Digital Media Player

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The SONO Digital Media Player by Wil Rushmer


Digital technology like computers, Ipods & Internet access are changing the way we get to listen to music. Whether we agree or not, most of us are using the resources given by the internet to get the music we want, either by downloading mp3s or finding our favorite radion station online. Computers are becoming more and more important for most of us to listen to music.

A recent Forrester report indicates that there would be 35 million online radio users by the end of the century. One in five people say that they listen to Internet radio on their computers.

Consider the fact that Internet radio is loaded with more than 10,000 online stations; it can repackage live and stored collections to equip the emerging digital audio user with more niche content and also give the user single click access to the digital content available on the Internet.

Using Internet radio

Listening to internet radio is more convenient than choosing to play your own music. Forget the hassles of selecting and compiling your play lists. Let someone else do it for you. A great wealth of digital content exists for you to explore. The beauty lies in exploring this "never heard before" music.

A wealth of genre specific stations are available for any type of music. A Specific station can be chosen to match your mood, stay upto date with news back home or even that incredible concert in London you missed. At home or work, listening to Internet radio, away from the PC, is now possible with the Portable Internet radio receiver.

Technology Involved

Portable Internet radio receivers bring the comfort of listening to radio away from your PC. The portability would give the user the ability to walk away from their personal computer and household and still access their favorite Internet station.

Merconnet, aware of this new technology has brought to the market SONO, a digital audio player with universal tuner is the first portable stereo system that allows access to more and more Internet radio stations everyday, plays mp3's and CD's along with FM broadcasts.

Ease Of Use

Plugging in the Base Unit to a PC's USB port automatically starts installation of the default Windows drivers. The SONO Digital Media Player software driver works in conjunction with all standard Windows device drivers. This leads to more convenience in listening to digital audio away from the PC.

The portability approach to digital music is simple: it gives the user a product that works out of the box to wirelessly pipe music from a PC to any place in your house. The emerging internet radio listener will be happy to avoid the complexity and hassles of listening to internet radio any time, any where around the house. The SONO Digital Media Player will allow you to store your favorite internet radio stations and browse through your mp3 files without touching your PC. This is yet another example of how technology innovates for tomorrow. For more information on this exciting new product, please visit http://www.merconnet.com .


About the Author
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Benefits of DVR Players by Randy McClure


A DVR player's best benefit is enabling people to have more control over their day-to-day schedules. A Digital Video Recorder (DVR) allows you to record video in digital format on the DVR's hard drive. A DVR is a cross between a video tape recorder and a DVD recordable drive on a computer, but a DVR is a lot more. Here are some benefits of DVR players.

Watch Your Favorite Programs On Your Own Time.

With DVR players, you can record hours and hours of TV programs for viewing later. The amount of programs that you record is only limited by the size of your DVR player's hard drive. This enables you to watch your favorite reality TV show or soap opera when you want to watch it. Surveys of DVR owners show that recording TV shows for future viewing is the biggest benefit for owning a DVR player.

Archiving Favorite TV Programs.

Some DVR owners use their DVR player to archive their favorite TV programs and TV series. Archiving is best if you hook your DVR player to your home computer network.

Digital TV Best For DVR Recording.

The recording quality of a DVR player is best when recording digital TV versus analog TV programs. This is one reason why DVRs got their start with satellite TV with the TiVo DVR. Satellite TV is digital. If you have cable TV, non-digital programs are getting to be less of an issue as many cable companies are now going digital. See TiVo and Satellite Company Deals

Bypass TV Ads, Instant Replay, Freeze Screen.

Another popular benefit of DVR players is the ability to treat TV programs just like a DVD movie. You can by-pass TV ads, you can replay a TV program scene, or just freeze the screen. Studies show that many DVR owners still watch TV ads, but just bypass ads that are of no interest to them.

DVRs Are Great For Recording Security Surveillance Video.

DVR players are quickly becoming the most popular way to record and store surveillance video. A DVR player frees you from having to handle bulky video tapes and also the digital images are of better quality than video. Businesses are the most avid users of DVR players for security surveillance recording. This is because DVR players practically make security surveillance hands-free with no changing out video tapes all the time.

Share and Display Digital Media on DVR Player With Home Network.

DVR players are a great way to share digital media between your home network and your TV. Most DVR players are easy to hook up to your home network as they use an USB cable which is fairly standard way to hook up to computers. With a DVR player hooked to your home network or home media center you can view digital photos and other digital media on your TV. If you have two DVRs on your home network or media center, you can share digital TV programs. Another great benefit of hooking up your DVR player to your home network is that you can remotely schedule your DVR player to record TV programs.



About the Author
Randy McClure is a web site publisher of http://www.easyaccessclub.com . EasyAccess Club is an eCommerce resource for discount shoppers, small businesses, and churches. We provide discount shopping reviews of stores, feature discount stores, offer eTool resources, scam alerts, and eTips. Also, visit our other sites: Small Business Online - http://biz.easyaccessclub.com and Church Online - http://www.access-jesus.com .



Media Player Shootout by James Kendall


Whether you call them media players, jukeboxes, mp3 apps, music managers, or whatever - we all need a proggy to listen to our digital music with sowe decided that it was time to publish the Online Music Blog Media Player Shootout. For the sake of this article I am only going to discuss players you can get for free and I am not going to go into p2p apps.



So with that, lets dive right in. For my money there are are only 3 choices - Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media Players - but I'll talk a little about RealPlayer 10 as well. All of these applications share baseline features - playing various media files, cataloging digital media, etc. We'll focus on things about them that are different.




Back in the day, we had Winamp, and it was good. Unfortunately the original Nullsoft team has all moved on and instead of the hacker cred that Winamp used to have back when Justin Frankel et all were on the job it is now just another corporate media player with a hazy future.



Winamp lost a lot of momentum that it had when it released a ( very ) bad Winamp3 - but with the release of Winamp5 they seem to be back on track - it is useable, responsive, and has a lot of plugins and skins created for it.



The major problem is that for all of it's features it is not much, if any, better then the two dominant media players that are tied to successful music stores iTunes and WMP. Additionally you have to pay $14.95 to get the pro version that add features that iTunes and WMP include for free. One of the bonuses of using Winamp is the ability to tune into all of the cool shoutcast radio stations.




iTunes is, of course, is the digital jukebox front end for the iPod and the iTunes music store from apple computer. The iTunes music store was the first to get pay for digital music downloads right and it still has the largest legal downloadable catalog on the net giving the iTunes jukebox a hefty advantage.



If you are using a Mac then it is a no brainer - you should be using iTunes as you media player, but even if you are using Windows iTunes provides an attractive alternative. The iTunes store is superior ( imho ) to the Windows Media based stores such as Napster and with the legendary Apple ease of use in full effect iTunes makes a great Windows based Jukebox. Noteworthy is the Apple Lossless codec that allows one to rip CD's to the ACC format that sound as good as the CD itself to our ears. On the negative side, the iTunes jukebox feels heavy on moderately powered PC's compared to Winamp or WMP. It runs a little slower, seems to use more resources, etc.




Last (of yea, except for RealPlayer... ) Windows Media Player 10 is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and is some much better then the last generation of MS media players. The jukebox itself is stuffed with features such as its ability to monitor changes to your digital media files and update itself, simple sync and burn, ratings, and the auto tag features are all very nice.




One of the changes in V.10 is the ability to rip files if the format and with ( or without ) the DRM of your choice. You also get the ability to listen to Internet radio streams with WMP, and although they tend to be more corporate then the hip shoutcast radio you can still find some good music. WMP also features a lossless ripping of CD's but I was less impressed with the results then I was with Apples Lossless.



And finally there is RealPlayer. The free RealPlayer 10 is better then previous version although that is not saying much imho. It still takes over your file formats by default, tries to force you register, runs in the background (phoning home ?) unless you can find the settings to tell it not to - all of the problems that it has always have. I say stay as far away from Real as possible even if you can use "Harmony" to use your iPod with the Real store. While I may be being over critical of Real's jukebox - I do think that there are other alternatives that are less intrusive and have better feature sets.



All in all I think that either iTunes or WMP is a solid choice and far and away the best media players available. Winamp is a okay too as long as you don't need to rip music or burn it back to a CD - but it is worth the download and install just to listen to Shoutcast stations from time to time. Personally I use WMP at work and iTunes are home, so take that for what it's worth. I think that I like WMP a little better, but not so much that I would take the time to switch my iTunes set up at home.


About the Author
This article was originally posted on Online Music Blog and was written by James Kendall of Copacetix Digital Creation.