I was walking through Sim Lim today to get those over-priced silicon case (~$20) for an iPod nano I won a while ago in the National Infocomm Club competition when I overheard some announcer giving away lucky draw prizes and one of them turned out to be a SD card reader. I’m sure one does not cost more than $5 these days.

Of particular interest was one of them: a supposed MP4 player. Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea that MP4 players are supposed superior music players to your iPod or Zen, I would like to dispel any misconceptions that you have. I once overheard a bunch of aunties on the way to Sitex discussing this and I was horrified by the misconception that people have.

Technically, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is NOT an audio format. MP4 is, in technical jargon, a container format for video and audio streams. Well, it basically means it is a sort of box that contains both audio and video data. It binds them together for playback on video playback software/hardware. Think of it as a kind of zip file for video/audio. Of course, MP4 can only contain audio data but the audio data is NOT encoded in “MP4 format” - there is no such thing.

On the hand, MP3 is an audio compression format. It’s full name is actually “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3″ which you can probably tell from the “MPEG-1″, the audio format is quite old. (There is something called “MPEG-2″ which is used on your DVDs. I think they skipped MPEG-3 to minimise confusion.)

If you want to consider MP4 as the successor to the audio format MP3, you already have it as Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and mind you, most current supposed “MP3 players” like iPod already support this format! So do not be duped into thinking you are paying extra for that “improved” audio player.