HOW TO BECOME THE ULTIMATE PORTABLE MUSIC FAN

In the 1960s, it was the transistor AM radio. In the 1970s, it was the portable AM/FM radio. In the 1980s, it was the Sony Walkman, the revolutionary portable cassette player that went hand-in-hand with leg warmers and pastel-colored terrycloth headbands. In the 1990s, the Walkman gave way to the portable CD player. (And those legwarmers and headbands just went away, thankfully.) Now, a decade later, we're getting our portable music another way via portable digital audio players.

Today's portable audio players sometimes mistakenly called MP3 players are small gadgets that hold large libraries of songs in digital fashion. These players let you download music from the web or rip songs from CDs, storing all that music in digital audio files. Even the smallest portable players hold hundreds of songs, and the largest devices can archive your entire music collection. And, best of all, these gadgets fit in the palm of your hand; no more carrying around bulky portable CD players.

Another advantage to these digital music players is that you can program them to play back your own personalized music mix, in the form of customized playlists. Put together one mix for your drive to work, another mix for your drive home, and a third to listen to on weekends. It's normally as simple as dragging and dropping specific songs in a PC- or Mac-based music player program and then transferring the songs and the playlist to your portable device.

Portable Music Players Choose Your Poison

There are three types of digital music players available today, defined by their type and quantity of storage. Which type of player you choose depends on how you plan to use it, how many songs you need to store, and how big your budget is.

The smallest (and lowest priced) digital players are so-called flash players. These devices, such as the iPod Shuffle, store their digital music in flash memory, and offer anywhere from 64MB to 1GB of storage capacity. These miniature units are small enough to fit in any pocket, are relatively inexpensive (as low as $100 or so), and won't skip if you're jogging.

The biggest (and highest-priced) digital players are hard drive players. These devices, like Apple's iPod, use 1.8'' hard disks that provide up to 40GB of storage capacity. These units let you store literally thousands of individual songs, and can even double as file and digital photo storage devices. The downside is size and weight, and they can cost anywhere from $250 $400. They can also skip if you jostle them around; they're not ideal for runners.

Occupying the middle ground are MicroDrive players, such as the Apple iPod Mini and Creative Zen Micro. These units use smaller hard drives called MicroDrives that offer a decent compromise between size, storage, and price. You'll get storage in the 1.5GB 4GB range, in a fairly compact form factor. Price is typically in the $200 $250 range, and they suffer from the same skipping tendency as the larger hard drive players.

So, which type of player should you choose? As with most gadgets, it depends on how you'll be using it. If you're a runner or jogger, skip the hard drive players (that skip when you run) and stick with a flash player that won't skip at all. If, on the other hand, you're relatively sedentary and want to put your entire CD collection in the palm of your hand, then go with a big-capacity hard drive player. If you want more storage capacity than you get with a flash player but still want a somewhat-small form factor, make the compromise and choose a MicroDrive player.

Know Your File Formats!

Another factor when choosing a portable audio player is where you're going to get your songs from, and what file format you're going to use. Different players are compatible with different file formats; choose the wrong player, and you might not be able to download songs from your online music store of choice.

While there are literally a dozen or more file formats used to store digital music, you're really only going to run into three formats that are best-suited for storing lots of files on portable devices:

• MP3 Short for MPEG-1 Level 3, the MP3 format remains the most widely used digital audio format today, with a decent compromise between small file size and sound quality. The primary advantage of MP3 is its universality; unlike most other file formats, just about every digital music player and player program can handle MP3-format music.

• AAC Short for Advanced Audio Coding (and also known as MPEG-4 AAC), this is the proprietary audio format used by Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store. AAC offers slightly better sound quality than MP3 files, along with strong digital rights management, to prevent unauthorized use. Unfortunately, most non-Apple music players won't play AAC-format songs but if you're an iPod user, this is the format you'll be using.

• WMA Short for Windows Media Audio, Microsoft's digital audio format is promoted as an MP3 alternative with similar audio quality at half the file size. That may be stretching it a bit, but WMA does typically offer a slightly better compromise between compression and quality than you find with MP3 files. It also provides strong digital rights management.

So which audio format should you use? It depends on your portable audio player, and the site you use to download your music. For example, the most popular music store is, far and away, Apple's iTunes Music Store. When you download a song from iTunes, it's in Apple's proprietary AAC file format. Unfortunately, the only music players that are compatible with the AAC format are (surprise!) Apple's iPod, iPod Mini, and iPod Shuffle. You can't play AAC-format files on any other player. So if you like iTunes, you need to buy an iPod and if you own an iPod, you have to use the iTunes Music Store.

Similarly, the iPod cannot play back files recorded in Microsoft's popular WMA format. So if you download music from Napster, let's say (which uses the WMA format), you can't play them back on your iPod. Similarly, if you own a Creative Zen Micro, which plays both MP3 and WMA formats (but not AAC), you can use it with any other music store except iTunes. You get the picture.

So here's the important thing to know. Apart from iTunes, most online music stores and services, including Napster, download files in the WMA format. Almost all music players except the iPod, of course are compatible with the WMA format. So if you buy an iPod, you're going to become a customer of the iTunes Music Store, whether you like it or not. If you buy any other type of player, you won't be downloading from iTunes, even if you want to. Such are the joys of incompatible formats.

And Now for the Obligatory Section on the Apple iPod

Okay, it goes without saying (although I'm going to say it anyway) that the most popular portable music player today is the Apple iPod. Apple moves a million or so of these puppies every month; for many teenagers, an iPod is a required accessory even more than the latest camera phone. You gotta hand it to Steve Jobs, he's done a good job of marketing this little white slab of plastic.

Apple sells several different versions of the iPod. The big daddy of the iPod line is, quite simply, the hard-disk iPod. Add a bigger hard disk and a color display and you get the iPod Photo. Shrink the case and use a smaller MicroDrive, and you get the iPod Mini. Go with an even smaller case and flash memory instead of a hard drive (and remove the display, for some unknown reason), and you get the iPod Shuffle. The iPod, iPod Photo, and iPod Shuffle are all in Apple-white cases; the iPod Mini comes in a variety of groovy colors.

Probably the best thing about the iPod (and the iPod Mini) is its Control Wheel. This is one area where Apple got it right, and competitors still haven't come close. Operating an iPod is as easy as moving your thumb around the outside of the wheel to scroll through the menu system, and then clicking the center button to select a menu item. It does exactly what you expect it to, no surprises.

Portable Video Players Movies to Go

Now that you know all about portable audio players, how about portable video players? Well, there's nothing surprising or complex here; a portable video player is a portable device that plays back video (as well as audio) files on a built-in LCD screen.

That said, this is a relatively new consumer electronics category, and there aren't a lot of devices on the market yet. That's beginning to change, of course, as more and more consumers discover the benefits of watching movies on a handheld device that looks like a portable game machine.

Most portable video players have at least a 20GB hard disk. Movies are recorded in MPEG-4 format, which is the visual equivalent of audio MP3 files; you get 4 hours of programming per gigabyte. Picture quality is typically around 300 x 225 pixels, which is okay for watching on a small screen. Most units play back movies using Microsoft's Windows Media Center software.

All portable video players also function as portable music players, so you don't have to carry two devices around. Some also let you view digital photographs on the built-in screen, thus doing additional duty as digital photo vaults. There are even a few units that function as pure hard disk storage, for any type of PC file. The more options the merrier, is what I say.

Getting movies onto the portable device can be a bit of a challenge, considering that Hollywood insists on strong copy protection. Some players, like the Archos models, ignore the copy protection and let you record video from your VCR or DVD player. Other players, like the RCA Lyra, enable the copy protection, which limits what you can copy to and watch on the portable device. Before you buy, find out the type of programming you can copy to the portable device, and how.

It's All About the Accessories

A gadget wouldn't be any fun if it didn't provide the opportunity for you to accessorize and to purchase even more stuff. To that end, there's no more accessorizable gadget than the Apple iPod, which has spawned an entire sub-industry in iPod-compatible accessories.

What types of accessories are we talking about? A short list includes cables and docking units, FM transmitters, car kits, media readers, voice recorders, remote controls, external speakers, and cases of all sorts and colors. A number of companies, including Belkin (www.belkin.com) and Griffin Technology (www.griffintechnology.com), manufacture a variety of iPod accessories. Belkin in particular has a large number of useful and stylish iPod accessories available; its catalog is definitely worth checking out.

Of course, because the iPod is Apple's baby, you can find a ton of iPod accessories on the Apple site (www.apple.com/ipod/accessories.html). Also good are sites such as iPodlounge (www.ipodlounge.com), We Love Macs (www.welovemacs.com), and XtremeMac (www.xtrememac.com), which offer accessories from a variety of manufacturers.

The Sound Is Only as Good as the Earphones

You'd be surprised at the difference a good set of headphones or earbuds can make. Most portable music players deliver pretty good sound, but you need a good set of phones to hear it. Even the standard iPod earphones, which are better than some, still kind of suck in my personal opinion. The very first thing I do when I buy a new portable player is to throw away the stock earphones and replace them with something that sounds a lot better.

Headphones come in two types open-air and closed-ear. Open-air headphones sit lightly on top of your ears; this type of phone is lightweight and very comfortable to wear, even for extended periods. The downside which might not be a downside, depending is that they're not well isolated from ambient noise. That is, you can still hear what's going on around you. So you'll hear your music, but still know if the telephone is ringing.

Closed-ear headphones are often called sealed phones because the heavily padded ear cups completely cover your ears. This results in excellent sound quality and good isolation from external noises. The downside is that these phones are heavy and cumbersome and become uncomfortable in long listening sessions. They're better for use in your living room (or in the recording studio) than with a portable device.

And don't forget earbuds, which are like headphones without the phones. Instead of bulky foam cups that enclose your entire ear, earbuds are tiny earphones that fit inside your ear. The advantage of in-ear devices is that they do a better job of blocking background noise than standard over-the-ear headphones. Plus, they're small and light, perfect for portable use.

You might think that earbuds, because of their small size, wouldn't sound as good as full-size headphones. You'd be wrong. Most earbuds sound very good, and the best deliver even better sound than similarly priced headphones. That's because the tiny transducers fit right inside your ear, with nothing to interfere with the sound; the better the fit, the better the sound quality.

Interestingly, most earbuds sound better after a little use than straight out of the box. That's because the buds have to be broken in a bit to loosen the transducers; they might sound a little rough initially but will smooth out after a few weeks of listening. You can also improve the sound by letting the earbuds shape themselves to the contour of your ears. To that end, many high-end earbuds come with a number of tips or sleeves, typically in different sizes. You'll need to experiment with different sleeves to find the one that fits you best. The sleeves also improve the bass response, so they're definitely worth using.

By the way, one variation on the common earbud is the canal phone, which looks like an earbud but fits deeper into the ear canal, rather than just resting in the outer ear. This provides an air-tight seal and super-good sound isolation. Canal phones are at the high-end of the price spectrum but are good if you want professional sound reproduction. For the best sound, you can purchase custom-fitted canal stems that are made from molds of your ears.

Whether you opt for a set of headphones or earbuds, you need to evaluate two things sound and comfort. Look for a unit that delivers a clear sound with no distortion; a deep and controlled bass without a lot of boominess; a smooth, even frequency response without bright or tinny highs; and good positioning of the sound image between the right and left channels. And be sure you like the way the phones or buds fit and feel. Imagine using the earphones for a couple of hours and determine how you'll like them after that kind of use. If the phones or buds start to feel a little uncomfortable in the store, think how much you'll hate them after a few hours of steady use!