Gadget Savvy: MP3 Players Quiz

A music listener who has an MP3 player with 1 GB (approximately 1,000 MB) of memory can carry about 240 songs, or the equivalent of about 20 CDs. An MP3 model with 80 GB of memory, on the other hand, could store as many as 1,600 albums.

WAV (Waveform Audio) and MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface) are two file types that can be played on most MP3 players. A ZIP file, however, even though it may carry several MP3s, is an unplayable format and needs to be uncompressed before its contents are used.

The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany developed and patented the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 technology, now commonly known as the MP3 format, in 1989. It's now the standard for playing music and sound on computers, cell phones and, of course, MP3 players.

The world's first flash-memory-based MP3 player, the MPMan, was released in the late spring of 1998 in Korea. It was later introduced in America during the summer of that same year as the Eiger Labs MPMan F10 and F20.

Solid-state memory, because there are no moving parts, allows for better reliability and no skipping. The technology is suited for listeners who don't keep lots of music on their MP3 players -- a player with a hard drive instead of solid-state memory can have anywhere from 10 to 150 times more memory storage.

An internal microdrive is an example of a hard disk, the same thing desktop computers and Web servers use to store memory. Internal flash memory and memory sticks contain no moving parts, so they're considered solid-state memory.

Along with the ability to copy music from CDs, radio or Web sites, MP3 players can also organize and create custom lists of songs in the order you want to hear them, simply known as a playlist.

Most MP3 players use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, useful for their thin, lightweight size. Because they provide a lot of energy in relation to their small size, you'll also find them in laptops, PDAs and cell phones.

MP3 players house digital music, but in order for you to hear it through headphones or speakers, the digital signal processor (DSP) converts the digital signal to an analog signal. An amplifier allows the analog signal to be heard.

Believe it or not, a George Foreman grill also doubles as an MP3 player docking station, allowing chefs to grill out and listen to their favorite tunes, while the Swiss Army Knife has gone digital with its own MP3 player combo. The dental filling MP3 player, as far as we know, doesn't exist.