Types

Digital audio players are about categorized by accumulator media:

Flash-based players: These are non-mechanical solid accompaniment accessories that authority agenda audio files on centralized beam anamnesis or disposable beam media alleged anamnesis cards. Due to abstruse advances in beam memory, these originally low-storage accessories are now accessible commercially alignment up to 128 GB. Because they are solid accompaniment and do not accept affective locations they crave beneath array power, are beneath acceptable to skip during playback, and may be added airy to hazards such as bottomward or breach than harder disk-based players. There are USB beam drives accessible that cover basal MP3 playback capabilities.

Hard drive-based players or agenda jukeboxes: Accessories that apprehend agenda audio files from a harder deejay drive (HDD). These players accept college capacities as of 2010 alignment up to 500 GB. At archetypal encoding rates, this agency that tens of bags of songs can be stored on one player. The disadvantages with these units is that a harder drive consumes added power, is beyond and added and is inherently added brittle than solid-state storage, appropriately added affliction is appropriate to not bead or contrarily abuse these units.

MP3 CD/DVD players: Carriageable CD players that can break and play MP3 audio files stored on CDs. Such players are about abundant beneath big-ticket than either the harder drive or flash-based players. The bare CD-R media they use is actual inexpensive, about costing beneath than US$0.15 per disc. These accessories accept the affection of getting able to play accepted "Red book" CD-DA audio CDs. A disadvantage is that due to the low rotational deejay dispatch of these devices, they are even added affected to absence or added misreads of the book if they are subjected to asperous dispatch (shaking) during playback. The mechanics of the amateur itself about can be absolutely sturdy, and are about not as decumbent to abiding accident due to getting alone as harder drive-based players. Aback a CD can about authority alone about 700 megabytes of abstracts a ample library will crave assorted disks to contain. However, some higher-end units are aswell able of account and arena aback files stored on beyond accommodation DVD; some aswell accept the adeptness to play aback and affectation video content, such as movies. An added application can be the almost ample amplitude of these devices, aback they accept to be able to fit a CD.

Networked audio players: Players that affix via (WiFi) arrangement to accept and play audio. These types of units about do not accept any bounded accumulator of their own and have to await on a server, about a claimed computer aswell on the aforementioned network, to accommodate the audio files for playback.

USB host/memory agenda audio players: Players that await on USB beam drives or added anamnesis cards to apprehend data.