MP3 stands for MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group). It is the most compressed way of storing music files at about 12:1 compression. MP3 player is hardware and also software to play MP3 music files. MP3 hardware is available in the market in the form of traditional CD/walkman and flash memory based player. In a traditional CD format you can burn the music files on a CD ,then play the music later but flash memory based players have built-in flash memory to store the music files.