If you have never heard of MP3(Mpeg) players and don't know anything about them then you are in luck. To find out what it's about just read this. If you already know about MP3 players, then you should still read this. You just might learn something new.

History

MP3(Mpeg) stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, Audio Layer III and it is a file system that compresses music files without loosing much of the quality. It all began in the mid-1980s, at the Fraunhofer Institut in Erlangen, Germany. Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen, helped to develop this low bit rate audio coding. Because the files were smaller they became easier to copy, transmit over the Internet and download. At the Frauenhofer Institut they also developed the first MP3 player. This was in the early 1990s, but it turned out to be not as great as they thought. In 1997, another developer at Advanced Multimedia Products named Tomislav Uzelac created the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, which is thought to be the first prime-time MP3 player. Other programmers eventually began to create their own tools for MP3 users. And then Napster came along! Napster was on the Internet in 1999 and it allowed anyone with a connection to download just about any music they wanted,and it only took minutes. That may all come to an end, however, because a judge has ordered Napster to be shut down.

Now

MP3 players are probably one of the cheapest and easiest ways to compress stereo-quality music to a portable player of a computer system. MP3 files are audio files that are encoded into different formats to tracks on a Compact Disk. The files on the MP3s are encoded near the CD quality. MP3 format compresses a cd quality song by a factor of 10 to 14 without loosing the quality. MP3 players makes it possible for people to pass the retail music market and download if they have a regular Internet connection. Most times you can get the music for free. MP3 players are a relatively new sound compression. A regular album can only hold only about 65 minutes of its music but with a MP3 player set, you can fit 17 albums on one CD. The thing that makes the MP3 player sets so fun and special is that they can fit lots and lots of songs on them. You can fit many albums into just one small file. All of that makes it possible to be able to download the music files off of the MP3 players. MP3 players are one of the wonderful and new controversies of the Internet going on today.

Later

MP3s have been very successful because of its open nature format and this is why it will probably stay around for awhile. As people learn more and more about MP3 technology the use of the MP3 format will continue to grow.

My personal prediction for the future of MP3 players is that they may not be available to use the way they are used now. The makers of the MP3 players have gotten into lots of trouble. Because of the MP3 player, people do not buy the CDs. Instead of the people buying new CDs, they can go onto the Internet and download songs for free. How would you feel if you came out with the hottest new album and couldn't wait for them to sell? Then you find out that they are being given away for free and you are not making any money off of it. That is called plagiarism. If the MP3 players don't go out of business, then I think that they will probably be able to hold more songs and albums inside of them. I think what may happen is that, when you download a song off the Internet and onto a file, you also get a chip that contains the music video to the song if it has one, that you can put into a tape and into your television. I think that when you download, it will also come in tree different languages (English, French, and Spanish) that do not take up any room on the file. I also think that in the future, there will be new designs of MP3 players. This is what I see for the future of MP3 players for this world. My prediction for the future of MP3 players is probably wrong but this is just what I predict.