Can PDA's Be Used For Playing Music?

| Tuesday, May 10, 2011
By Owen Jones


A PDA is a personal digital assistant, but is also called a palmtop computer. They were first brought out by Apple in 1992, but they have come a long way since then. At first they were little more than electronic organizers. Later a browser was added and then wi-fi potential. Nowadays, a lot of them have the ability to play MP3 files too.

The MP3 files are usually replayed through a player like Windows Media Player, which might be a feature of the suite of applications that came with Internet Explorer. The playing of music files while you are working, or multi-tasking, may slow the PDA down, but that actually depends on the speed of your PDA's Central Processing Unit (CPU) and the amount of random access memory (RAM) it has plugged in.

These are limitations that apply to all other types of computer too. Storage of your MP3 tracks is achieved normally by the use of a flash memory card. You download the music to the card and then gain access to that folder and its tracks from the PDA's screen. The MP3 files are called from the flash card into RAM and played as they would be on any other computer.

You can listen to the music through the built-in stereo speakers, but they are usually pretty tinny, you can attach headphones or you could connect mini external speakers, which give a astonishingly good sound, as do the headphones. In headphone mode they behave likewise to a Walkman.

If you are familiar with Windows on a laptop or desktop, you will recognize Windows Media Player (WMP). It is very adaptable and will play back most forms of audio and visual media. If you have WMP on screen whilst you are listening to music and the PDA can get on line, it will automatically download interesting details about that track from the Net, if you have set that alternative in the Options Menu.

Most PDA's are Touch-Screen, so tapping the screen ceases the music and retapping it fires it up again. If you feel that your PDA is rather slow or if you have plenty of music on your desktop computer, you could load that music onto your flashcard and plug it into your PDA instead.

WMP is a very practical tool. It will allow you to organize and categorize all your music files and store them in lists known as libraries or Play Lists. You have total freedom to organize these play lists as you see fit: say, by music type, by artist, by album, by date, by genre or by country or by all of them. These lists can then be played one after the other or at random or merely searched for as individual tracks.




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