RSSMP3 Player Market Doubling as Apple Dominates
By Ed Oswald | Published May 1, 2006, 2:55 PM
The digital music player market is expected to double in size by the end of the decade, research firm In-Stat said in a report released Monday. Shipments of players will jump from 140 million units last year to 286 million units by 2010.
Spearheading the rapid growth will be falling price points, growth in both the pay-per-download and subscription online music stores, enhanced functionality, and increasing flash memory capacities.
The market for flash players is especially strong. The small chips have allowed for equally small players, most notably Apple's iPod Nano and Shuffle, as well as other players from Creative, iRiver and Sony.
Falling prices for the chips have also allowed manufacturers to offer the players at deeply discounted prices. In-Stat reported that in some Asian markets, the cheapest players were priced at $25. However, even with such discounts, Apple still leads the pack.
"Apple continues to dominate the market for MP3 players, particularly in the US," In-Stat analyst Stephanie Guza said. "Apple competitors continue to face significant challenges, such as a constrained Flash memory supply, device and software integration, and the 'cool factor' associated with Apple's iPod line of products."
The study also found that Microsoft's overall dominance of the entire industry is just about gone. 49 percent of all players in existence now carry the Apple brand. The point that more Microsoft-based players have been sold overall has long been a talking point in arguments for those favoring the Redmond company's digital music efforts.
In-Stat said that on hard drive based players, the focus would turn to a multimedia device as faster processors and bigger disk drives are able to power audio, video and image playback functions.
actually ipod is not totally a mp3 player.you see,just like LAN,it dose not dial any number,but you still call it a modem.and mp3 is the lowest code that ipod can work with.there is something so called lossless or ^%$&^.so what i think is that most of the ipod users did not fully enjoy the function.and for the windows users,it is really hard to find ipod is superior
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|Someone recently showed me a 256mb MP3 player with a 75 hour battery life. >_<
I can bet it didn't do much(or anything) else.
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|People don't have to be stuck with ipods. They can use itunes and a program like Tunebite http://fileforum.betanew...l/Tunebite/1108995430/1 I use it and it works great on my mp3 player. too bad more people dont know about programs like this.
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|Because most people are sheep. Their friends buy ipods, so they feel they have to, they cannot think for themselves, and buy a better device (of which there are many better players than iPods).
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|It would be nice if Microsoft entered into an agreement with Apple to support their format. My personal opinion of Microsoft's attempt at competition in the digital arena is that they water down the market with poorly named, poorly marketed file formats of their own that offer no improvement upon existing formats.
Why not just embrace existing standards and enjoy being recognized for being 'iPod' compatible? Why not package Quicktime with Windows?
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|Honestly, I like Apple, but I have to say that Quicktime on Windows isn't the best experience out there, especially from inside of iTunes. Playing podcast videos is grueling on my brand new laptop. They work wonderfully on my friend's G5, though.
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|I'm not particularly suprised that Apple are dominating the market. It's not that Apple are doing the right things, their plays are not that good, iTunes is locked into propitery formats etc.
It's just that everyone else is in an even worse state.
The Portable Audio market is waiting for a decent sounding, well built, good looking player with execellent Battery Life.
I thought I had found this gem of a player, in the Sony NW-A3000, it's a awesome bit of hardware, 35hours from a battery charge, looks fantastastic, outperforms anything else in the portable market, unfortunatly, the software supplied is so bad, it makes the unit unusable!!
I do think, Sony have the potential to challenge Apple, but they need to sack all their existing programmers responsible for SonicStage, and the embarrasingly bad "Sony Connect".
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|Forget about Sony. I don't know about there HD players, but I've own an Hi-MD (MiniDisc) player. If you don't know what that is it, it basically uses disc's that hold 1 gig of space.
But like you said the software sucks (Sonic Stage) and has too many restrictions. Only downloads, can't upload back to computer. MP3 sounds worse than it does on my computer... Atrac sounds better but I would still rather use MP3 for compatibilaty for other mp3 players.
Instead try an iAudio player. There X5 series are pretty good for music and so are there A2 series for video. No software is required. It uses mass-storage USB 2.0 so you just plug it in and it just works; it shows up as a hard drive. Put your music in the Music folder and unplug and wala (spelling?) there's your music.
Speaking of music, not only does it support MP3 it also supports Ogg (my favorite), Flac (also my favorite), Wma and Wav.
Other things that is worth mentioning.
- About 35 hours for X5L and 14 Hours for X5
- FM Player/Recorder
- Built-in Mic for voice recording
- Line in for Direct MP3 recording
- Line Out
- Both X5 and A2 play video, but the X5 isn't really worth watching on with the small screen. The A2 on the other hand has about the same size screen as the PSP (480x272 resolution), it's also ment more for video too.
- Has a USB Host feature; if your digital camer gets full, you can offload the memory card to the X5. You can also put PSP video's on the X5 and load them up to your PSP, up to 60 gigs with the 60 gig X5.
- Nice equalizers with good bass and BBE, 95db SNR sound quality which is good. I wouldn't doubt if Sony's was like 86db SNR. That's what there car stereo's are when the rest are like at 90db or above last time I checked, even lower than the generic models.
- Other stuff I'm probably forgetting
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|What does it mean an mp3 player? The question apparenly makes no sense, but I am asking because my friends (and me too) use multicodec players, which are more and more popular. No one from our group uses mp3 anymore, we use Ogg Vorbis instead (or FLAC). So are our players qualify as mp3 players or not?
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|That's why at least some people have pushed people to use the term "Digital Audio Player" instead. It's a more generic term that encompasses all the different players regardless of what codec that they use. It's also a good name for naive users that may not understand the term mp3 player. "Digital Audio Player"(DAP for short) I think would be a much better because it's a good short but accurate description of what these players are.
That being said virtually all recent digital audio players support MPEG 1 layer 3 audio(aka mp3) because it is still one of the most popular codecs. While I don't have any firm numbers I am certain a fairly decent percentage of people don't use mp3 anymore. I am sure a fair number of the iPod toting crowd just takes the AAC tracks from iTunes.
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|Yeah, they're generally still "mp3" players.
Speaking of FLAC and OGG, check out http://www.rockbox.org - they've got alternative firmware for iPods, iRivers and Archos players that enable FLAC, OGG etc, and add a load more features like games and plugins.
Absolutely screws the iPod's already-modest battery life though.
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|Thanks for the Web page. I will bookmark it. I still use my ol' good iRiver iFP-799 (tweaked firmware: extended OGG files bitrate limit - now from Q=0 to Q=7.25, recording limits were removed, the player is seen by any operating system as a flash memory pen. The fw it is available from http://www.misticriver.net forum, unfortunately one needs to register to download the firmware). But I like the player anyway :-)
Honestly, I do not like describing the players as "mp3 players". It is like calling all desktop operating systems "Windows" or all bubble jet printers "HPs". Mp3 is one of many codecs only.
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|Give it time. They are still only using one "core" if you will, so all the functions are being generated on the same chip, instead of spreading it out over the two chips the iPod has. Plus, the code hasn't been optimized for the iPod yet. Its only been out for like 3 months now, so give it some time. I love Rockbox. It adds so much more functionality to my iPod. I personally don't get nor use OGG, but from what I understand, its playback is top notch. For me, its all about FLAC, which I can play, unabated for about 8 hours before its time for a recharge. MP3 playback is decent, but don't use any equalizer settings and disable the peak meters in your WPS, otherwise you'll experience major skipping issues as the buffer empties too quickly and has to be refilled...again, only half of the processing power is being used at this point. Keep checking on it...it'll get better as development continues.
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|I heard M$ is considering marketing an MP3 player again.
This one may have a chance since they're teaming up with Fleshlight.
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|Again? I wasn't aware they were ever involved in a portable player.
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