The case of the digital audio player! MP3 Music

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Digital Audio Players

The case of the digital audio player!
By Robert C. Wren

When I was a teenager, I used to keep up with all of the latest technological innovations. It wasn't exactly the cool thing to do, but it certainly was important among a certain subculture of youth.

It showed that I was cutting edge and elite, that I knew my way around a computer and could probably waste you in a video game. Nowadays, however, it seems to be harder and harder to keep up with what is going on. The technological developments are not coming faster exactly, it is just that the standards are diverging. Rather than the trend towards interoperability growing, it has diminished. The case of the digital audio player provides perhaps the best example.

I have been searching for digital audio players for a couple years now, but I have yet to find one that really addresses all my needs. I think it is ridiculous that no one has built a digital audio player that is truly multi platform it. I know the reasons – the companies want to try to lock in the market as much as they can. Each digital video player, audio MP3 player, and other portable media device tries to force its own format on everyone. The end result? The consumer loses, and none of the digital music player formats really succeed.

Take the iPod audio player. It succeeded not because of quality, but because of buzz. Apparently, the press picked up on it and thought that it was a new development – a technology that hadn't been seen before. They didn't realize that it was just another standard digital audio player.

The might have captured a lot of the market overnight, but they will never go all the way. You see, many people were already using MP3s, Ogg Vorbis files, and other formats that were not compatible with it. The iPod audio player succeeded in forcing its standards on to some users – perhaps more successfully than other digital music players – but ultimately failed to capture the market. Now people with iPods cannot listen to music from other audio players, and vice versa.

It strikes me as absurd. Anyone who has ever played with music editing software, digital audio player software, or other sound or video software on the computer knows that there are multiplatform programs out there. I can't for the life of me figure out why no one has put one of these in a portable device yet. Until someone gets the bright idea to do so, I know that I will stay away from digital audio players

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