Managing Your Mess

You

love your Ipod. You wouldn't dream of taking a trip without your digital camera. You've just started playing around with a digital camcorder. And already your hard disc is bursting with music, picture and video files. Digital gadgets may have become an indispensable part of our lives, but figuring out how to organize and access all that content is a growing headache. At the Demo 2004 trade show in Scottsdale, Ariz., last week, exhibitors presented several cutting-edge solutions to keep chaos at bay.

ALL IN ONE Roxio's Easy Media Creator 7 is a new software suite that lets you rip a music CD and edit your own home movie and burn it onto a DVD you can send to the grandparents. Available now for $99 (Windows PCs only), it gives users a single interface for handling all their organizing tasks. I especially like the home-movie-creation features, which guide you through the process of editing a video. There's also a sound editor for adding special effects to digital music, a photo album, picture-editing tools and a backup feature for saving data files to disc.

PC-TV If you want to get your media files closer to the home entertainment center, the new Molino Media Mogul could be a good solution. It's a set-top box with a 300-GB hard drive that connects to a TV instead of a PC. Using the onscreen interface and a remote control, you can create song playlists and photo slide shows. Hook the unit up to your home network, and you can access Media Mogul files on your PC too. The Media Mogul, available this summer for $995, has a DVD player, memory-card slots for all types of flash memory and USB and FireWire ports for importing images and video.

MEDIA TO GO Storing your music, pictures and videos in one place sounds great — except when you're on the road. That's why a new company called BravoBrava in Union City, Calif., is developing AllMiMedia Premium, which will let you remotely access digital-media files from any PC equipped with Windows Media Player and a high-speed Internet connection. Imagine checking into a hotel, flipping open your laptop and watching any movie from your home DVD collection or playing any song stored on your home PC. Available in late 2004 for owners of Media Center PCs (a new kind of multimedia PC), AllMiMedia Premium will work on cell phones and PocketPCs too.