By Lou Dolinar
Fifth in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

The iPod has demonstrated that millions of people want to create and carry with them soundtracks for their lives. The next big thing is moving your Universal Soundtrack to different locations and devices.

In the home, as we learned in the last couple of weeks, it is no great trick to set up your home theater and audio gear to handle the new digital formats via networked PCs and dedicated client hardware such as the Slim Devices Squeezebox (http://www.slimdevices.com/). Your central music files, of course, also are available for download into portable iPod-like devices, and possibly for burning to CDs for your car. You can even listen to your home music collection at work, over the Internet.

The pieces are all out there now, but they don't work together very well, because the hardware is designed to sell software, i.e. music. File compatibility in general, and digital rights management, file settings that aim to prevent unauthorized copying of digital content, are the main problems.

Take Apple, which has the closest thing to a turnkey solution to the universal soundtrack, and certainly the most popular. Start with iTunes, arguably the cleanest, most straightforward free software for ripping, buying and playing back music - available free for PC and Mac and set up to share across a home network. It seamlessly integrates with the various iPod players (arguably the best user interfaces in portables), and with the iTunes store, a system of downloading music that's so slick parents can set up the kids with "allowances" for buying digital tunes. You can even play music remotely, without a computer, via the Airport Express.

Alas, Apple's version of the AAC compression format uses a form of digital rights management that's unique to the company. Music you steal via file-sharing services or load yourself from CD can be readily copied to non-Apple devices. Music you buy from Apple, at 99 cents a pop, can't. It will play on a Windows PC as long as it runs iTunes, but not with other software such as WinAmp, which you may prefer. For portable devices, you need an iPod.

For wiring your house, you're stuck with the Airport Express (www.apple.com/airportexpress), which has no display or remote control, and has to be manipulated from the Mac. Alternately, you could use the Mac Mini as a music client, but you're looking at close to $1,000 by the time you equip it with a display, more memory, and a keyboard and mouse.

On the Windows side of things, the usual cliches pertain, thanks to Microsoft's own digital rights management in its WMA format. Windows offers a lot more choices than Mac - most of them badly implemented. Anything you buy with this imprimatur runs only on players from Microsoft licensees, so you've given up the best portable players, Apple's, and are left with fairly dismal alternatives.

The biggest annoyance - none of the increasingly popular network music devices can handle copy-protected AAC. And don't think that Microsoft will do to Apple what it did to Netscape - Apple players and music outsell their Windows counterparts, and have about 70 percent of the market.

So what's a home user to do? A teenager who buys $50 worth of top- 40 music a year online, and who isn't setting up a whole-house music system, might just consider his purchases disposable and ignore compatibility issues. There are in fact hacks who can, with a fair amount of time and effort, convert or break copy protection.

On the other hand, if you're an album-oriented adult and buy a lot of music, it is better to stay away from online music purchases altogether, and stick with good old-fashioned CDs. These can be ripped into file formats that are common across all music playback software and hardware, and if new formats are invented as old ones become obsolete, well, you can always re-rip the CDs.

CDs have a couple of other advantages. While digital rights management of online purchases allows for backup, odds are pretty good that most people aren't going to want to bother. Just think about what happens, two years down the road, when your hard drive crashes and takes $1,500 worth of iTunes with it.

Also keep in mind that downloaded songs are in a compressed format, and thus not the ultimate in high fidelity. If you buy CDs and are willing to sacrifice some disk space you can rip your tunes in so-called lossless formats, which offer much higher sound quality in a good home audio system. We'll look at some of those format issues in my next column.

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY, Moving tunes not as easy as it sounds

[NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]

Newsday - Long Island, N.Y.

Author: Lou Dolinar

Date: Apr 4, 2005

Start Page: A.20

Edition: Combined editions

Section: BUSINESS

Text Word Count: 781

(Copyright Newsday Inc., 2005)