By MARYANNE MURRAY BUECHNER	Email this article to a friend

April 7, 2003

Playing MP3s through your stereo   doesn't have to be a complicated   affair THINKSTOCK

You've got countless MP3s just sitting there on your computer, and you'd really like to play them on the stereo in your living room. You could burn the digital tracks onto CD, but that could take a while. You're better off connecting your PC to your stereo.

There are lots of ways to do this. The cheapest is to string a cable between your computer's sound card and your stereo receiver using an audio cable with RCA jacks (the red and white plugs) at one end and a mini stereo plug on the other (measuring 1/8-inch, same size of a Walkman headset jack). These cables run as long as 50 feet (though the shorter ones are easier to find) and can be purchased online or at any RadioShack for $20 or less. Make sure you plug the mini end into the "line out" jack of your sound card. If your sound card isn't all that great—if the audio doesn't sound its best running through your PC—consider Xitel's Hi-Fi Link ($45), a 30-foot cable that connects your stereo to your computer through the USB port.

If you'd prefer not to snake yet another cable through your walls, spend a bit more and you can transmit your music from your PC using short-range radio. The RCA Lyra, a wireless transmitter and receiver set, uses the same band as cordless phones to transmit music from your PC to your stereo. A more generic digital FM transmitter, such as the CC-FMT sold for $89.99 at Hobbytron.net, also plugs into your PC's sound card. Choose a dead spot on your FM dial as your own personal station and radios within 200 feet (or so) will pick it up. Sound quality will be pretty decent, though probably not quite as good as commercial radio, and you could get interference and static.

With any of the above, you will still have to play the music from your computer, because the computer will still be converting the digital music files into analog sound before sending it out around the house. Herein lies the downside: if someone sits down to play, say, Grand Theft Auto on the PC while you're relaxing to some smooth jazz, the sounds of car-jackings and police chases will mix right in with your tunes.

So if you share your PC with others, you might want to set things up so that your stereo grabs the digital music files from your PC and decodes the music itself, bypassing your PC's sound card altogether. For this, you'll need a digital audio receiver, a new type of stereo component that's still very much an early-adopter toy. Most DARs work over a home network, so if you've already got one installed, you're ahead of the game. If you don't have a home network, and shudder at the mere thought of setting one up, don't despair. You can get a receiver that will talk directly to your PC. One such product is the Motorola simplefi ($279, www.motorola.com/simplefi). It's not perfect, but setup is easy and it will do the job. You plug a wireless adapter into your USB port and the device, connected to the back of your stereo receiver, pulls music files off your computer wirelessly. You have to create a new playlist on your PC by dragging and dropping music files from your hard drive into the media manager that comes on the installation disc. I found this part of the process tedious, but a "Watch Folders" feature can help speed things up. Motorola also promises to improve the software in its next version, due out by the end of the summer.

If you are an old networking pro, or wouldn't mind taking a walk on the techie side, the SlimP3 from Slim Devices (www.slimdevices.com), a small company based in Mountain View, Calif., is one terrific little device. It uses a basic Ethernet network connection to talk to your computer and regular RCA cables to connect to your stereo receiver. You download the software from the website and configure the device using the remote control. You'll use the same remote to toggle through playlists on the device's small display screen to find what you want to hear. Most likely the configuration will be automatic, but you may need to manually input some information about your network, such as your computer's IP address. The manual will walk you through it.

The trouble with the SlimP3 is that it's wired, and wireless is so much more appealing. If you have a Wi-Fi wireless home network up and running, take a look at CD30's new C300 ($249, www.cd30.com) or the soon-to-be-released Linksys Digital Media Adapter ($199, www.linksys.com), which connects to the back of your TV or stereo using generic A/V plugs and pulls up file menus on your TV screen. Philips makes a shelf stereo system called Streamium ($399; www.streamium.com); the MC-250i, due out in late May or June, will also grab digital music files off your PC over a Wi-Fi network.

Before you invest in one of these digital audio receivers, you should know that most only play MP3s, waves and/or WMA files-all popular formats you're probably already familiar with if you've downloaded music from a peer-to-peer file-sharing service or ripped songs from your own audio CDs. If you subscribe to a service that delivers music in a secure format, such as MusicNet or PressPlay, you probably won't be able to run that content out to your networked receiver. Often the music you've "downloaded" from one of those services doesn't reside on your hard drive, or at least not in a way that allows you-or an external device on your home network-to retrieve it. You'd have to burn it, rip it, and put it into MP3 format.

This compatibility problem will hopefully improve as hardware manufacturers and content providers work to bridge that gap. Listen.com's Rhapsody, for example, will soon work with the new simplefi, both companies say. That's a start-but it will be years before the industry approaches anything resembling universal plug and play, says Eliot Van Buskirk, senior editor at CNET and author of Burning Down the House: Ripping, Recording, Remixing and More! (McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; April 24, 2003).

When it does happen, it will likely transform the very notion of owning music. You won't need to buy a whole CD or even pay to burn particular tracks if you can access tens of thousands of CDs-worth of music from a subscription service and listen to it anytime, anywhere and from any device in your home-without tying up the computer. It's a nice fantasy. For now, I think I'll stick with the cheap cable to network my PC to my stereo—and try to keep my husband off the first-person shooters.

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