except that they are
smaller and they use solid state memory instead of a physical
medium like a tape or a CD. All of the players currently on
the market include a software application that lets you transfer
your MP3 files into the player. Most of them also include utilities
for copying music from CDs or Web sites, and the ability to
create custom playlists.
The MP3 player
is a wonderful example of a new use of existing technologies.
None of the components in a typical MP3 player
is radical, or even new, technology. By simply combining
these components in a new way, and writing some code to control
it
all, manufacturers have created an entirely new line of consumer
products!
The job of the
MP3 player is pretty straightforward. When you play a song,
the player must:
- Pull the song from memory byte by byte
- Decompress
the MP3 encoding
- Run the decompressed bytes through a digital-to-analog
converter
- Amplify the analog signal so you can hear
it
The main difference between a portable CD player
and an MP3 player is that the CD contains the bytes instead
of
memory,
and on a
CD the bytes are already decompressed so no decompression
is needed.
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