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Podmaxx '08

By combining iTunes and power of Podmaxx, you'll unlock your your iPods maximum potential! Did you know that it was impossible to move all your music from your iPod™ back to your PC. Impossible to copy anyone's iPod. Impossible to stop iTunes from deleting your valuable music collection. Do it all and more starting now with Podmaxx™.

Apple 60 GB iPod with Video Playback
Have a hankering for the best iPod on the Apple tree? Check out this sweet thing: massive storage space allows up to 15,000 songs, 20,000 photos, or a cool 150 hours of video playback. The color display is bigger (2.5-inches) and easy to read, and you can now squeeze a whopping 20 hours out of the battery - 5x more than before. Comes with earbuds and lots of attitude. Three big thumbs up from CleverJoe.

Apple 30 GB iPod
with Video Playback!
This sexy baby stores up to 7,500 songs, 20,000 photos, or 75 hours of video playback. Owners speak about their iPod in religious terms, and there are some pretty good reasons why. The new generation of the hugely popular iPods have arrived, and this 30 GB version is slim and feather-light, and offers a small barrage of other bonus features. If CleverJoe were all thumbs, each one of them would be sticking straight up. Apple's iPod rocks on.

When portable MP3 players first became popular, they were relatively simple devices that were good for one thing: playing MP3 files. Today, portable MP3 players like the Apple iPod and Creative Labs Nomad have evolved into outstanding music playback systems far more capable then the early day versions. Join CleverJoe's clever newsletter and he'll let you know when new articles are posted.

The best MP3 Player? Which one should you buy?

iRiver, Apple iPod, Rio, Creative Labs Nomad, Sony, Panasonic, Nike, RCA, Samsung, Archos. There are many MP3 players and MiniDisc Player/Recorders available and the "best MP3 player" music system really depends on your personal needs. Each has it's own strengths and applications. Some, like the Apple iPod and Nomad offer excellent playback AND digital recorder capabilities, while others such as the SonicBlue MP3 Sport player by Rio offer superb durability and shake free music.

From a digital audio perspective, today's MP3 players have reached a level of sophistication that would make CleverJoe's mama proud. Many MP3 players include decent built in equalizers and excellent digital audio converters that will convert your fave CD to MP3 format. Although this is still compressed audio and audiophiles among us will point out that it's not going to replace professional DAT recorders anytime soon, the big bonus here is that a large amount of digital audio can be stored on a small and portable MP3 player. With no moving parts, MP3 players are well-known for delivering skip-free music, and music on the go is obviously the big theme here.

MP3 players and MP3 music, like everything else technology related, are in constant flux. Recognizing that, most of today's best MP3 players now ship with reprogrammable firmware that will enable support of new digital audio formats and software extensions as they emerge. Yes, clever music lovers everywhere can have their cake and eat it too.

Best MP3 Players
Browse CleverJoe's Top Pick MP3 player reviews to the right and find the one that turns your personal crank and suits your needs the best.

iRiver H10 20 GB MP3 Player/Recorder
With enough storage space for thousands of songs and still lots of room left for photos, movie files and an extra pair of socks. If you're looking for the ultimate in sweet without breaking the bank, the iRiver H10 is an easy choice. About the size of a cassette, it has a great looking color monitor display, ultra-fast transfers, and 16 long hours of battery life. Throw in voice recording, fm radio tuner and recorder and the deal is even sweeter. The ability to view JPEG or BMP images on the full colour display is a nice bonus.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard encoding for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players. MP3 is an audio-specific format that was designed by the Motion Pictures Expert Group. A group formed by several teams of engineers at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany, AT&T-Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, USA, Thomson-Brandt, and CCETT as well as others. It was approved as an ISO/IEC standard in 1991.

The use in MP3 of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners, but is not considered high fidelity audio by audiophiles. An MP3 file that is created using the mid-range bit rate setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is typically about 1/10th the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality. The compression works by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. This method is commonly referred to as perceptual coding.[1] It internally provides a representation of sound within a short term time/frequency analysis window, by using psychoacoustic models to discard or reduce precision of components less audible to human hearing, and recording the remaining information in an efficient manner. This is relatively similar to the principles used by JPEG, an image compression format.

The term MP3 is actually a reference shortened from the official M(oving) P(icture) E(xperts) G(roup) -1 Audio Layer 3 nomenclature for this lossy digital audio encoding format.

The MP3 audio data compression lossy data compression algorithm takes advantage of a audio perceptual limitation of human hearing called auditory masking. In 1894, Mayer reported that a tone could be rendered inaudible by another tone of lower frequency.[2] In 1959, Richard Ehmer described a complete set of auditory curves regarding this phenomenon.[3] Ernst Terhardt et al. created an algorithm describing auditory masking with high accuracy.[4]

In 1983, at the University of Buenos Aires, Oscar Bonello started developing a PC audio card based on bit compression technology. In 1989 he introduced the first working device based on a PC audio card using auditory masking: Audicom.[5]

The psychoacoustic masking codec was first proposed in 1979, apparently independently, by Manfred R. Schroeder, et al..[6] from AT&T-Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and M. A.Krasner[7] both in the United States. Krasner was the first to publish and to produce hardware for speech, not usable as music bit compression, but the publication of his results as a relatively obscure Lincoln Laboratory Technical Report did not immediately influence the mainstream of psychoacoustic codec development. Manfred Schroeder was already a well-known and revered figure in the worldwide community of acoustical and electrical engineers, and his paper had influence in acoustic and source-coding (audio data compression) research. Both Krasner and Schroeder built upon the work performed by Eberhard F. Zwicker in the areas of tuning and masking of critical bands,[8][9] that in turn built on the fundamental research in the area from Bell Labs of Harvey Fletcher and his collaborators.[10] A wide variety of (mostly perceptual) audio compression algorithms were reported in IEEE's refereed Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.[11] That journal reported in February 1988 on a wide range of established, working audio bit compression technologies, some of them using auditory masking as part of their fundamental design, and several showing real-time hardware implementations aimed at laboratory experiences. This hardware was never used in PC audio cards.

The immediate predecessors of MP3 were "Optimum Coding in the Frequency Domain" (OCF),[12] and Perceptual Transform Coding (PXFM).[13] These two codecs, along with block-switching contributions from Thomson-Brandt, were merged into a codec called ASPEC, which was submitted to MPEG, and which won the quality competition, but that was mistakenly rejected as too complex to implement. The first practical implementation of an audio perceptual coder (OCF) in hardware (Krasner's hardware was too cumbersome and slow for practical use), was an implementation of a psychoacoustic transform coder based on Motorola 56000 DSP chips. MP3 is directly descended from OCF and PXFM. MP3 represents the outcome of the collaboration of Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg , working as a postdoc at AT&T-Bell Labs with Mr. James D. Johnston of AT&T-Bell Labs, collaborating with the Fraunhofer Society for Integrated Circuits, Erlangen, with relatively minor contributions from the MP2 branch of psychoacoustic sub-band coders.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 encoding began as the Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) project managed by Egon Meier-Engelen of the Deutsche Forschungs- und Versuchsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt (later on called Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, German Aerospace Center) in Germany. The European Community financed this project, commonly known as EU-147, from 1987 to 1994 as a part of the EUREKA research program.

As a doctoral student at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Karlheinz Brandenburg began working on digital music compression in the early 1980s, focusing on how people perceive music. He completed his doctoral work in 1989 and became an assistant professor at Erlangen-Nuremberg. While there, he continued to work on music compression with scientists at the Fraunhofer Society (in 1993 he joined the staff of the Fraunhofer Institute).[14]

In 1991 there were two proposals available: Musicam and ASPEC - (Short excerpt on German Wikipedia) (Adaptive Spectral Perceptual Entropy Coding). The Musicam technique, as proposed by Philips (The Netherlands), CCETT (France) and Institut für Rundfunktechnik (Germany) was chosen due to its simplicity and error robustness, as well as its low computational power associated with the encoding of high quality compressed audio.[15] The Musicam format, based on sub-band coding, was the basis of the MPEG Audio compression format (sampling rates, structure of frames, headers, number of samples per frame). Much of its technology and ideas were incorporated into the definition of ISO MPEG Audio Layer I and Layer II and the filter bank alone into Layer III (MP3) format as part of the computationally inefficient hybrid filter bank. Under the chairmanship of Professor Musmann (University of Hannover) the editing of the standard was made under the responsibilities of Leon van de Kerkhof (Layer I) and Gerhard Stoll (Layer II).

A working group consisting of Leon van de Kerkhof (The Netherlands), Gerhard Stoll (Germany), Leonardo Chiariglione (Italy), Yves-François Dehery (France), Karlheinz Brandenburg (Germany) and James D. Johnston (USA) took ideas from ASPEC, integrated the filter bank from Layer 2, added some of their own ideas and created MP3, which was designed to achieve the same quality at 128 kbit/s as MP2 at 192 kbit/s.

All algorithms were approved in 1991 and finalized in 1992 as part of MPEG-1, the first standard suite by MPEG, which resulted in the international standard ISO/IEC 11172-3, published in 1993. Further work on MPEG audio was finalized in 1994 as part of the second suite of MPEG standards, MPEG-2, more formally known as international standard ISO/IEC 13818-3, originally published in 1995.[16]

Compression efficiency of encoders is typically defined by the bit rate, because compression ratio depends on the bit depth and sampling rate of the input signal. Nevertheless, compression ratios are often published. They may use the CD parameters as references (44.1 kHz, 2 channels at 16 bits per channel or 2×16 bit), or sometimes the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) SP parameters (48 kHz, 2×16 bit). Compression ratios with this latter reference are higher, which demonstrates the problem with use of the term compression ratio for lossy encoders.

Karlheinz Brandenburg used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega's song "Tom's Diner" to assess and refine the MP3 compression algorithm.} This song was chosen because of its nearly monophonic nature and wide spectral content, making it easier to hear imperfections in the compression format during playbacks. Some jokingly refer to Suzanne Vega as "The mother of MP3"[17]. Some more critical audio excerpts (glockenspiel, triangle, accordion, etc.) were taken from the EBU V3/SQAM reference compact disc and have been used by professional sound engineers to assess the subjective quality of the MPEG Audio formats. It is important to understand that Suzanne Vega is recorded in an interesting fashion that results in substantial difficulties that arise due to Binaural Masking Level Depression (BMLD) as discussed in Brian C. J. Moore's book on the Psychology of Human Hearing, for instance.[page # needed]

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