Appendix 51
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Glossary
BITRATE —A bitrate indicates the average number of bits in 1 second of a digital
audio track. MP3 encoders allow you to specify the bitrate when making MP3 files.
The higher the bitrate, the better the audio quality. Unfortunately, this also means
a larger file size.
CATEGORY —A general grouping of audio tracks, for example, artist, album, or
genre.
DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM) —A technology enabling the copyright owner of
intellectual property, like a digital audio track, to control file usage. It is normally
used to allow you to download digital audio tracks while preventing you from
distributing the files to other people or other devices. With DRM, digital audio
tracks contain digital signatures. Your device is DRM-compliant.
GIGABYTE (GB) —About a thousand million bytes. A 1-GB device can store 1000 MB
worth of MP3 files. If your MP3 files are encoded at 128 kbps and each file is about
4 minutes long, a 10-GB device can store about 2500 MP3 files.
FIRMWARE —The software in your device that allows you to perform numerous
functions including playing and recording audio.
KBPS —Kilobits-per-second. A measure of how good the bitrate is. 128 kbps is the
standard bitrate for MP3 files. 128-kbps MP3s are near-CD quality. Some other
commonly used encoding rates are 160 or 192Kbps.
LITHIUM-ION BATTERY (LI-ION) —A battery composed of lithium, a light metal with
high electrochemical potential. Lithium batteries are light and store high amounts
of electrical energy. Because of this, lithium-ion batteries are ideal for portable
devices like yours. Lithium-ion batteries do not use poisonous metals, such as lead,
mercury, or cadmium, and have no memory effect problems. However, they are
more expensive than conventional nickel-cadmium (NiCad) and nickel metal-
hydride (NiMH) batteries. Your device uses a Li-Ion battery.
MEGABYTE (MB) —About 1 million bytes. Bytes, megabytes, and gigabytes are
measures of how much data a storage device can hold. For example, a 3-minute
MP3 encoded at standard bitrates is approximately 3 MB in size.
MEMORY EFFECT —A property of some NiCad batteries that can surface when a
battery is not fully used or discharged before it is recharged. This can cause the
battery to have a false ‘memory’ as to how much electrical energy it can store. This
results in significantly lower battery levels, even after a full charge.
MP3 —A member of the MPEG compression family, MP3 is a commonly used
compressed digital-audio format. MP3 encoding transforms digital audio files (like
WAV) to provide reasonable audio quality in relatively small file sizes.