RNWK--WSJ(6/1): Competition Hot For Ways To Organize Digital Music
05/31/2000
Dow Jones News Services
(Copyright ¸ 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
By Walter S. Mossberg
MUSIC IS THE HOTTEST commodity in the digital world, so it's not surprising that the competition to create the best music jukebox software has been heating up. I've been testing two new jukebox programs: one from the market leader in the category, RealNetworks; and one from the colossus of all software, Microsoft. I've compared these with the jukebox software I consider the gold standard, MusicMatch Jukebox, from MusicMatch.
For the uninitiated, a jukebox is a computer program that manages, organizes, and plays collections of digital songs, which the computer typically stores on its hard disk in a popular file format called "MP3."
These products handle songs downloaded from the Internet. But they also do much more. They can convert songs on your music CDs into files on your hard disk, and let you set up play lists containing just the ones you like. And then, if your computer is equipped with a CD recorder, they can allow you to record these favorite songs, in any order, onto your own homemade audio CDs. They can also tune in Internet-based radio stations, and transfer music to hand-held digital music players.
THE PROGRAMS, finally, enhance the experience of collecting and listening to music. The simpler programs merely offer "visualizations" -- swirling visual patterns that move with the music -- and "skins," flashy interfaces for controlling the playback. The best programs also allow users to manually augment songs with pictures of the artist or album covers, lyrics, notes and artist information. These can be displayed while you play songs.
When I first reviewed the field in August, I downgraded the most popular player, RealNetworks'
RealJukebox, for three main reasons. First, it had a geeky user interface, reminiscent of a Windows file manager. Second, it was highly intrusive, scattering its icons all over your desktop and menus without permission. Third, and most important, unlike MusicMatch, it didn't allow you to add cover art, lyrics, or notes to your song files.
Well, the company has completely overhauled RealJukebox in version two, available in beta form at www.real.com/jukebox/. It overcomes all of these objections, and is now in a class with MusicMatch (which can be downloaded at www.musicmatch.com). But I still rank it a bit below MusicMatch because of a few annoying characteristics.
On the positive side, RealJukebox 2, which comes in a free version and an enhanced, $30 "plus" version, now sports a handsome interface that makes it easy to view your collection by title, artist, album, or genre of music. Its visualizations and skins are far better than those in MusicMatch, and it now asks permission before planting icons all over the place.
Best of all, the program now has even more ability to annotate your music than MusicMatch does. You can see album covers and lyrics while you play a track, and you can enter a wealth of other data, including notes and comments. There are even special enhancements connected to classical and jazz pieces. Like MusicMatch, RealJukebox 2 can go to the Web to fetch information on an artist.
UNFORTUNATELY, TO PLEASE the control-crazed music industry, the program is set up to record your CD music in an oddball, "secure" format that locks the songs to only one PC, even though users have a right to make unlimited copies of their CDs for personal, noncommercial use. It's fine for limitations such as this to be imposed on new products the record companies will soon be selling over the Internet. But RealJukebox is trying to retroactively and unfairly impose limitations on so-called "legacy" music that people bought years ago, in the form of CDs, with no such strings attached.
This problem might be fatal to RealJukebox 2, except that the so-called secure recording can be turned off, if you dig deep enough in the menus, and the company is promising to change the software so that consumers are given a chance to defeat the feature during installation. There are some other problems. Even in the $30 version of the program, an ad appears in the bottom right corner of the screen. Again, you can turn it off, but it's offensive that the company jams it in at all. Also, the beta version of the program had trouble with some songs recorded by MusicMatch. But, overall, I like RealJukebox 2 a lot.
There's no point in dwelling much on the first Microsoft jukebox software, a free program called Windows Media Player 7, which can be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/.
It's a very early version, and lacks all planned features. But, even when it's complete, it looks like it will only be on a par with the first version of Real Jukebox, not with the new version or with MusicMatch. The Microsoft jukebox sports a file-manager-type techie method for organizing your music, and it doesn't offer users any ability to manually annotate songs with cover art, lyrics, or notes. Also, it doesn't record CD music in the standard MP3 file format, but in Microsoft's own format, WMA. The visualizations and skins are pretty nice, and the program can fetch artist information from the Web. But, like all Microsoft products, version one doesn't measure up.
So, I still like MusicMatch best, but now I also can recommend RealJukebox 2 -- provided you know how to turn off its sneaky security features and advertising.
(END) DOW JONES NEWS 05-31-00 |
