Portable Audio

As an affiliate of Amazon, Portable Audio offers one of the widest selections of portable hard disk and flash memory MP3 players available on the internet. You can browse through our recommended hard disk and flash memory players at your leisure, and then, when you've made your selection, you can purchase your choice at the best possible price by clicking on the 'Place your order button'. You will then be re-directed to Amazon's website, where your player will be waiting in your Amazon shopping basket ready for you to complete your order.

If our featured players don't include the player you're looking for, or if you you're looking for non-portable audio or other electronics items, you can use our Amazon (UK) search to search the full Amazon (UK) electronics catalogue directly from within the Portable Audio site.

Portable hard disk and flash memory players

Portable audio players are basically mini-computers used for storing MP3 files and playing them back to the user.

They connect to your computer using USB or FireWire, and appear to the computer as an additional drive. You simply drag and drop your MP3 files from your computer's hard disk to the MP3 player, which causes the files to be copied over the USB or FireWire link, and then the player is ready to play the music. Since the player is also a portable storage device, it may also be used to carry files from place to place.

Portable audio players are becoming more and more popular as users 'rip' their own CDs into MP3 files or download songs from the Internet. Some players also have extra capabilities - such as recording audio, doubling as a digital camera or movie camera, and showing colour videos on a small colour screen.

There are two types of digital audio players:

Hard Drive based players read digital audio files from a hard disk drive. These are smaller versions of the Hard Disk Drives found in laptop computers. The larger capacity HDD players can store an entire music collection in a single, portable location meaning you always have access to your music collection, no matter where you are. Because of their large storage capacity, devices that also display video are usually hard-drive based.

Flash Memory based Players are solid state players that hold digital audio files on flash memory similar to that used in USB keys and digital camera memory cards. Whilst the capacity of Flash based players is lower than that of Hard Drive based players, they have no moving parts and are therefore more resilient to shocks.