Towards the end of last year, notices were being posted about the demise of the MP3 player. The analysts at IDC had originally predicted worldwide penetration of 26m personal players by 2005. However, poor PC sales and record company prevarication over making their catalogues available for download significantly impacted on the market for digital audio players. The units hadn't captured the buyer's imagination either. Smaller models could not store enough music (invariably around an hour), while large hard disk personals were too bulky to be properly portable.
Enter one of the format's more unlikely allies in the guise of Apple. The computer company rewrote the MP3 personal rule-book by producing the iPod, a £300 hard disk based player that offered a generous 5GB of storage - roughly 1,000 tunes - yet unlike rival products, was small, stylish and light. With more than 125,000 units sold worldwide in the first two weeks, it was also a runaway success. Disappointingly for PC owners, the iPod is Mac-only - although a company called Mediafour is doing its best to rectify this.
Apple recently unveiled its second incarnation of the iPod, which for £365.11 offers twice the amount of storage. However, while there are still no hard disk MP3 players for PCs that are as elegant or as easy to use as the iPod, several new products have narrowed the gap a little. SonicBlue, whose Rio series of players were among the most popular of the early MP3 personals, has unveiled the RioRiot. Due in stores in a few weeks, the £350 unit offers 20GB of storage (twice as much as the iPod version two), is compatible with MP3 and its Microsoft originated rival Windows Media Audio (WMA), and also includes an integrated FM tuner. While it can't rival the iPod for looks and size, SonicBlue's marketing director, Nick Caddick, is confident that it "wipes the floor with the Apple unit in terms of usability of its interface".
The Riot will soon be joined by the third version of rival company, Creative Lab's Nomad Jukebox. The original version of the Jukebox, which launched in 2000, offered 6GB of storage, but was criticised for its bulkiness and unconventional styling. A 20GB version arrived earlier this year and will soon be joined by the Jukebox 3, which is one-third smaller, and lighter than the original. Also available is the £350 Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, another a hard disk-based MP3 player with a 20GB hard disk, which can record music directly from other audio sources.
"Although hard disk players have captured the market now, I think they are a short term solution," predicts Mark Jones of the UK's online MP3 hardware specialist www.mp3players.co.uk. "The fall in the price of flash memory cards means that newer small models have larger capacity cards and can store many tunes."
Jones cites the £280 Dual Play, a unit in the shape of a cassette (so that it can be placed directly into in-car or personal audio cassette systems) which has a storage of 256MB - eight times as much as early MP3 players, as a good example of how the market is developing. Jones is also keen on a new storage medium called Dataplay. These cards are slightly larger than a 50p coin, store 512MB of data, yet retail for around $10 - a fraction of the price of rival Memory Stick and Secure Digital cards. As Dataplay is promising 5 GB cards within the next year or so, Jones believes that players such as the I-River IDP-100, which is due in the UK later in the year, will significantly eat into sales of hard disk players.
Yet even with the upsurge in sales of MP3 players, the format is still a long way from becoming a mass market product. SonicBlue's Nick Caddick believes that "MP3 needs to move away from the PC, so the units can record music as MP3, no matter what the source." Those who share his view will probably be impressed by Panasonic's £400 SV-SR100 which is expected later this month. To a slim and lightweight personal CD player, Panasonic has added an encoder that can record music from CDs, or indeed any external audio source via an input, as AAC files on to a removable Secure Digital storage card. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) offers a superior sonic performance to MP3 and yet allows more music to be accommodated on to a card than its rival. The unit does not come with an SD card, although 128MB SD cards are currently on sale with 512MB versions to follow shortly.
