These days, you'd be hard pressed not to have heard of MP3 players. With the popularity of products such as Apple's iPod continuing to skyrocket, and the increasing prevalence of support for music playback across a variety of devices (games systems, mobile phones, etc), you'd have to have at least be aware of digital music.

However, for many people looking to take the plunge, being aware is not enough. There are a multitude of formats, sizes and feature sets on offer, all of which cater to different users. Rest assured however, there will be an MP3 player to suit your needs and budget and this guide will help you find it.

It will also help slightly more experienced users who already own an older generation MP3 player but are looking to upgrade. The landscape has changed over the last few years and there are many things to consider when making another purchase.

The basics

MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3 - and without getting needlessly technical - is one way of compressing audio data to a small size. Depending on quality and file format settings, one minute of near CD-quality music will use around 1MB of memory. This means a 5GB player can hold roughly 1000 five-minute songs.

Compression works by analysing the songs and removing small parts of the sound that the codec deems won't have much of an impact on the song. However, it does reduce the quality of the audio somewhat (how much depends on how much you compress it) and thus audiophiles will likely want to stick to lossless formats such as FLAC or WAV.