OTHER TECH

Photo by Tony Cordoza The trouble with storing a massive music library on your computer is obvious: it's on your computer! To hear those MP3 or WMA (Windows Media Audio) files on the killer sound system in your living room, you need to jump through hoops. You can burn them onto recordable CDs, maybe futz around with MP3 players, or use a Wi-Fi-based device like the Prismiq Media Player or Gateway's Wireless Connected DVD Player. But these have a strong focus on video and must be hooked up to a TV for you to cue up tracks.

None of these options is ideal, but Creative Technology's Sound Blaster Wireless Music - despite its clunky name - comes pretty close. This two-piece combo features a receiver that's smaller than many satellite speakers and a remote control that's a bit larger than your typical handset thanks to its decent-size LCD. You'll also need to install some software on your Windows-based computer.

It feels more natural to pick your tunes from a list on the remote's LCD than to park yourself in front of a TV or PC screen. The blue backlit LCD is readable in all kinds of light, and since the remote uses radio-frequency (RF) signals, you don't need to point it at anything for it to work - you can even use it in an adjacent room. And with the receiver small enough to carry between rooms, you can make your entire digital music library accessible anywhere there's an amplifier or receiver with an available line-level input. The receiver's antenna is embedded.

I first installed the included Media Server and Music Console software (Windows 98 SE or later) that communicates between your PC and the receiver. I was then prompted to use the supplied USB cable to temporarily link the computer to the Wireless Music receiver. Doing that turns on the receiver, which then trolls around for an 802.11b or 802.11g Wi-Fi network. You pick your network, and if you're using WEP security, the Creative software asks you to enter your security codes. The software then embeds these codes into the receiver, which you unplug from the PC and move to your music center.

From here on out, you can use the remote's Menu, Library, and arrow buttons to pick songs. You scroll to the initial letter of the artist or album, hit the select button, scroll through a list to the artist or album you want, and hit play. You can also use the Sound Blaster Music Console jukebox software to set up playlists, including smart playlists based on musical genre, or to have songs by a particular artist played in random order. And calling up a playlist is easy once you've assigned it to one of the nine preset buttons on the remote.

In general, Sound Blaster Wireless Music worked well. Poorly encoded MP3 files sounded terrible, but the WMA files encoded at the higher than typical data rates of 160 and 192 kilobits per second (kbps) sounded as good as the original CD.

The Sound Blaster Wireless Music center can have a pretty good range in an all-802.11g network. In a test configuration, it synced up with my PC from a distance of about 80 feet and through three floors. At these distances, there was no problem streaming even high-bandwidth, 192-kbps MP3s. The only problem I had was using the system in the kitchen. Microwave ovens can interfere with Wi-Fi networks, so when the microwave went on, the music went off. But once the burrito came out, the signal was restored, and repositioning the receiver solved the problem.

There are a few downsides. It took 4 or 5 seconds for new tracks to load - a couple of seconds more than the usual gap between tracks on a CD. This was a surprise, because I got almost instantaneous results using the pause control within a track. A more comical problem occurred when I highlighted the artist Desmond Dekker and hit play. I expected to hear a selection of ska and reggae tracks, but instead I got a Queen tune, followed by Lenny Kravitz. The reason? The software had lumped three albums into one because they all had the same title - Greatest Hits. This doesn't happen with Windows Media Player and other jukebox software. Nothing short of re-ripping the tracks with a different album name or editing the individual MP3 tracks' ID tags could split these albums up again. Another gripe is that you have to thumb all the way through alphabetical lists to get to artists like Yello or XTC.

Still, Sound Blaster Wireless Music is a liberating device that finally takes large digital music libraries out of the den and into the living room. It's also pleasantly surprising how easy it is to install and use - unless most of your tracks were ripped from Greatest Hits albums.