Bringing PC Tunes to Stereos

The personal computer has given music lovers more ways than ever before to find, collect, organize and share songs. And many of those ways haven’t drawn a single lawsuit from the record labels.

The problem is getting songs and playlists out of the PC’s sonic gulag and into the home entertainment center. Unless you live in a dorm room, chances are your PC is nowhere near your stereo and the best set of speakers.

The same problem will confront consumers as they incorporate their increasingly over-muscled computers into other areas of daily life--their photo albums, home movies, games, even TV shows. It’s one of the challenges posed by the microchip-directed, hard-drive-recorded lifestyle.

The ultimate solution will be digital home networks that bring the home computer’s resources and the Internet into every room of the house. But consumers have been reluctant to install such networks, largely because they don’t see the point. Other than computers, few devices today can use a home network to deliver something people need or want.

Which brings us back to music. The burgeoning popularity of MP3, jukebox software and Internet radio could very well kindle consumers’ interest in home networks. Still, there’s another missing piece--simple, inexpensive devices that can play those tunes and stations anywhere in the home.

That piece is coming, albeit at a price that’s still pretty high. At the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month, at least half a dozen companies demonstrated stereo components that use a home network to bring music from the PC to the living room. One that’s just hitting the market is the $299 Gateway Connected Music Player, a slick black box that illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the PC as a digital jukebox.

The Connected Music Player plugs into a stereo receiver through standard audio jacks, and it hooks into the home network via phone lines or Ethernet cables. The phone-line connection is based on the Home Phoneline Networking Assn.’s high-speed standard, which allows you to make calls even when data is traveling over the lines.

If you already have a home network running, the Gateway player sets up quickly and easily--provided you configure the network software correctly. The player takes a few seconds to compile a directory of the song files available on all PCs connected to the network, then indexes them by title, artist and album. The songs themselves stay on the PC.

The main strength of the box is that it builds on the computer’s ability to mix and match songs from different artists and discs into custom playlists. The Gateway player can create playlists, read the ones on your PC or simply play groups of songs in random order.

The result is hours of uninterrupted and personalized music, untainted by any of the filler found on so many CDs. And the more music you store on your computer, the more you get out of the Gateway player.

The box has several troubling weaknesses, most of them stemming not from flaws in the player but from the music industry’s confusion over formats, the audio quality of compressed music files and the rapid change in music technology. The same issues pose problems for every manufacturer developing a networked music player.

The initial version of the box can read only MP3 and Windows Media formats, which leaves out the scrambled formats distributed by many of the labels. Although the company plans to add support for other formats and encrypted files if there’s sufficient demand, Gateway’s Jeff Schindler said that for the time being, the box may not be able to play all the songs on your PC.

Second, though MP3 files can sound every bit as good as a CD when played through $30 computer speakers, there’s a notable difference between the two on a good stereo.

And third, the constant changes in music software mean that the Gateway probably won’t be completely in sync with your computer. For example, the version of MusicMatch Jukebox that comes with the Gateway saves the playlists you create in one place on your PC, but the latest version saves them in a place that the Gateway can’t find.

Software updates often iron out quirks like that, along with the bugs that made a pre-release version of the player mystifyingly unreliable. Updates also can add features, and Gateway has a major one planned for early this year that will allow listeners to tune in to radio stations from the Internet. Those who snap up a player before the new version is released will be able to download the software for free from the Internet.

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Times staff writer Jon Healey writes about the digital living room.