By Chris Housepian:

For those of you interested in the growing world of digital music, mp3s, and media players I’ll give my personal opinion of a few select programs and hardware devices here.

• Mp3s:
  • First for those of you that have been living in a cave for the past four or five years mp3s are quickly becoming the new music format standard. Just as cds replaced cassettes and cassettes replaced eight tracks, we are now in a transitional phase from cds to mp3s. The quicker you join the bandwagon the more familiar you will be with mp3 technology as it evolves.
    • Trivia time: mp3 stands for “motion picture experts group layer 3″ and was first developed to help dvd manufacturers compress audio onto dvds.
• Software based mp3 players:
  • There are four players worth mentioning here: Microsoft Media Player, Musicmatch Jukebox, Winamp, and Apple iTunes.
    • Microsoft’s Windows Media Player is a very popular media aplication. I am conviced that this stems from its inclusion with Windows XP and many people’s inclination to use the programs that they already have installed. Of the four players mentioned here this is the only one that plays not just audio but video as well “out of the box”.
    • Musicmatch Jukebox is the main competition for iTunes, and rightfully so. Jukebox’s library manager capabilities brought better file organization to millions of users and their integrated ID3 tagging has proved very useful to those with massive libraries of music. However, their inability to work seamlessly with Apple’s industry standard iPod forced Apple to introduce their far superior iTunes software to an untapped audience of Windows users.
    • Winamp was one of the first players to become widely popular and as such has gained a loyal following. However its more complicated nature and consumption of system resources, coupled with its default ugliness lead me to say pass on this one.
    • iTunes, what can someone say about something that works almost perfectly other than “download it immediately!” If you have mp3s sitting there on your hard drive, or are considering starting up a collection then this is the first thing that you should have. From its extreme ease of use to its very powerful playlist functions, this is the mp3 software to end all mp3 software; Apple has done a magnificent job.

Stay tuned for my upcoming hardware mp3 player recommendations.

• If you have any questions or comments I can be reached at thechoop@hotmail.com