OTHER TECH

EscientMusic and movies at a matinee price Media management is nothing new to Escient. The company debuted its first CD manager in 1996 and has been refining its technology ever since. With its new FireBall DVDM-300, Escient takes a two-pronged approach, combining a hard-drive music-server with an interface that controls from one to three DVD/CD megachangers.

The controller works with specific megachangers from Sony or Kenwood that support an RS-232 connection. Load the changer with any combination of movies and music, and the DVDM-300 takes care of the rest, going to the Internet to search out titles, descriptions, and cover art. A built-in CD-RW drive lets you rip CDs to the hard drive or burn music to CD so you can take it on the road. For streaming audio to a remote room, you'll need one of Escient's MP-150 clients.

SETUP The DVD/CD jukebox (I used Sony's DVP-CX777ES) connects to the Escient, not your A/V receiver, with the usual A/V cabling and an RS-232 cable. The DVDM-300, meanwhile, connects directly to your A/V system. A standard Ethernet jack handles the broadband Internet and network connection.

You install the client the same way, but without the changer connections. Typically, the client would sit in a remote room, connected to a separate A/V system as well as to your home network to stream data from the DVDM-300. Wireless network access is possible via third-party hardware.

LOADING MEDIA You load DVDs and CDs into the megachanger, and the DVDM-300 reads the table of contents from each disc and searches the Web for art and title information. DVD movie recognition was outstanding - the FireBall identified every movie I loaded (48 of them), including multidisc sets and bonus discs. CD recognition was equally impressive.

There are a few options for importing files to the hard drive. The CD-RW drive takes 3 to 4 minutes to rip most discs, one at a time. For bulk importing, music can be loaded from the megachanger, but this is done in real time and could take days. If you already have a music library on a networked computer, you can simply drag files to the Escient. This worked great, and I was able to transfer music via my desktop's wired connection and my laptop's wireless one. The FireBall supports only MP3, WAV, and FLAC audio files, so those in WMA, AAC, and other formats will need to be re-ripped in one of the supported formats.

OPERATION Escient makes finding movies or music a snap. You can browse movies by title, genre, or cover art, and selecting one brings up a screen that includes the cover, a synopsis, and lots of other details. Music is sorted by artist and album title, but searching can be narrowed to just the CDs in the changer(s), music on the internal hard drive, playlists, or by genre. Selecting an album produces a list of track titles. When you tire of your own music, you can stream Internet radio stations. Beyond the supplied remote and wireless keyboard, both the server/controller and clients can be controlled via a slick Web interface.

PERFORMANCE Watching CDs and DVDs was uneventful - meaning that the DVDM-300 did everything exactly as it should. Access time for movies was about 25 seconds, and DVDs often bypassed FBI warnings and went straight to the feature. Music stored on the hard drive played virtually instantaneously. The MP-150 client performed identically to the DVDM-300, except that it is unable to access discs stored in the changer(s) - meaning DVD playback isn't possible in a remote room. One huge bonus is DVDM-300's front-panel display, which lets you operate the system without having to turn the TV on.