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My next home stereo system may be a used Macintosh, thanks to MP3 files, inexpensive multi-gig hard drives, and the latest version of Casady and Greene's SoundJam MP Plus. For me turning a Macintosh into an amplifier-worthy sound source like a CD player or radio tuner is not a matter of if, but rather when and how. The user interface on most so-called sophisticated home entertainment systems is, to put it mildly, a disaster. Modern systems deliver fantastic sound, and universal remote control devices have simplified the user experience somewhat, yet stereo systems are still dominated by complicated controls, information-poor displays, and non-standard layouts.
The idea of making a Macintosh the centerpiece of a home stereo first took shape just after MacWorld. I had just installed a copy of SoundJam MP 1.6 and encoded a few tracks off several of my compact disks. The sound was not quite as good as I had been lead to expect, but it was still quite good most of the time. Best of all, the convenience of having my favorite tracks just a mouse click away was a powerful incentive to keep adding new songs. Soon dozens of songs from disks that had been hiding in a closet were liberated to create my personal desktop music server.
As I write this, an eighteen-gigabyte ATA hard drive can be purchased for less than three hundred dollars. Using conservative estimates, such a drive could hold the contents of over three hundred compact audio disks, which is more than three thousand songs, or over two hundred hours of non-stop music. That kind of capacity would probably hold my entire collection, if I skipped the songs I never liked anyway. Moreover, a Macintosh SoundJam MP based jukebox could organize the music in countless
playlists, based on genre, artist, album, style, or personal themes. And by employing AppleScript and Apple's voice recognition technology, a Mac Jukebox could play any song or group of songs just by asking.
Mac hardware is already up to the task of serving music, and the software continues to improve. SoundJam MP 2.0 removes many of the limitations of the previous version. Now it is possible to store equalizer presets, volume levels, and start and stop times for each song. While most songs are fine with the default encoding parameters, some need a little tweaking to overcome the sonic limitations of the MP3 format. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place while in the process of upgrading, when I discovered Arboretum's Realizer plug-in. With Realizer and a bit rate of 160kbps, the music quality is very close to the original compact disk.
While the convergence of television and computers is still a few years off, the merging of consumer music with computers is happening right now. Any day now I expect some bright company will deliver an MP3 music server that looks right at home next to the television. Are you listening, Apple? In the meantime, I will have to build my own.
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"Harmonic
Convergence"
