Internet Tunes For Nontechies - Brief Article

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, August, 1999 by Scott Bernard Nelson

New tools make it easy to download and play MP3 music files.

Music files have been passed around the Internet for years, but I never bothered to get on the bandwagon. The sound was wobbly, the technology unreliable and the download time maddening. Besides, much of the fare consisted of pirated songs swapped among college kids.

But the online-music movement is starting to mature, thanks to faster modems, an expanding playlist you can download without Violating copyright laws, and recent advancements in MP3--a digital compression technology that allows computer users to download near-CD-quality sound to their hard drives. MP3, known formally as MPEG Audio Layer 3, is fast becoming the standard for online music.

So I spent a few weeks this summer playing with a couple of new MP3-centric toys. To my surprise, I became an addict within days, converting my entire CD collection to MP3 and searching the Web for downloadable songs.

MANAGING THE MUSIC. One of the developments making online music more accessible is RealJukebox (free for personal use; www.real.com/products/realjukebox), an all-in-one PC music manager created by RealNetworks, which claims more than 50 million registered users of its Real Audio players. You can download Real Jukebox if you have a PC with Windows 95 or 98, 200 megabytes of available hard-drive space and a sound card.

RealJukebox has a familiar, user-friendly feel because it's designed to look like a standard CD player. Under the skin, though, it's far from standard issue. Stick an audio CD into your computer and RealJukebox saves it to the hard drive, or "rips" it, while you listen. Once ripped, a tune is there for your listening pleasure in perpetuity (my collection now serves as background music while I work).

But the real fun comes when you go online, find music you like and add it to your RealJukebox mishmash. Free (and legal) MP3 files are available at sites such as www.mp3.com.www.emusic.com.www.rioport.com and www.tunes.com. You'll also figure out pretty quickly that there are hundreds of private sites, MP3 search engines and newsgroups where you can find free (though not always legal) and pay-per-song files. Because record companies are jittery about giving away the goods online, most MP3 songs are by obscure groups. Consequently, I had trouble finding current hit songs, but I still managed to download hours' worth of classical music, jazz and blues.

Thanks to my cable modem, even the most monstrous of the files downloaded in a minute or two. With a slow 28K modem, though, a five-minute-long MP3 tune could take a half hour or more to bring down. And you'll need a hefty hard drive to stockpile such an extensive digital music library. That same five-minute file, for example, eats up almost 5MB worth of disk space.

MUSIC TO GO. Versatile as I found RealJukebox, I could use it only when I was seated at the computer. For the rest of the time, I organized the songs in the order I wanted and downloaded them to the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 ($170; 800-468-5846; www.diamondmm.com). The Rio is the first widely available gadget designed to untether MPg files from the computer.

The pager-size MP3 player runs for a dozen hours on a single AA battery, never skips (there are no moving parts or lasers) and accepts a half-hour's to two hours' worth of music at a shot, depending upon the recording quality. To my untrained ear, the songs saved on the Rio sounded as sharp as a CD, while the tiny player proved more portable than any I've handled before.

At least half a dozen competitors to the Rio will debut this summer or fall. Creative Labs' Nomad, a mini MP3 player that one-ups the Rio with a voice recorder and an FM tuner, will sell for $170. The Samsung Yepp, which goes even one better with an FM radio, a voice recorder and a 500-name phone directory, will sell for $199. You can also download music from the Internet to a notebook or hand-held computer.

.WAV OF THE FUTURE? The biggest frustration I had with the Rio was that I couldn't send MP3 files back upstream to my home or car stereo. While a hi-fi MP3 player for your stereo may be a ways off, Empeg is planning to introduce an MP3 player next spring designed to slip in and out of your car stereo. The Empeg Car, slated to retail for $999, will play about 35 hours of digital music. For now, you can record CDs off your hard drive with a recordable-CD drive that attaches to your computer. Those units cost $300 to $400.

Several alternatives for online music were born in the past year, and others (including one from Microsoft) are coming. Mark Hardie, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., says competitors will eat into MP3's dominant position, but MP3 is likely to survive the shakeout.