Neat Stuff to do with your Digital Audio

As a follow-up to last month’s article, I said I would let you know about some neat stuff on which to play all the MP3’s you’re downloading. I travel a lot, and for quite a while now I have been taking my tunes with me to listen to while traveling. I have an HP 548 PocketPC that has a built-in music player that plays either MP3 or WMA files. WMA, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is Window’s answer to a compressed music file. Only WMA is about half-again the size of an MP3, which for a traveling music player is great, more music in less space. The capability to convert MP3 to WMA is built into most of the popular music players, including MusicMatch, which I reviewed last month.

With my collection of MP3s pushing 3,000, I wanted some way to listen to the tunes in my family room on my "good" stereo system. So I purchased a new DVD/CD player that has an MP3 decoder built it. Now, I just burn a CD with whatever songs I choose, plop the CD into the DVD player and can listen to one CD for several hours.

Because I have this ability while I am at home, I also wanted to have more choice while I was traveling. So, I started looking around and eventually settled on a Phillips EXP-103 personal CD player that has built-in MP3 decoding capabilities. With two AA batteries I can listen to up to 10 hours of music. The Phillips is also CD-Rewritable compatible, so I can record different selections for each trip using the same CD over and over again. With the Phillips CD player I also got a car kit, which allows me to plug-in my portable CD player into a cassette tape adapter that plugs into the tape player in most rental cars. I recently found out that the tape adapter also works with my PocketPC also giving me a greater selection to listen to on the road. The kit also included AC and DC power adapters.

Last month I told you about MusicMatch allowing me to listen to and record streaming audio on my home PC, and that the quality was excellent (CD-Quality) because of the cable modem. Well, obviously I don’t record everything I listen to but I would like to listen to the streaming audio in other parts of my house, especially in the family room. Enter the Kima KS-110 Wireless Audio System. With the Kima system all you do is plug the speaker cable that comes from the PC into the back of the Kima transmitter and then plug a cord provided from the transmitter to the speakers. Place the Kima receiver close to an FM receiver (radio), within 1000 feet of the transmitter, and anything coming through your computer can be heard on the radio in the other location. A little adjusting is required for gain and signal strength and the receiving radio has to be adjusted to either an 88.1 or 88.3 frequency but that’s it! And the quality of the sound is great, or at least I think so.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be just music or streaming audio. Anything that you can hear through your speakers on your computer can be heard through the FM receiver at the other location.

So you see, there are a lot of neat things that can be done with the digital audio we have available to us these days. I’m sure there are many other things, and I would be interested in hearing about them myself. If you have any ideas or suggestions send me an email, give me a call, or, heck, write an article in our newsletter and tell us all about it. I’ll be listening for you. u