A Stereo with a Brain

The stereo in my living room knows too much about me. It knows that I listen to cheesy love songs by Rod Stewart and that I am hooked on show tunes from the Mamma Mia! original-cast recording. It remembers which songs I play five times in a row and which ones I skip altogether. The Bose Lifestyle 48—available in Britain next month for $7,094—understands all this because it comes with uMusic, an "intelligent playback system" that stores hundreds of CDs on a hard drive and can learn its owner's musical tastes.

The Lifestyle system is aimed at an affluent crowd of music lovers who don't want to bother with computer-based music jukeboxes like iTunes or RealPlayer. It makes sense, since a home stereo system typically delivers better sound quality than most PC setups. The system's individual components are impressive: in addition to storing 340 hours of music, it has a DVD player, luxurious surround sound and Bose's tiny JewelCube speakers. A $5,853 version, the Lifestyle 38, comes with larger speakers and a smaller drive that holds 200 hours of music.

Here's how it works: first you load your CDs, one at a time, into the CD player. It takes about five minutes to rip each disc and convert tracks into MP3s. Then each time you play a song, you can either mark it as a favorite (using the "+" button on the remote) or give it a thumbs-down (with the "-" button). The uMusic system stores your preferences, then creates customized presets that play songs you have indicated you like, as well as tunes from your collection that have a similar mood, melody or genre. It makes these calculations using a database that catalogs each song. If it guesses wrong, you hit the "-" button to skip a song and train the system.

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After a few days, uMusic did a good job of learning my tastes. But it offers too few options for customization and costs too much compared with computer-based solutions, which are free except for the price of your computer. The most obvious problem is the clumsy interface, which appears on your TV screen and makes it impossible to see a list of songs you have marked as favorites or quickly find a specific song you want to hear. Anyone who has created playlists on a computer will be disappointed to see that uMusic lets you make only one fixed playlist.

Perhaps uMusic's biggest flaw is its lack of expansion options: there is no online interface for downloading songs, and you can't get a bigger hard drive. So unless you start deleting, once the drive is full, you're stuck playing the same old songs.