Creative lab mp3 player

Notes from the Lab

Recently, I was fooling around with a Creative Labs Nomad Zen Xtra. While the Zen isn't nearly as svelte as the iPod, it does offer a staggering 60GB of storage. With that much capacity, I could download a substantial portion of my music collection, which is encoded in Windows Media Audio Lossless format and carry it around. WMA Lossless files are much larger than typical music files compressed with lossy codecs like MP3, standard WMA, and others.

Alas, despite the fact that the Zen is supposed to play WMA files, it cannot handle WMA Lossless. I'd have to convert the files to something else and download it.

I can take MP3 files and play them almost everywhere, right? Not exactly. I can play them on most computers and most digital music players. I cannot, however, play them on some set-top boxes or networked CE audio gear  sometimes even those that claim to play MP3 files in reality cannot. Worse yet, when looking for clients to play my format of choice  in this case, Windows Media Lossless  my options are further reduced. The folks at Microsoft suggest that this is just a lag effect, since WMA Lossless is fairly new, and the chipset support hasn't arrived yet.

Then consider the issue of digital rights management (DRM) wrappers. As Jason Cross noted in his recent rant on the topic, the customized wrapper that surrounds the AAC-encoded music bought from iTunes means that those AAC files can't be played on other AAC-capable hardware.

Now, consider the lowly, much maligned audio CD. It's been accused of having marginal audio fidelity, easily scratched, too expensive and too easy to copy. But I can take any audio CD in my collection, put it in any CD player, any DVD player, and any DVD/CD recorder in the known universe, and it plays.

So we have a multiplicity of codecs and a multiplicity of DRM methods. Plus, some of my friends will show up with music in Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, which adds even more complexity to the problem. Which means I literally can't play any music anywhere in my house. If I want to do that, I either need to burn an audio CD, or pipe it around in 128KB MP3. Either option is certainly less than convenient.

What's needed is a universal media adapter.

I have two DVD players in my house. One is a Yamaha DVD-S2300, the other is a Pioneer DV-563A. Both are capable players, though the Pioneer is considerably less expensive. Both can play DVD-Audio and SACD multichannel discs, which are the two standards for high end, multichannel music playback.

This week, we're reviewing a bunch of DVD recorders for the PC. These recorders are also format-agnostic. You can drop in a DVD-R disc, a DVD+RW disc, a DVD+R disc or a DVD-RW disc, and happily burn your content onto optical media. It doesn't matter which media I use.

So why can't I play my digital media files on one single appliance? Today, I'd have to stack several different appliances, plus a connection for a portable player, just to be able to handle any of the possible music formats.

Video is no better. We have MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV and others. No single device can play all of them. Now you can buy consumer players that will play DivX  but not WMV. You'll be able to buy consumer players that play WMV  but not DivX. It makes me want to slap the codec vendors upside the head and say "standards are good, dammit!"

So here's my plea to all you "innovators" out trying to make real products. Give me a universal digital media player.

I want it now, dammit.

Take advantage of Fast User Switching.

This is a nifty feature in Windows XP, in which you can keep multiple accounts logged on. You may already use it for your family members, but it's also very useful even if you're the only person who uses the PC.

For example. I have two logons, one for work and one for personal use. When you install an email client like Outlook, it treats each account as a different user, and builds a different email store file for each account. So you never mingle work and personal email, even though you're using the same client. Note that if, for some reason, you want to keep some files hidden, you'll need to bring up the property sheet for that folder and make it explicitly private.

Fast user switching isn't perfect, because some applications don't understand it. One example is the Cisco VPN client we use at Ziff-Davis. If you log onto any account except the one which has the primary VPN client installed explicitly, the password screen for the VPN logon appears on the first account you logged into. But overall, fast user switching is a handy, underused feature in Windows XP.

Dave Salvator and I are heading off to the Society for Information Display (SID) conference up in Seattle. Check the ExtremeTech blog for our impressions of the show.

Meanwhile, we do have some great content. Be sure to check out the water-cooled P4 Build-It that went up over the weekend.

We'll have a pair of LCD monitor reviews up this week, including the Gateway 30" LCD TV and a new HP 23-inch display. Also on tap, finally, is the big DVD recorder roundup and a piece on image quality and the new graphics hardware from ATI and Nvidia.

Finally, we get really goofy with some cold cathode lights, glowing fans and an acrylic case. Check out our "Geeks Just Wanna Have Fun" build-it later on this week.