Portable MP3 players let you play your music anywhere you want

With portable MP3 players there are no CDs, no tapes, no wires, no limits...just lots and lots of your favorite music. You set the playlist. You control everything.

If you have a lot of songs you want to take with you, then a hard drive based portable mp3 player like the Apple iPod is a great choice. They can hold thousands of songs. A basic rule for storage is that 1 megabyte equals one minute, 1 gigabyte equals 1000 minutes. For example, a 20GB drive will hold approximately 5,000 songs (4-minutes each) when compressed at the standard 128 kilobits per second. You can basically put your entire music collection on just one mp3 player and listen to any song you want at any time.

Portable mp3 players that use flash memory, on the other hand, are generally limited to dozens of songs. You can usually buy more memory to bump up the capacity to a few hundred songs. The big benefit with these is cost. If you're on a tight budget, a flash memory portable mp3 player may be what you need.

A portable mp3 player uses ID3 tags (artist, track, genre, etc.) to organize files. Most of the higher capacity players let you use playlists created with Musicmatch Jukebox. With that software, the information from the songs is read from an online database called Gracenote CDDB. Or you can manually type in all your song info. Musicmatch Jukebox also lets you easily convert (ie. rip) your CDs to mp3 files.

Getting songs onto your portable mp3 player usually involves connecting it to your PC. Keep in mind if you have a lot of songs, transferring them over could easily be an overnight task. Many players use a USB connection. Get one with a USB 2.0 or FireWire (IEEE 1394) connection (if your PC has one of those) and you'll be transferring music much, much faster.

Finding music is simple thanks to music downloading services like iTunes Music store. iTunes lets you select from over 700,000 tracks from five major labels and more than 450 independents. You can enjoy free 30-second previews of all songs and find hundreds of exclusive and pre-release tracks and many rare, out-of-print albums.