The in sound from line out: Your audio goes digital with Windows Me

Digital audio is perhaps the greatest thing that’s happened to music since rock and roll. Music file downloads, streaming webcasts, and Internet radio stations promise to broaden your musical perspectives, and Windows Me can bring them straight to your computer. Windows Me also lets you catalog and store your personal music collection on your computer, freeing you from hunting and shuffling through your stacks of CDs.

Radio free Internet
Streaming content has changed the way audio is delivered to computers, letting you listen to music in real time (as it’s entering your computer from the Internet). Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer 5.5 (both features of Windows Me) provide you with easy access to Internet radio and other forms of streaming content, including video-enhanced webcasts. Windows Media Player includes a comprehensive guide of indexed radio stations and content providers, and Internet Explorer gives you a slim Radio toolbar that lets you listen and change stations while you surf. You could be typing in Tulsa while listening to techno from Tokyo!

As an alternative to streaming audio, many Web sites offer free downloads of promotional music from professional and amateur musicians alike. At Windowsmedia.com, for example, you can beef up your collection with downloadable files from famous artists, such as the delightful rappers in the Sugar Hill Gang. Once the audio files are on your hard disk, you can listen to them without being connected to the Internet.

Off the CD and into the PC
Only a few years ago, the combination of immense file sizes and small hard drives made it nearly impossible to store CD-quality music on your computer. But with today’s advanced audio compression schemes and gigantic hard drives, it’s now possible to record and catalog your entire CD collection onto your computer. Windows Media Player lets you record and encode your music in the Windows Media format—a compressed file format typically smaller than MP3. You can select the level of quality for your files, and how much hard drive space they consume.

You’re the DJ
Once your music is cataloged on your computer, you’ll find that storing songs digitally offers many advantages. For example, you can build extensive playlists that play specific songs in any order, no matter which one of your CDs they were recorded from.

Playlists come in handy when you’d like to hear a customized mix of music without having to change CDs. Although changing CDs may only be a minor inconvenience when you're alone, it's a pain when you're throwing a party. You want to have fun with your friends; you don’t want to worry about changing CDs every hour. Simply program a playlist to play your selected music indefinitely, without interruption.

You can take it with you
What if you can’t live without your playlist, but have to leave your computer? No problem. Just import your files into your portable music player and off you go.

Handheld, portable music players are smaller and more versatile than personal CD players, which are bulky and prone to skipping. With extensive support for USB devices, Windows Me lets you to transfer files from your computer to your attached handheld player. An increasing number of wristwatches and cell phones—complete with headphone jacks—are also implementing the power of digital audio. There are even jackets and vests that incorporate digital audio technology into the fabric (dry clean only!).

Some models of digital media players include adapters that plug into your car stereo, letting you take your music on the road. And remember that audio isn’t just limited to music—you can even listen to digitized comedy routines or audio books that you’ve downloaded from the Web. In the future, when wireless broadband becomes a reality, you might even have your music streamed directly into your vehicle. While that technology may still be a few years down the road, Windows Me lets you take advantage of all the power and versatility of digital audio—today.