The Hindu Business Line : iPod and MP4 player

An iPod is a portable media player that also supports additional features such as hard drive, address book, games, calendar, alarm clock, eBook for Mac, Notes for reading text files and Photo support. You can connect it to your system using a USB cable. The iPods that were first introduced were designed to be used with Macintosh only (Mac iPods), then later designed for Windows also (Windows iPods). So older iPods either work for Mac or work for Windows operating systems. The new iPods are for both, rather than having separate models of Windows iPods and Mac iPods. Mac iPods contain Apple's iTunes application and Windows iPods have MusicMatch jukebox software. You can change iPods with Mac format to Windows format and vice-versa.

iPods have storage capacities of 10GB, 15, 30, 60 and 80GB. Now the "iPod nano" is also available, which is thinner in design, has brighter display, and offers playtime of up to 14 hours when fully charged. This is available in 2, 4, and 8GB models.

iPod supports the audio formats MP3, MP3 VBR, WAV, AIFF (Mac iPods only), AAC only. This will not support WMA (Windows Media Audio), RealAudio and Ogg (new open-source audio format). But you may convert these formats to other audio formats that iPod supports. In simple terms, an iPod is Apple's portable MP3 player. More information about iPods can be found at http://www.apple.com/ ipod/specs.html

MP4

MP4 players can play Audio as well as Video files. They can play MP3, MP4, WMA (from Microsoft), AAC (from Apple), ATRAC (from Sony), AVI, MPEG4 and some other types of files. MP4 players come with software that converts the various video formats to the device compatible format, which will be used by the MP4 player for playback. The conversion software accepts all the abovementioned video format files as input and stores them in the device compatible format as output. This file has to be copied into the MP4 player.

Picture viewing

In addition to video playback, the MP4 player can display still pictures in JPEG format. It can also make a slide show with the pictures. The audio and picture files can be played or viewed in the MP4 players as they are whereas the video files would need to be run through conversion software FM radio It has a built-in FM Tuner and different FM stations can be tuned. You can record from FM channels. The FM audio can be saved in the Player.

Voice recording This can be used as arecorder. A powerful microphone records the audio. Most of the players save the recorded audio in WAV format.

Some MP4 players have additional features such as Phone book, Games and Text Reader.

M. SAMPATH

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