Advantages: good battery life
Disadvantages: ?????

...walkman and so once more the people were able to listen to their music when and where they liked. And the people were once again happy… …until the day someone created the first mp3. OK, so that was my brief and perhaps not so accurate history of consumer personal audio products. Things are always changing and we now have more choice than ever about how we listen to our music when we are on the go. And in these days of digital music the humble mp3 has played a big part in that due to its enormous popularity. Here comes the science bit. An MP3 is a digital audio file. All music contained on a CD is digital but in it’s raw form one single track can take up about 40 or 50 megabytes (mb). But by converting it to mp3 format the data is compressed to make a much smaller file, usually around 3 or 4 mb. The mp3 format became hugely popular... Read review

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Advantages: Free music, never skip, cheap, light, small, easy to use, can get any sone you could imagine
Disadvantages: None!

...MP3 is LOADS better than MD for many reasons. One is that if you don't mind getting your music illegally, all your music is completely FREE OF CHARGE! Using software such as Napster, which lets you search for MP3s from other user's hard disk drives, you can find literally any song you could ever want, and then download it to your PC and MP3 player. This is also good as you don't have to carry lots of discs around with you. Also, you can choose the sound quality of MP3, so you can have around twice the sound qaulity of CD or MD if you wish, but it will take up twice the space, or the same as CD or MD, or less, depending on how much space you have on your MP3 player. Also, MP3 players are much lighter than MD, and NEVER skip as there are no moving parts. There is also less to go wrong with the electronics of the player... Read review

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Advantages: Portable audio
Disadvantages: Cost

...When I first saw this category I struggled to work out what was going on, I was thinking what we were doing comparing a form of data compression to a storage medium. Then it became clear that what was in fact being compare was having a portable mp3 player and a portable MD player. Well having owned both of these, I feel that I am in a fairly good position to write a helpful opinion on this subject matter. I think it's best if I break up this into categories and then draw conclusions. THE BASICS ----- A portable Mini-Disc player is on average about 7cm long by 7cm wide and over 1cm thick and it plays MDs which are about the same size. An MD is like a tiny CD with a case, but they are re-recordable and editable. Each MD can store 74-80 minutes of CD quality music. An MP3 player is on average a little bigger than a Nokia 8210... Read review

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Advantages: Very very cheap
Disadvantages: Search facility could be improved

...WHAT? FREE MUSIC? Yes, free mp3 music, almost – and I’m not talking about file sharing either. As far as the old Napster is concerned – been there, done that, got the virus… No, I’ve had my fill of queues, misnamed and incomplete files, adware, Trojans and other assorted malicious code from these sites. I’m not talking about over-commercialised sites either, where you’re expected to pay 99p for a track. For an album (in mp3 format, which is not as good as audio CD), you can pay as much as you would in the High Street – and you don’t even get the CD, the jewel case or the sleeve notes to keep. I’m talking about a little-known Russian (so far!) music download site, (there are actually three sites I use, which are all very very cheap, but this one beats them all in price if not for scope, and which I’ve been using... Read review

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Advantages: Good for encoding and decoding mp3s. The animator.
Disadvantages: Functions complicated at first. Ripping CDs problematic.

...Why does a person buy mp3 solution software? What is the main objective? The listening and enjoyment of their music? Of course. Because we are basically talking about an mp3 player, right? So, why should pay for something that we can get very good well-known versions from off the Internet for FREE? Sure, Ejay MP3 PRO promises much more than just the ordinary mp3 player, but somehow it fails to completely deliver on its promise. Its overall look is stunning, maybe a bit too stunning so that it can overawe the basic user at first. It looks a little complicated with all those shiny buttons it has on its large interface, yet you get used to it quite quickly. However, pretty soon you're thinking that it is simply mutton dressed up as lamb. Looking good is one thing, but doing its job is another thing completely. It is slow... Read review

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Advantages: Free Music, easy to use and understand, portable, flexible.
Disadvantages: n/a

...Simply put. You need an MP3 player if you like music. Anything you want you can take with you, without a price for the music. Much better than a CD player! MP3's have become very popular throughout the public music industry. The recent experiences with Napsters law suit and others a like have meant that the MP3's have got a lot more publicity than may have first been anticipated. Deciding that it was probably a much better thing to get an MP3 portable player than a Mini-Dic player, I got one for Christmas. It cost £100, compared to a mini-disc player costing around £200. It came with 64mb already installed, and the option of having an external hard-drive. This means that I can store 64mb of music on the MP3 player (typically a song will be around 3mb in size but varies from song to song). This means I can store around 21 singles... Read review

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Advantages: Music on the Move , And Very Cheap after initial set up
Disadvantages: Cost of initial set up (if you dont already have the kit)

...I see lots of reviews for the Creative Labs portable hard drive (300 GBP) and various other portable MP3 players (100 GBP to 300GPB but with very limited playtime and very expensive removable media). Not only that , the Sunday supplements and PC mags tell us that we need to spend at least 250 GBP to have MP3 on the move. First of all MP3 is music , and the cheapest way to get music on the move is on tape. A SONY walkman costs from about 11.99 GBP with tapes of varying length for around 1GBP. This is convenient but , I don’t like compiling tapes any more and tape is inherently fragile. Next step up is minidisk, you can get a portable recorder for around 100GBP (Argos are doing a Sharp one in their sale, and always check out Richer Sounds) with mini disks around 1.5 GBP for a reasonable quality disk. More convenient than tape... Read review

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Advantages: Cheap! small, user friendly, no-one will ever want to steal it and you can replace cheaply if it breaks!
Disadvantages: No locking device, non standard headphones, obviously not hi-tech!

...I seem to start all my reviews with some brief autobiographical notes so here goes... ~~The Autobiography of my MP3 use~~ My MP3 player broke. I was not happy. One of the reasons I wasn't happy was that it had reached that perfect state of being old, out-moded and shabby which meant no-one would be tempted to steal it on my upcoming Round the World trip and I wouldn't care if they did. Now I had to find another old, out-moded and shabby MP3 player to take with me. In the meantime I was stuck training for Race for Life in silence (unless I sang to myself and, being a Reception Teacher, I am only really confident on the lyrics to Nursery Rhymes. You get funny looks jogging round the local park singing 3 Blind Mice, believe me) That's when I spotted these little babies in Tesco for only £4.97. I couldn't quite believe it. After... Read review

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Advantages: Range of features, reads CD-RW audio CDs, anti-shock, built-in battery charger
Disadvantages: Tricky to set up an MP3 CD to work with it, no backlight to the display, unresponsive buttons

...This Goodmans unit comes in a casing that's just a little bigger than my hand. It has several controls spattered around it, with most of them on the top lid, surrounding a text display (not backlit). The unit comes complete with a set of in-the ear headphones with in-line volume control, and a power supply unit. The buttons on the top cover a variety of functions and uses, some dependent on whether you're playing an MP3 or audio CD. The standard features include track skipping, play/pause, stop, play mode (e.g. Random), resume and programming (manually setting up your favourite tracks). For MP3 CDs, the buttons also allow you to type in the name of the track you want to search for, to clear the display and so forth. On the front of the silver, blue and black case is the latch for the lid, which flips up to reveal the CD spindle... Read review

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Advantages: Free original music, plenty of reviews on software, and comments on legalities
Disadvantages: Can be a little slow at times due to the huge amount of traffic

...This site covers every single aspect of the MP3 computer music scene. You need look no further than mp3.com for everything you ever wanted to know about MP3's - oh and you can get some music as well (how could I forget the music). Where do I start? Well, I'll start with the tunes. I am actually a member of the mp3.com artist group, and I can tell you there are some very good people who put their music on to this site! Some of whom I'm sure will go on to bigger and better things in the future. Basically what we have here is a music "community" made up of various artists who need/want to get themselves heard. This site covers pretty much every musical genre that there is! If it's not here then it probably isn't worth listening to. This means that whatever kind of music you are looking for you are bound to find something to suit you... Read review

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