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Todays Star Buy iPod offer is an 8GB iPod Nano in black for £108.65.

Star-Buy Ipod & MP3 Player Buyers Guide.

Read the helpful hints and facts below before buying your MP3 Player or iPod.

Shorthand for MPEG Audio Layer 3, a set of standards for storing and compressing digital audio files. Essentially MP3 takes a CD file, and compresses the sound to a much smaller file by removing the bits that the human ear cannot actually detect.

Whether you want to listen to music while working out, or you just need to occupy yourself as you commute on public transport, a portable MP3 music player could suit your needs. MP3 players are available in a wide variety of styles and sizes and capable of storing thousands of songs. These light and compact players set your music free so you can easily mix and match songs in any order.

MP3 players offer three types of storage : hard drive, flash memory, or recordable CDs. Hard-drive players have the greatest amount of storage space but are most expensive. Flash-memory models are small but hold a limited number of songs. MP3 CD players have an unfashionable chunkiness but recordable CDs are cheap and provide plenty of capacity for MP3 files.

Nearly all MP3 players require that you have a reasonably modern PC with a free USB 1.1 or 2.0 port (and in some cases, a FireWire port). As you begin creating your music collection on the computer, you may want to upgrade your hard drive to be able to store more music files.

The greater the storage capacity,  the more songs you can hold. Hard-drive based players store up to 60gbs. Flash memory-based models generally have up to 512MB of built-in storage (around 120 songs). Many give buyers the option of adding memory through either CompactFlash, SmartMedia, or MultiMediaCards. MP3 CD players, the size of standard portable CD players, use inexpensive CD-R discs.

File management - MP3 files include ID3 tags that provide artist, song title, and album name information to the player. Working with this data, a player can organize your music files. Find an easy-to-read LCD screen that shows the information you use regularly. Even with an effective display, it can be hard to navigate through hundreds of songs.

Transfer speed & connection type - Downloading 5GB of songs from your PC using a USB 1.1 interface can be a time consuming task. If you're a speed freak, search for players that employ the much faster USB 2.0 or FireWire. With FireWire (included on Apple's iPod, amongst others) you can transfer an entire album in seconds. (If your PC lacks a FireWire port, you can add an internal FireWire card).

Software - All players come with software and drivers that allow you to download songs from a PC. Some of the popular units have drivers you can use within RealOne or MusicMatch Jukebox; this permits you to import from a CD-ROM and download the MP3 file to your player using the same application. Hard-drive-based players often let you use Windows Explorer to drag and drop your files into the device.

• Mp3 players are particularly suitable for joggers as they are lightweight and tracks do not jump.
• If you plan to carry your player wherever you go, consider investing in both a fitted cover and a rugged carrying case for protection.
• Consider a player with an FM tuner, not essential, but a worthwhile addition especially if you grow tired of your own music.

The MP3 player market covers a range of shapes, sizes, features, storage capacities, file formats, and download services. Amid such variety, how are you to choose? That's where we come in. This guide will help you pick the perfect player.

• How does an MP3 player work?
• What kind of MP3 user am I?
• What else can I do with an MP3 player?
• Where do I get music?
• What else do I need?

Every month, manufacturers unleash even more MP3 players to an increasingly confused public. Not only do these devices have wildly divergent features, but ongoing format wars mean the MP3 player you choose dictates where you can buy your digital music. These devices are anything but one-size-fits-all.

First, there's the question of design. A player can have every feature in the world, but if the design doesn't match your lifestyle or if the interface is impenetrable, you still won't enjoy it. You'll want to look closely at performance; sound quality and battery life can make or break a player, especially if you travel a lot or have the so-called golden ears of an audiophile.

Before you start checking out specific models, you should have a basic understanding of the types of MP3 players available.

Note : All types of player mentioned below can play other formats besides MP3, such as WMA, ATRAC3, OGG, or AAC, but we still refer to them as MP3 players.

Hard drive based Micro hard drive based Flash based MP3 CD

Most likely, a high-capacity player can accommodate every song you've ever purchased. Hard drives run from 10GB on up, and large players such as the 60GB Apple iPod can hold around 17,000 songs, assuming an average file size of 3.5MB per tune.

• They store all your music on one device.
• They also tend to have more features and larger screens and are overall easier to use.

These players are usually built around a 1.8-inch hard drive; thus, they are larger and heavier than the others. Also, hard drives have moving parts, so these players aren't ideal for strenuous physical activity. Finally, most use rechargeable batteries (usually lasting 8 to 20 hours per charge) that you can't replace yourself, so after several years, you might have to pay for a new model or pay to get the battery replaced.

Straddling the line between full-size hard drive-based MP3 players and compact, flash-based players, these models aim to give you the best of both worlds by using miniature hard drives (about 1 inch or less in diameter) with capacities of up to 8GB. Players such as the Creative Zen Micro Photo can't store as much music as a 30GB Cowon iAudio X5L, but they feel a lot lighter in the pocket.

They're smaller and lighter than high-capacity players but still hold more tunes than flash-based models with the same price.

You get fewer megabytes per dollar than you do with a larger player, and these models have many of the same disadvantages of larger hard drive-based units, including the moving parts that limit physical activity and nonremovable batteries that eventually wear out and need to be replaced. Luckily, many new micro drive-based players such as the Creative Zen Micro feature a user-replaceable battery.

The original MP3 player design, these have no moving parts and are known for their shockproof operation and ultracompact dimensions. Devices range in capacity from 32MB to 6GB, though most new players don't go below 512MB. SanDisk's MP3 line, for example, includes exclusively flash-based players.

Flash-based players are tiny. They also have no moving parts, so their batteries last longer, and you can jog, snowboard, or bungee jump with them without causing skipping or damage. Many flash players include lots of extra features such as voice and line-in recording.

The aforementioned extras can make flash players a bit harder to use, and they have the highest per-megabyte cost and max out at 6GB.

These look just like portable CD players, except they can read data CDs filled with digital music. You can burn approximately 150 MP3 songs (10 albums) on one 650MB disc. But if you want to take your CD collection with you, no worries--these devices can play standard CDs, as well.

These are the least expensive of all types of MP3 players, and they use incredibly cheap replaceable media (CD-R/RW discs).

They're large and can skip when jostled.

At their most basic level, digital music such as MP3s looks a lot like any other computer data file a long series of 1s and 0s. In order to turn an analog signal (such as one picked up by a standard microphone) into a digital stream, ADC (analog-to-digital converter) software measures the signal at a regular interval to find the sampling rate. These samples, if measured close enough together, form a near-exact representation of the analog signal so as to approximate the transmission using 1s and 0s that computers and MP3 players can read.

Each second of true CD-quality sound takes up more than 1.3MB of disk space, which is why file-compression technology is essential to digital audio, especially portable audio. Using principles of psychoacoustics (how the brain perceives sound) and perceptual coding (eliminating imperceptible sounds), engineers develop algorithms, called codecs (compression decompression), that compress songs into the smallest possible sizes with minimal loss of quality. The sound depends on two factors the quality of this compression algorithm and the bit rate at which the song is encoded, measured in Kbps.

When you play a digital file, you essentially reverse the analog-to-digital process. A digital audio device, such as an MP3 player or a computer sound card, uses a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) to turn the 1s and 0s back into an analog signal that can then be amplified and broadcast over headphones or speakers. The sound depends on the attributes and quality of the digital file, the DAC chip in the player, the amount of distortion and hiss added by interference from the device's other circuitry, and the audio output level of your headphones or speakers.

When a digital device plays music that has been compressed by a codec, software on its chip (called firmware) applies the codec to decode the file, then sends the decompressed 1s and 0s to the DAC.

The first format or codec to gain widespread acceptance was MP3, but there are now a variety of players on the market that support AAC, WMA, OGG, and other formats. This information below will help you sort out the alphabet soup and determine which codecs you need in an MP3 player.

AA Audible - the format used by Audible.com, is designed for spoken audio content such as audiobooks and talk radio programs, including NPR. Many portable music players support AA.

AAC Advanced - Audio Coding developed by Dolby Laboratories and best known as the format used in iPods. Apple and Real use their own DRM (digital rights management) technology to secure AAC downloads for iTunes and Real Rhapsody. The iPod is the solitary player that accepts copy-protected AAC files and those from iTunes Music Store.

ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus Lossy compression formats used by Sony and its squadron of Network Walkman MP3 and MiniDisc players. It is an efficient format that sounds better than MP3 at the same bit rates. This format is akin to WMA and AAC but is generally known as a dark horse, as it is used exclusively on Sony-brand & Sonic Stage supporting players. Music downloaded or streamed from Sony's Connect music store are ATRAC3 files.

FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec - an open-source format that uses a clever algorithm to preserve every 1 and 0 found in the uncompressed file. Though not widely implemented, lossless formats such as FLAC are popular with audiophiles who disdain "lossy" formats (MP3, WMA, and so on) that further compress files.

MP3 - Motion Pictures Experts Group Layer 3 is such a mouthful, it's no wonder the abbreviation has taken over. In fact, MP3 has become shorthand for all portable players whether they use this format or not, though nearly all do. The eMusic online music store and most file-sharing networks use MP3.

MP3Pro - The latest from Thomson/RCA (the company that licenses MP3 to manufacturers and developers), MP3Pro sounds better than MP3 at the same bit rate. However, it hasn't been widely adopted by manufacturers other than RCA.

OGG - Ogg Vorbis is the underdog of this group. It sounds great, and because it is open source, there are no licensing fees when it's used to encode or play music, a fact that probably makes developers of other codecs a bit nervous. Although it's not as widespread as AAC, MP3, or WMA in players or online music services, OGG could gain traction as consumers grow more sophisticated in their digital audio usage and developers look for ways to cut down on licensing costs.

WAV/AIFF - This is uncompressed audio, like what you'd find on a standard audio CD. For the most part, WAVs are found on Windows machines, while AIFFs live on Macs.

WMA - Windows Media Audio, Microsoft's format, sounds better than MP3 at the same bit rate. Some WMA files include copy protection, but others do not (if you left the "Copy protect music" box checked under the Options menu in Windows Media Player you've been ripping copy-protected WMAs). Most players support WMA, and online music stores use secure WMA.