A digital audio player (DAP) is a device that stores, organizes and plays digital music files. It is more commonly referred to as an MP3 player (because of that format's ubiquity), but DAPs often play many additional file formats. Some formats are proprietary, such as MP3, Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Audio Codec (AAC). Some of these formats also may incorporate digital rights management (DRM), such as WMA DRM, which are often part of paid download sites. Other formats are patent-free or otherwise open, such as Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex (all part of the Ogg open multimedia project).

There are three main types of digital audio players: MP3 CD Players - Devices that play CDs. Often, they can be used to play both audio CDs and homemade data CDs containing MP3 or other digital audio files.

Flash-based Players - These are solid state devices that hold digital audio files on internal or external media, such as flash memory cards. These are generally low-storage devices, typically ranging from 128MB-1GB, which can often be extended with additional memory. As they are solid state and do not have moving parts, they can be very resilient. Such players are generally integrated into USB keydrives.

Hard Drive-based Players or Digital Jukeboxes - Devices that read digital audio files from a hard drive. These players have higher capacities, ranging from 1.5GB to 100GB, depending on the hard drive technology. At typical encoding rates, this means that thousands of songs - perhaps an entire music collection can be stored in one MP3 player. The Apple iPod and Creative Zen are examples of popular digital jukeboxes.

Data Recovery Wizard can recover mp3, wma music files from Digital audio player!

See: IDE/ATA, SATA, SCSI, USB, Fire wire (IEEE1394) hard drive, External(Removable) hard drive, CD-ROM, Floppy disk, USB flash drive, Digital camera, Digital audio player, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, Tape drives, Zip drive, Jaz drive