MP3 has far and away established itself as the standard in digital music formatting. Whatever the fate of Napster, the music file swapping craze shows no sign of slowing down under. But what happens when your MP3 player, PC and CD rack start to overflow? ZDNet Australia takes a look at some of the MP3 file storing hardware and software currently on the market, and discusses the likelihood of starting up your very own MP3 jukebox.
It all starts with downloading a couple of tracks from bands you've never heard of and playing CDs on your CD-ROM. Now you download from Napster, rip CDs left, right and centre, swap songs peer to peer, and even download whole albums over cable modem, legally of course...
Your favourite MP3 player is in your start-up items and never stops playing those tunes, 1000s of them from Kiss to Karma County, from B52s to the Bloodhound Gang. But at some stage, something has got to give. You've been kicked off the household computer, you quickly fill the standard 20GB hard drive on your computer and your MP3 collection still keeps growing.
Just how do you think you're going to manage all those songs and albums, and at the same time be able to find that one song you actually want to hear? How do you sort your music or create a playlist, and what about taking your music with you on the move? We took a look at all this, and more, with a special focus on what hardware and software you need for the ultimate MP3 jukebox.
When it comes to MP3 hardware storage products, Australia seems to be a little behind in the market. Although a lot of development is happening in Asia and the United States, the products aren't always covered by warranty here and then there's the great exchange rate we are experiencing at the moment, which doesn't help matters either. We'll have a look at a couple of hardware products that are available here now and get a taste for what we might see down the track. Then there's the software to organise those thousands of tracks, create the perfect playlist for any occasion, and burn the next party CD. Most is readily available via download and many are free. We'll review a range of MP3 players to find the best jukebox software out there.
Online MP3 storage is also available and the good sites even allow you to stream the music back to your computer so you don't need to store them on your hard drive. You can listen to them from anywhere with an Internet connection. There are plenty of online storage options but if you want to play and manage your music online, at a quality that is acceptable for home audio, bring your bandwidth, you'll need at least an ADSL internet connection running at 256kbits or better.
This whole article seems to be very poorly researched. With vague statements especially about the Nomad Jukebox. It seems very lax to post an article like this without actually trying out the hardware being mentioned. Come on, is your relationship with vendors that poor that you don't get evaluation units to make subjective judgements from?