1. MP3 Players By James Creamer

2. Basic Idea Most basic idea of an MP3 player is a portable music source that fits in the palm of your hand The amount of music you can store on a particular player depends on how much memory the one you own has and can range now from only a few cd’s worth up to 40,000 songs But the more memory you want the higher the price would be In order to put the music on the MP3 player it needs to be plugged into a computer and using some sort of media player for music you move the music files onto the MP3 player Music can be put onto the media player by buying it online on multiple sites or uploading a cd onto it

3. Beginning MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III and it is a standard for audio compression that makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for displaying video and audio using lossy compression The inventors named on the MP3 patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.

4. Timeline 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code- named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB). January 1988 – Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC. April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3. 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1. 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published. 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later. November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3. September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer. February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format. 1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.

5. MPMan F10 MP3 Player The first Mp3 player called The MPMan F10 had a memory of only 32MB or up to 8 songs, It connected to an old-style parallel port on the host PC from which songs could be copied to the player. There was a tiny LCD on the front of the player to give an indication as to what you were listening to. In May 1998 it made its debut in the US and Europe at a price of $200 US

6. Competition The following year the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 was released causing the MPMan F10 to lower their prices due to the competition from $250 to $200 It also had 32MB of storage fed through a parallel port. But it boasted a larger display than the F10 and also featured a Smart Media slot to allow users to increase the gadget's storage capacity The PMP300 was widely but wrongly held to be the world's first commercial MP3 player due to its large popularity over the F10

7. Size MP3 players are able to hold so much data in a small space due to compression In 1894, Alfred Marshall Mayer reported that a tone could be rendered inaudible by another tone of lower frequency which is the basic idea used for the first step in compression The compression removes frequencies above and below the spectrum audible to people and waveforms that you can't hear because louder waveforms drown them out, but this does cause the song to be of a poorer quality know as lossy compression Then once all excess information is gone the file size itself is compressed in multiple processes, the first being like a zip file Next a process called Huffman coding reduces the size of the file even further but does not change its quality known as lossless compression

8. Largest The largest audio based Mp3 player now has a memory of 160GB, but ones that hold videos and other media are said to be able to hold up to 250GB, But the 250GB ones arent necessarily store bought like that and will need some modifications by the buyer who will also need a decent knowledge of electronics in general. Apple’s Ipod brand of Mp3 players has a 160GB version, or 40,000 songs you can buy for $250

9. Bibliography Stevens, A. (2000). Into the World of MP3. Proquest. Retrieved May 1, 2011, from http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/202698348/12F1297D4222B19095/3?accountid= 13025 http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/202698348/12F1297D4222B19095/3?accountid= 13025 Hacker, S. (2000). MP3: The Definitive Guide. Firstsearch. Retrieved May 2, 2011, from http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSPage?pagetype=return_frameset:sessionid=fsapp3- 46184-gn7xxxsb- nkd02n:entitypagenum=3:0:entityframedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.netlibrary.com%2Furl api.asp%3Faction%3Dsummary%26v%3D1%26bookid%3D28870:entityframedtitle=World Cat:entityframedtimeout=15:entityopenTitle=:entityopenAuthor=:entityopenNumber=: http://firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FSPage?pagetype=return_frameset:sessionid=fsapp3- 46184-gn7xxxsb- nkd02n:entitypagenum=3:0:entityframedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.netlibrary.com%2Furl api.asp%3Faction%3Dsummary%26v%3D1%26bookid%3D28870:entityframedtitle=World Cat:entityframedtimeout=15:entityopenTitle=:entityopenAuthor=:entityopenNumber Bellis, M. (n.d.). The history of mp3. inventors.about, Retrieved from http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/MPThree.htm http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/MPThree.htm Smith, T. (2008, March 10). Teh years old: the world's first mp3 player. Retrieved from http://www.reghardware.com/2008/03/10/ft_first_mp3_player http://www.reghardware.com/2008/03/10/ft_first_mp3_player http://www.apple.com/ipodclassic/