My ears perked up. It was a little hard to believe what I was hearing.

“Dad, what do you think about this one?”

There I was, out Christmas shopping last weekend with two of my daughters, ages 20 and 17. And they were asking my advice?

The last time I remember Christmas shopping with both of them was when I had to drive them everywhere and they were spending most of their money in the little-girl makeup and lip gloss aisle. Back then, my opinion was of little or no value in such matters.

Happy to finally be of use, I walked to the crowded electronics aisle where Katy and Julie were standing.

Both were looking at personal audio players. And both seemed a bit puzzled as to what they should be looking for.

“Dad, you know about this stuff,” Katy said, holding up two players. “Which one?”

If you’ve been out shopping for personal digital audio players, chances are you might be confused too.

And it’s no wonder. You have four formats to choose from: MP3-CD players, MiniDisc players, flash drive players and hard drive players.

Prices can range for as little as $30 for a basic CD-MP3 player, to as much as $600 for the new iPod, which can hold 15,000 songs on a 60 gigabyte hard drive.

More than CDs

If you’re looking for a bare-bones solution to playing the MP3s on your computer, you might consider a CD player that will play not only regular music CDs, but MP3 audio files as well. You can get about 150 compressed MP3 files on a single CD-R or -RW.

I checked around on the Web and found hundreds of CD/MP3 players.

Among the least expensive was the Panasonic SL-SX430 Personal CD player, which cost about $45. It got four out of five stars on epinions.com.

The Neiman Marcus MP3 watch has 256 megabytes of flash memory. It costs about 95.

Another is the iRiver SlimX 450, which also has an FM radio tuner, 16-minute skip-free playback and up to 55 hours of battery life. The price is about $130.

Another model is the $99 Sony S2 Sports Atrac3/MP3 CD Walkman, which is resistant to water and heat and allows you to play up to 490 songs on one disc (using Atrac3plus compression). It also has an AM/FM digital tuner with TV/Weather bands and 51 station presets.

One of the downsides of the CD players is their size. For example, the Sony model is 9.8 ounces.

MiniDisc players

If you don’t like the heftiness of the full-sized CD players, you might consider the lighter-weight MiniDisc players, which are about 4 ounces.

MiniDisc models, which have been around since 1992, begin at about $99 and go up in price as you add more features, such as radio and TV band tuners or the ability to record with a microphone.

Sony’s Net MD Walkman models will record your computer’s MP3s or CDs at up to 32X speed on the MiniDisc, using Sony’s “Atracs3plus” audio encoding. You can get about 13 hours of music on a single 80-minute MiniDisc, compressing at 48 kilobits per second.

A step up are the new Hi-MD Walkman models, which came out earlier this year. They’ll play both MiniDiscs and the new Hi-MD discs, will hold up to 1 GB of music storage (with Atrac3plus 48kbps encoding) and can transfer through USB from your computer at 100X speed.

But you’re paying a lot more for the new format — the Hi-MD models range from about $200 to $400.

What a lot of reviewers like about Sony’s MZ-NH900 model (about $300) is the ability to record directly onto the disc through the mic plug-in. And if that’s not enough, the new HD-MD discs also will hold other computer files, including photo jpegs.

For more information on MiniDisc players go to www.minidisc.org.

Flash drives

If a MiniDisc is too big for you, you might want to consider a flash drive MP3 player, which copies your music through a USB connection to your computer.

Flash drive players provide considerably less storage than a hard-drive player. But their small size makes them easy to carry, and has led manufacturers to integrate them into other products.

For example, you can get many wrist watches with flash drives that play MP3s. Neiman-Marcus had one for $295 that held 256 MB of flash memory. You attach ear buds to the watch.

Another interesting use of a flash drive are wrap-around sunglasses, known as the Oakley Thump. The high-tech glasses come with a 128 MB or a 256 MB flash drive MP3 player built into the frames, with ear buds that extend down from the ear pieces (about $500).

But if you’re strictly interested in a basic audio unit, you might consider the iRiver iFP-795. It has 512 MB of memory (or about 0.5 GB) and comes with an FM radio tuner and weighs 1.3 ounces. The cost is about $225.

The Rio Forge 128MB Sport player (about $140) includes a stopwatch and a lap timer for those who like to take their tunes with them on workouts.

One of the least expensive flash drive players I found was a $69 Creative Labs MuVo 128 MB player being sold by Wal-Mart. It has a built-in USB plug for direct connection with wires. It would hold about 30 MP3 songs or 60 Windows Media Audio songs and weighs just under 1 ounce.

Hard drive players

If you have a lot of tunes and want to keep them with you at all times, you’ll probably want to think about getting a hard drive digital media player.

The best known, and probably the most expensive, is the iPod, which works with both Windows and Mac computers.

The iPods, now in their fourth generation, can hold thousands of songs in a unit that’s not much bigger than a pack of cards.

An iPod with a 20 GB hard drive costs about $279. The new iPod photo, which has a 60 GB hard drive and a color screen to view photos, runs about $600.

But you don’t have to spend that much to be an iPod person. The iPod mini, which has a 4 GB hard drive, will hold about 1,000 songs, and cost $249.

You can probably get a little more for your money, storage wise, if you get a Rio Carbon, which ranges in price from about $195 to $250 and has a 5 GB hard drive. And it’s slimmer and trimmer than the iPod mini, weighing 3.2 ounces compared to the iPod mini’s 3.6 ounces.

Another smallish MP3 player is the Creative Zen Micro, which has a 5GB hard drive and weighs in at 3.8 ounces, costing about $225. It also has a built-in microphone so you can record memos. And it also has a built-in FM radio tuner.

Listening

As I stood in the electronics aisle, Julie, Katy and I looked at the offerings.

“How much do you want to spend?” I asked. “Do you want to play MP3s?”

I explained a little about the portable audio devices they were considering.

They seemed patient and thoughtful as we looked at the specs written on the outside of the clear, hard-plastic packaging. Finally, they made their picks.

“Thanks, Dad.”

I felt like thanking them — they actually listened. It was music to my ears.

“Hey, Pops, what do you want?” Julie asked as we walked through the store.

I drew a blank.

Earlier, I had been dreaming of a white iPod Christmas. Visions of multi-colored mini-iPods had been dancing in my head.

But, right then, I couldn’t think of anything. I looked around.

“I don’t know … socks,” I heard myself saying. “Or a tie.”