Learn the ubiquitous MP3 player and related artifacts of this digital age
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| Keith: Hi, I’m Keith. |
| Sadia: Hey and I’m Sadia. The focus of this buzzwords lesson is MP3 and digital audio. |
| Keith: Well – are you listening to EnglishClass101.com on an iPod? If not, do you have an iPod? Millions of people do, and thousands-- probably hundreds of thousands more use some other digital audio player (sometimes we say D-A-P, DAP). |
| Sadia: Yeah I mean that’s going out of fashion I think but they’re still referred to as ‘DAPs’, digital audio players, and these are also known as MP3 players. |
| Keith: Yeah I think everyone knows that one, MP3 players. |
| Sadia: For sure. Some MP3 players or DAPs are referred to as portable media players, so, you know media – that’s music, or video, or images; portable – that means easy to carry, so portable media player. So they’re referred to as portable media players because they’re easy to carry and they can display or play music, video, or images, and this lesson focuses on music and MP3s and digital audio. |
| Keith: Of course today, the MP3 is a common format for music, and a format is lots of different types – there’s MP3, there’s WAVs, if you’re familiar with computers, there’s lots of different formats that music can come in. An MP3 is just a different type of file for music. This MP3 was introduced in 1994 and was celebrated for its ability to compress a large music file into a smaller, more portable and easily transferrable file. What does “compress” mean? |
| Sadia: Yeah so a lot of vocabulary going on there, “compress” means to kind of, make smaller, usually it suggests, like, a squeezing of some sort but in this case, to compress a large file simply means to make it smaller and ah a compressed file is more portable, you can put it on a smaller device and carry it easily, and you can also transfer compressed files easily. Transfer means to send. |
| Keith: Means you can put it on one MP3 player, you can put it back on your computer, to another MP3 player – you can move around easily. |
| Sadia: Right, so I'd say that the arrival of MP3 has kind of slowly but completely changed the way we buy and listen to music, right? |
| Keith: Oh, definitely. I mean, you don’t have to go to record shops...record shops, you know – do we even go to record shops anymore? You don’t have to go to HMV, CDs, nothing! |
| Sadia: Sam Goody (laughs) |
| Keith: (laughs) Nothing! |
| Sadia: (laughs) What are those places?! |
| Keith: I don’t even know the names. All you have to do is be on the Internet to buy some music. |
| Sadia: So record shops – they’ve gone out of business! “Gone out of business” means there are no more. I mean, there are a few, but they’re slowly going out of business or closing down. So as Keith said, we can just log onto the Internet and we can have, literally, kind of a world of music, like, at our fingertips. It’s kinda crazy, I feel like this wasn’t true as recently as maybe 10 to 12 years ago when we all listened to CDs, right? |
| Keith: CDs were the king of music and at that time D-A-Ps, DAPs, the MP3 players, there weren’t so many. Actually one of the earliest digital audio players was introduced in, you know what, 1979! |
| Sadia: And that’s actually before either of us was born! That's pretty impressive! |
| Keith: Very, very impressive. |
| Sadia: (laughs) |
| Keith: But ah the first prototype of a portable, digital music player... |
| Sadia: “Prototype” – what’s that? |
| Keith: Prototype is like the first model, so you show it to someone and then...it’s like ‘oh it’s nice, ok, maybe make a few changes here’ but it’s the first model. |
| Sadia: Ah ok. |
| Keith: So the first prototype of a portable digital music player – and these words everyone should know – is the IXI, and this was developed by the British inventor and also the businessman Kane Kramer and this was, again, in 1979. |
| Sadia: Kane Kramer was an inventor – person who makes things, and a businessman or an entrepreneur, which is a word you learned in our last buzzwords lesson. For those of you not good at math, Kramer introduced his, uh, portable music player 30 very long years ago! |
| Keith: Yeah, it’s a very long time. |
| Sadia: (laughs) |
| Keith: Ok, so Apple-- you know the company Apple who, you know makes the iPod-- |
| later hired Kramer to consult for them, to help them. |
| Sadia: Right, to consult. To consult means to work with, or offer advice and information. So, Kramer had already developed – he already worked on – his audio player. So Apple wanted to use his knowledge, they wanted to take advantage of his knowledge, they wanted him to consult for them. |
| Keith: Exactly. |
| Sadia: And if I'm not mistaken, the design of the original iPod – the first one – is not very different from Kramer's IXI, right? |
| Keith: That's right. And the IXI had the capacity for about 3 hours and 50 minutes of audio. What’s “capacity” mean? |
| Sadia: Capacity means the amount you can hold, which, I think you’ve also heard in an earlier lesson. |
| Keith: So the original IXI it can play 3 hours and 50 minutes of music which today, it’s not a lot, but ah you know back then, 1979, that’s a lot of ahmusic time. |
| Sadia: Pretty impressive...in fact, they would probably have said that the IXI was “cutting edge”. Cutting edge means the kind of...how can we describe “cutting edge”? |
| Keith: I think cutting edge is kind of new and exciting technology. |
| Sadia: Sure, new and exciting – cutting edge. So the IXI was cutting edge in the late 70s and early 80s so it was kind of like the first iPod in a sense. |
| Keith: Now, fast forward to today, when the iPod, which actually uses the MP4 format, is everywhere. |
| Sadia: It’s definitely everywhere. And now, with the introduction of the iPhone, the portability of |
| music – the ability to carry a whole lot of music anywhere at anytime – is now sort of viewed as as a necessity, as something we have to have. |
| Keith: Right – it something that we now need...or is it? I don’t know. |
| Sadia: People are beginning to get spoiled, I think (laughs). |
| Keith: (laughs) I think so too. |
| Sadia: So companies that produce other devices, like the Blackberry or the “Crackberry” as we learned previously, they realize that the only way to keep up with Apple, to kind of maybe get some of the money that Apple is making, is to make their products capable of storing and displaying or playing back media. |
| Keith: But even though Blackberries can now store music and images and also you know what even video, I think Apple products are the kings of the portable media player market – they're unmatched! They have no competition. |
| Sadia: Yeah I think that’s pretty true. With nearly 200 million iPods having been sold since the first one was sold in 2001... wow that’s a long time ago. |
| Keith: You know at some point I had about like 3 or 4 iPods. |
| Sadia: (laughs) Woah! |
| Keith: I’m spoiled. |
| Sadia: So 200 million of them have been sold, so Apple’s on to somethin and I think they'll probably be ahead of the game for a long time! |
| Daniel: Let's take a look at the vocabulary for this lesson. |
| Chihiro: file [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: a collection of computer information stored as a single |
| unit |
| Chihiro: file [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: file [natural native speed] |
| What’s next? |
| Chihiro: audio [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: relating to sound |
| Chihiro: audio [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: audio [natural native speed] |
| Next we have: |
| Chihiro: portable [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: easy to carry |
| Chihiro: portable [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: portable [natural native speed] |
| And the next word is: |
| Chihiro: store [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: to put away for later use, to place information in a |
| person's or computer's memory |
| Chihiro: store [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: store [natural native speed] |
| And the next word: |
| Chihiro: compress [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: to make smaller, to squeeze in an effort to make smaller |
| Chihiro: compress [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: compress [natural native speed] |
| Next is: |
| Chihiro: transferable [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: able to be moved from one place or situation to another |
| Chihiro: transferable [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: transferable [natural native speed] |
| Next we have: |
| Chihiro: log on [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: to sign on to a computer or website with a user name |
| and password |
| Chihiro: log on [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: log on [natural native speed] |
| And the last word is: |
| Chihiro: prototype [natural native speed] |
| Daniel: an original or first model after which other forms are |
| copied or developed |
| Chihiro: prototype [slowly - broken down by syllable] |
| Chihiro: prototype [natural native speed] |
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