I'd like to step in from the Mac perspective and say this: iTunes!
iTunes! iTunes!
Its freaking amazing. Just introduced at the last MacWorld Expo by the
sinister Mr. Jobs (he's no Bill Gates, but . . )
You can download it for free from the Apple's site
(http://www.apple.com/itunes/), and its sooooooo cool. Pop your cds in the CD
drive, and MP3 the whole disc with a single click. Searching and accessing
your entire collection is very, very easy, and you can make limitless lists
for playback, or burn them to a cd with a single click. Compilation disc
heaven.
For around $300 you can add a 30 GIG Firewire external hard drive (or larger),
MP3 your existing discs (or organize your downloads), and store hundreds and
hundreds of CDs (nearly 1000 full albums, by my reckoning) on you desk top.
I've got about 1200 individual songs stored in 3.5 gigs, and have never had a
playback problem, but we also have a generous amount of RAM. More RAM is
always a good thing.
Maybe this is similar to what Real Jukebox does (I haven't been to the [PC]
Dark Side lately, so I'm not up on what's current there), but iTunes is so
superior to the Mac stuff we'd had before--Adaptec Toast and Quicktime Player-
better for organization and playback and cd burning. The only caveat is that
you have to be running at least OS9. And its freaking free! Mac people,
step up to the music trough!
Freak on . ..
Catherine T. in greater Seattle
Gerald wrote:
> I've been using Real Jukebox to record CDs onto my hard drive, and use it
> for playback. I like a lot of the features of Real Jukebox, but it seems to
> pause, or break up, a lot. (more frequently lately)
>
> Anyone know of a better program (that's free to d/l) that is better than
> Real Jukebox - one with similar features? My processor is 300 Mhz with 64 M
> RAM. Do I need more RAM for this thing to play smoothly?
>
> Questions, questions, questions.... My life is full of them.
>
> Gerald
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