Six months after dropping its DJ line of MP3 players to focus on its flash-based DJ Ditty, Texas-based PC giant Dell said yesterday that it has stopped making the Ditty, effectively exiting from the digital music business.

Dell's DJ Ditty

Dell pulled the plug on the Ditty quietly, with Dell spokesman Venancio Figueroa confirming that the company stopped selling the Ditty last week. Figueroa told the Associated Press that the move allows Dell to focus on its core areas of PCs, printers, and flat-panel televisions.

Coupled with Creative's decision to settle its patent claims against Apple for $100 million yesterday, Dell's move only further cements the iPod's dominance in the space. According to recent data from NPD Group, the iPod has nearly 76 percent market share among portable digital music players. SanDisk, which unveiled a would-be iPod Nano killer earlier this week with the 8GB Sansa e280, is second at just under 10 percent.

Dell initially had high hopes in the digital music space. In 2003, it rolled out three hard-drive Digital Jukebox (DJ) players: the 5GB Pocket DJ, 20GB Dell DJ20, and 30GB Dell DJ30. But those players sold poorly as the popularity of the iPod skyrocketed, and Dell said it was focusing on the Ditty, which launched last September and rivaled the iPod Shuffle in size and storage capacity at 512MB.

But the $99 player never caught on, and Apple lowered the price of the 512MB Shuffle to $69, further undercutting the Ditty.

Dell's Web site is continuing to sell MP3 players from Creative, iRiver, SanDisk, and Samsung.