MP3 Fans Get New Players, Services--Will Squabbles Stop the Music?

You can tune into radio stations without going near a radio. You can wear 30 minutes of music on your wrist. And you can buy a CD on the Web and start listening to it within seconds.

Welcome to the noisy nexus of computers and music--where players are proliferating, standards keep changing, and a free music mentality has the recording industry's lawyers hip-hopping.

Player Power

If you want Internet music to go, you need a portable player. I examined three of the newest models: a prerelease version of Creative Labs' $329 Nomad II; I-Jam Multimedia's $299 IJ-101; and Sony's $399 NW-MS7 Memory Stick Walkman. This new generation of player devices comes in many shapes and sizes and replaces awkward parallel ports with speedy USB connections.

Some vendors have also added new features. The Nomad II and the I-Jam player include FM radio tuners, and the Nomad II offers a voice recorder. Both units can hold any type of file, so you can use them to shuttle documents around.

As an antipiracy measure, the Nomad II won't let you copy an MP3 file from the player to a PC. But I found that changing an MP3 file's extension before transferring it to the Nomad let me transfer it back to the PC--though the Nomad can't play the file under the new extension. So much for piracy prevention.

Sony's Memory Stick Walkman takes the size prize--it's not much larger than a pack of gum. Unfortunately, the copy-protection shackles imposed by Sony's OpenMG Jukebox software mar the unit's slick hardware.

You cannot transfer MP3 tracks to the Walkman unless you've converted them to Sony's format, which takes a couple of minutes per track. You must also register your player's serial number before you can use it, which makes you a candidate for junk e-mail from Sony. And you can't back up encrypted files. If your hard drive dies, so does your music collection.

These aggravations provide a grim preview of how other portables may work as competing manufacturers adopt the industry's Secure Digital Music Initiative specifications.

In any case, more portables will be playing soon. Two of them worth watching are Casio's $249 WMP-1V Wrist Audio Player (this product should be available by the time you read this), which straps 33 minutes of MP3 audio to your wrist, and Sanyo's SSP-HP7 (probably coming out later this year), which crams its playback circuitry and 32MB of memory into headphones.

Sanyo's player joins Diamond's Rio 500 models in supporting content from Audible.com, which uses its own format to deliver audio books, radio programming, and more spoken content.