Softonix.com

This morning, SMS reminder service Kwiry is adding a new tool to its repertoire called shortcuts. It goes beyond the original implementation of adding keywords and photos to look up later, and turns it into a tool that links up with various Web services you might be using.

The first implementation of that is with Netflix. If you’re a subscriber of the DVD-by-mail service, you’re now able to simply send an SMS to the service with “Netflix” and the movie title and it will automatically be added to your queue. This is one of those things that’s just genius–if you overhear someone talking about a movie you can simply send a quick text message and have it show up on your doorstep. There’s no need to log in to Netflix from your phone (which only works on a few handsets) or scribble it down somewhere for later.

Amazon.com users also have their own shortcut that’s not nearly as sexy as the one for Netflix, but still useful. Texting “Amazon” with a product name will add it to your wish list. Like the Netflix implementation, this has been set up to let you track it down later just like you would a search query, but with the eventual intent to buy. As part of a promotion, the company will be buying a Kwiry’d item someone’s put on their wish list each week for the next few months.

Besides Netflix and Amazon, Kwiry has also added some GTD tasking utilities, including support for writing a to-do list and adding events to your Web calendar using the same shortcode. It will convert things like days of the week into the proper date and time in whatever calendaring tool you’re using. Likewise, the to-do list you put together can be edited and rearranged back in Kwiry. I think these two items are going to be used less than the Netflix and Amazon look-up, but it’s a sign of other things to come from this search look-up tool.

As I’ve said before, I think Kwiry is a fun little tool if you don’t have the time to fire up your phone’s Web browser, or if you’re one of the millions of folks with an older handset. The only crux here is that SMS fees continue to go up, and using this a few times a day can really add up unless you’ve got a good texting plan from your carrier.

Kwiry users can now add Netflix movies to their queue and items from Amazon onto their Amazon wish lists with shortcode messages.

(Credit: Kwiry)

Six Apart is announcing Tuesday night the launch of Movable Type 4.2 (download from CNET) and Movable Type Pro. The 4.2 platform gives blog publishers better performance, according to Six Apart. But the really interesting thing about this launch is the new social features in MT Pro.

Movable Type Pro will enable “social publishing,” which is a fancy way of saying readers of MT blogs will now be able to do much more than just reply to posts in the comments. Readers will get profiles pages with “walls,” and the capability to rate other posts and comments, and to follow other blog members.

Six Apart also has added an aggregation widget called “Action Streams,” that allows bloggers to automatically pull in their activity on other sites, like Twitter or Flickr. It’s like FriendFeed, but with all the control and formatting you’d expect of a modern blogging widget.

The new Movable Type will have much richer social features for blog readers. WordPress is getting all social, too.

Meanwhile, WordPress (download from CNET) is converging on social networking as well. A new platform, BuddyPress, which is being built on the Wordpress core, will allow users to set up social networks. Presumably publishers will be able to graft these networks onto blogs.

The power of a blog is its network of users, and Web users are becoming accustomed to a culture of participation. Just as blogging is changing publishing, social networking is going to change blogging. So it’s appropriate the these products are getting new social features.

Related:
Salon goes open
Wired: WordPress-powered social network to arrive late 2008
Google’s DiSo project

Download links:
Movable Type: PC and Mac
Wordpress: PC | Mac

Driver Magician Lite lacks frills and showmanship, but the simple layout makes backing up your device drivers much easier than pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

A quick install and the small memory footprint would lead you to hope that the rest of the program runs the same way. That’s no sleight-of-hand: backing up every driver on my computer, from Bluetooth and tablet controllers to Intel chipsets, took less than 5 minutes. Users can select drivers individually or hit the Select All button at the bottom of the spreadsheet-style layout. Hitting the Start Backup button opens a directory window, so you can choose where the drivers will be saved to, and then another click begins the process.

We recommend creating a designated folder for backing up your drivers, since Driver Magician natively mimics your computer’s folder tree and saves each driver to an appropriate folder. This, I found out the hard way, was easier than cleaning up the mess after saving them to my desktop–it was worse than trying to pick up a deck of cards splayed across a stage. The app doesn’t do updating or reinstallation, unfortunately.

Utilizing Apple’s ad hoc distribution program, Stitcher let a beta version of their iPhone app loose on 100 testers today. While the app suffers from some stability issues, due to its unfinished nature, Stitcher provides a slick solution to those looking for customized audio programming.

Stitcher is trying to be to news and information what Pandora is to music. The service provides you with a variety of audio programming, broken down by topics, such as sports, technology, and world news. Sources for the app include CNN, CNET, ESPN, AP, WSJ, Reuters, and a variety of local sources. As you rate the various audio streams and podcasts, Stitcher learns what you might like and serves up content.

My favorite potential application of Stitcher is to create your own customized station for listening to on your daily commute. You could make a station that kicks off your morning with the sports scores from the night before, followed up by the top headlines from CNN, stories from your favorite local news station, and capped off by discussion of the hottest tech stories from CNET.

While there is a bigger market for music, I think that there is a sizable market for customized news and information. A lot of people listen to news and sports on the radio and Stitcher makes it easy to have a highly personalized stream to get you caught up on what matters to you.

Stitcher is a free, ad supported app. There is no word yet on when the app is going to be available to the general public, but the limited beta test ends at the end of this week.

We see two kinds of 404 (”File not found”) responses on the web: “hard 404s” and “soft 404s.” We discourage the use of so-called “soft 404s” because they can be a confusing experience for users and search engines. Instead of returning a 404 response code for a non-existent URL, websites that serve “soft 404s” return a 200 response code. The content of the 200 response is often the homepage of the site, or an error page.

How does a soft 404 look to the user? Here’s a mockup of a soft 404: This site returns a 200 response code and the site’s homepage for URLs that don’t exist.

As exemplified above, soft 404s are confusing for users, and furthermore search engines may spend much of their time crawling and indexing non-existent, often duplicative URLs on your site. This can negatively impact your site’s crawl coverage—because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently.

What should you do instead of returning a soft 404?
It’s much better to return a 404 response code and clearly explain to users that the file wasn’t found. This makes search engines and many users happy.

Can your webserver return 404, but send a helpful “Not found” message to the user?
Of course! More info as “404 week” continues!

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

This week we’re publishing several blog posts dedicated to helping you with one response code: 404.

Response codes are a numeric status (like 200 for “OK”, 301 for “Moved Permanently”) that a webserver returns in response to a request for a URL. The 404 response code should be returned for a file “Not Found”.

When a user sends a request for your webpage, your webserver looks for the corresponding file for the URL. If a file exists, your webserver likely responds with a 200 response code along with a message (often the content of the page, such as the HTML).

So what’s a 404? Let’s say that in the link to “Visit Google Apps” above, the link is broken because of a typing error when coding the page. Now when a user clicks “Visit Google Apps”, the particular webpage/file isn’t located by the webserver. The webserver should return a 404 response code, meaning “Not Found”.

Now that we’re all on board with the basics of 404s, stay tuned 4 even more information on making 404s good 4 users and 4 search engines.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Soon enough, you will be able to voice chat using instant messenger on an iPhone.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

Global IP Solutions, a company well recognized for its media-processing expertise in IP communications, announced on Monday its SDK, which enables Voice over IP applications to be made for Apple’s iPhone.

This means that developers can now use GIPS’ VoiceEngine Mobile, to create real-time VoIP applications, such as games, social-networking applications, and, of course, applications for making calls to regular phone lines over the Internet. Soon enough, you will be able to use instant messenger to voice chat with friends on the iPhone, just like you’ve been doing on your computer for ages now.

Though this is exciting news indeed, GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile will only work with iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection and will not take advantage of the new iPhone’s 3G connection. This is because Apple has always blocked the use of VoIP on the carriers’ data connection; and AT&T, understandably, wouldn’t be too happy about supporting something that potentially costs them long distance phone business. We can only hope this will change in the future. For now, in my experience, AT&T’s 3G coverage is still too patchy and unreliable to be a platform for VoIP calls, anyway.

Being the inventors of the popular iLBC codec standard (which got approved by IETF in late 2004 and is currently implemented in the iPhone), GIPS’ decision today seems a natural move, considering the popularity of the iPhone. According to Apple, more than one million iPhone 3Gs were purchased over the launch weekend; and exactly one month later–today–you can still find people waiting in line outside some Apple stores for the device.

So far, GIPS claims that its voice engines have been downloaded and used more widely than any other voice engine worldwide. GIPS’ voice engines enable consumers and businesses to enjoy affordable, high-quality, IP-based communications, even under adverse network conditions.

We swear, there's no reading required to expand your musical horizons these days. Well…aside from this article, at least.

(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

When you’re young, new music is everywhere: radio, Facebook profiles, borrowed iPods, or even burned CDs. It’s not hard to find tunes you love. The music appetites of 13- to 21-year-olds are voracious and the consequences of being musically unhip can be punishing.

Then something happens: you get older; work a full-time job; get married; have a mortgage; have children; adopt a particularly demanding parrot; and so on. You wake up one day and realize your taste in music hasn’t budged since your early ’20s and the prospect of discovering good, new music now seems like an overwhelming chore, fraught with disappointment. I know, I’m living proof.

We’re all familiar with the long, depressing list of activities that seemed easy in youth that now take effort. Fortunately, finding good music isn’t as tough as working off that middle-age gut. Since its inception, the Internet has helped us–mostly illegally–discover new music. Finally, tools for legal and efficient online music discovery are hitting their stride.

To help you help yourself, we’ve collected our favorite techniques to help the lazy, hurried, or unhip (or, face it, aging) connect with good, new music.

Music discovery technique No. 1: Personalized Internet radio

Recommended: Pandora, Slacker
Also see: AOL Radio, Live 365

There was a time your FM radio offered a steady stream of new music. Today, with the exception of public and college radio (which have their own challenges), annoying ads, and tight song rotations leave you little to learn. In short: radio sucks.

Using Pandora's Music Genome Project to passively stumble onto new music is about as simple as it gets. Click to enlarge.

(Credit: Pandora)

Lucky for us, Internet radio’s infinite bandwidth offers thousands of well-groomed stations eager to prove their musical good taste. Sifting through the Web’s deep directories of Internet radio stations requires time and patience, however, so we’re going to focus on the automatic, personalized options offered by Pandora and Slacker.

The beauty of both Pandora and Slacker is their passive approach to music discovery. All you have to do is call up their Web site and select an artist or genre as a starting point for music recommendations. Just like rating rented movies in Netflix, rating songs in Pandora or Slacker improves the quality of their recommendations and tailors your playlist to suit your taste. To help you track down the new music you’re hearing, most online radio stations display the currently playing artist, album, and song title, and links to acquire the music online.

Music discovery technique No. 2: Find someone with good taste

Recommended: Last.fm, iLike
Also see: iMeem, Blip.fm

Many of us have at least one or two friends who pride themselves on their good taste in music–friends who would create mix tapes or burn CDs for you back in your salad days. There’s still no replacement for a good, old-fashioned mix tape, however, there are new and faster ways to co-opt your buddy’s music library.

Last.fm tells me Veronica and I have ‘Low musical compatibility’–probably because she has better taste in music than I do. Click to enlarge.

(Credit: Last.fm)

For those of us with shrunken social lives and stale music collections, the public vetting of our listening habits on Web sites such as iLike and Last.fm seems more embarrassing than rewarding. The payoff of participation in these music-focused social networks isn’t bragging rights, but the capability to glimpse at the music collections of friends with good taste. By automatically pulling usage data directly from users’ iTunes music libraries (or Windows Media Player), Last.fm and iLike chart your most frequently played songs and those of your friends, allowing you to compare tastes and preview tracks.

If you’re music-savvy friends aren’t techie enough for something like Last.fm, don’t sweat it–you use these sites to find strangers with similar music tastes and listen to other songs they tend to like.

Editors’ note: Last.fm is owned by CNET’s parent company, CBS Interactive.

Music discovery technique No. 3: Subscription music

Recommended: Rhapsody; Napster
Also see: Slacker; Zune Pass

Here's the beauty of subscription music services: instead of wasting my time deciding which (if any) Kanye West album is worthy of downloading, I can just download his entire catalog and sort out the crappy songs later. Click to enlarge.

(Credit: Microsoft)

In his book The Paradox of Choice, author Barry Schwartz lays out his theory that consumers often become paralyzed with indecision when they face an overwhelming number of choices. I feel this way every time I browse Apple’s iTunes music catalog–a problem compounded by the fact that I’m just too cheap to buy a song for $0.99 cents without scrutinizing its 30-second preview like a grocer inspecting fruit. I spend so much time cherry-picking the songs I want to buy that I don’t have time left over to casually explore. As a cautious consumer, I’m actually scared that browsing iTunes aimlessly may cause me to buy something I’ll regret later, both musically and financially. (To wit: “Why the hell did I think I needed to buy the collected B-sides of Warrant?”)

Throwing $12 to $15 a month toward a music subscription service from Rhapsody, Napster, or Zune Pass (for Zune owners) will make you feel like a Survivor contestant dropped in the middle an all-you-can-eat buffet. Suddenly, you don’t have worry about overspending or buyer’s remorse–you can just download any random damn thing that catches your attention and decide later whether it’s worth keeping. Download 1 song or 10,000, it doesn’t matter: you pay the same flat fee per month.

Of course, you don’t own these songs the same way you would a CD or DRM-free MP3 file. If you stop paying your monthly subscription fee, the music you’ve downloaded won’t play. The trick is to not think of subscription music as a substitute for your music collection. Just think of this as a way to unblock your music Mojo.

Music discovery technique No. 4: Virtual concerts

Recommended: Concert.tv
Also see: Video podcasts

Lest we forget, music recordings were invented as a substitute for live performances. There’s still nothing as musically powerful as seeing a great band perform in a room full of wild fans, and even bad performances can refine your taste in music.

As the name implies, Concert.tv offers streaming concert videos. They're not all winners, but some of these performances will give you the shivers (in a good way). Click to enlarge.

(Credit: Concert.tv)

If your adult responsibilities take priority over a night spent developing acute tinnitus and a hangover, don’t fret. Legions of concertgoers will drink beer and sacrifice their hearing on your behalf and at some point in the show, many of them will raise their cameras and mobile phones in the air and snap a keepsake video to share online.

Most established acts (notably Prince) resent the new concert self-publishing pastime, but up-and-coming acts tend to embrace the opportunity for exposure.

To find these clips, you can turn to Concert.tv, one of the better catchall concert video Web sites, with a wide selection of content spanning many genres. Or, you can subscribe to video podcasts such as The Interface or Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows and have new concerts automatically load onto your iPod every few weeks.

Music discovery technique No. 5: Blogs

Recommended: Hype Machine
Also see: Mog, Pitchfork

Hype Machine scrapes the Internet's music blogs for hot new content and includes streaming audio previews.

(Credit: Hype Machine)

Despite Elvis Costello’s claim that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” online music blogs have given way to an explosion of compelling music reviews. Today’s online music writers can even embed music clips (often full songs) in their reviews to help get their point across.

I’ve listed this music blog technique last because I know that reading music reviews sounds tedious. However, for those of you who already religiously check your newsfeeds in the morning, adding a few music blogs to your list is a painless way to keep new artists on your radar and new music in your headphones.

In particular, Hype Machine tops our list of online music blogs because it aggregates the best work of many smaller music blogs and emphasizes hearing new music as much as reading about it.

Music discovery techniques No. 6 to 100…

I’ve listed the best five ways I know of to discover new music these days, but I know there must be others out there. I hope you’ll fill me in by sounding off in the comments section and telling me what else has worked for you and what hasn’t.

The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there’s a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications.

On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.

On the other side is Adobe Systems’ Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It’s grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft’s Silverlight.

All these technologies are advancing rapidly as Internet start-ups and giants such as Google race to transform personal computer software into services available on the Internet. These so-called rich Internet applications rarely match the performance and features of PC-based applications, at least today, but online applications can benefit from sharing, reliability, and access from multiple devices.

Consumers typically need not worry much about the programming plumbing beneath their online applications. But suppose you’re the person on the hook for your company’s online expense reporting tool or a start-up planning to build an online music mixer for anyone on the Internet. You’ll have to place a bet on which technology is best and which programmers to hire or train.

Few expect the competition to have a winner any time soon.

Kevin Hoyt, an Adobe Systems technology evangelist, believes Flash, HTML, JavaScript will coexist–but change rapidly.

(Credit: Adobe)

“You’ll continue to see a high degree of flux for probably the next several years,” said Kevin Hoyt, an Adobe Systems technology evangelist for rich Internet applications.

People in the computer industry love to talk about competition, which indeed often does keep companies from growing complacent. But it’s also awfully convenient when some foundational technology–Windows, JPEG, and USB spring to mind–dominates to the point where most engineers need not worry much about the messy chaos of multiple choices.

The HTML camp
The HTML side of the battle has its roots in industry standards and in the task of displaying information. That’s good and bad.

Industry standards can attract broad adoption, but they’re typically slow to arrive. And though both JavaScript and HTML are standards, differences in how they’re implemented in different browsers–and even different versions of the same browser–force programmers to accommodate all the possibilities.

Unlike during the browser wars of the 1990s, though, there’s more convergence than divergence these days. Even the upcoming version 8 of the dominant browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, will ship in a standards-compliant mode by default.

And HTML can’t be beat for pervasiveness, which is one reason why Kevin Henrikson, director of engineering at Zimbra, is a fan. Zimbra, which provides online e-mail and other applications, was an early Ajax adopter and in 2007 was acquired by Internet giant Yahoo.

“Even if I were starting from scratch today, I still think I’d bet on JavaScript and Ajax…It’s going to be hard to stop the massive momentum we have,” Henrikson said. “Flash is seeing a pretty aggressive growth cycle now, (but) I still think JavaScript is going to be (used in) 10 times the number of Flash apps that launch.”

Microsoft sees things differently, believing that programmers are best off ditching HTML and JavaScript as soon as Web applications start getting rich.

“It’s amazing what people have done with HTML, which was never intended to do rich Internet applications. And Flash was originally created for lightweight animation–literally for Mickey Mouse on the Web,” said Brad Becker, who as group product manager for rich client platforms at Microsoft helps oversee Silverlight. “But these technologies were designed for something else, and people are really hacking them to do more.”

Overhauling HTML and JavaScript
Today’s HTML kludges might be tomorrow’s standard features, though, because big changes are on the way.

One idea that’s established but not yet fully settled down is more sophisticated data storage that can let applications keep local copies of data or documents for a long time. One very important use of this technology is letting people use their Web applications even when offline.

Other big change HTML changes include Canvas to let browsers create customized graphical elements such as charts on the fly based on programming instructions rather than just downloading pre-fabricated elements from a Web site; Web Workers to let browsers perform computationally intense background tasks without disturbing the browser interface; and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an existing standard, which if adopted more widely could encroach on some Flash abilities.

Farther out on the horizon are audio and video tags for HTML that would let browsers play media with no extra plug-ins needed. If the industry manages to wade through the technological and intellectual-property difficulties of that area, it could erode one of today’s main Flash and Silverlight advantages.

“If you put it all together, that lends itself to Ajax being a very powerful, capable rich Internet application technology,” said Adobe’s Hoyt.

The Google guns
Google is perhaps the biggest gun backing HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax. Its Gmail and Google Maps sites woke many up to the possibilities, and the company followed up with Google Docs for online word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Just because Google is doing something doesn’t mean it’s the right way, though, Becker said. “If you look at Google Apps, they’re doing great things, but how many shops out there have the Ajax chops that Google does?”

Google Docs are one of the highest-profile attempts to reproduce desktop applications on the Internet.

(Credit: Google)

Google is trying to hard to give new ammunition to the HTML camp, in part by trying to advance the state of the art with an open-source project called Gears.

Gears’ flagship feature is offline access to Web applications such as Google’s Web-based word processor, but it’s also used to improve search at MySpace and speed blog posting with WordPress. Gears features that Google is considering for the future include desktop notifications to make Web apps more interactive, geolocation processing to let Web apps take advantage of where a Web user is located, and support for Webcams and microphones.

Gears, which like Flash and Sliverlight must be manually installed, hasn’t spread widely. But adoption by some big services could help encourage people to install it, which might in turn encourage Web site operators to support it.

Google’s Gmail could be the service to trigger a Gears adoption cascade.

“We expect Gears to be widely adopted in products like Gmail,” said Sundar Pichai, a vice president of product management at Google, and there are signs Gears-enhanced Gmail might arrive soon.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has its own browser extension technology called BrowserPlus. It’s limited to a few Yahoo demo applications right now, such as a more elaborate Web-based tool to upload images to the Flickr photo-sharing site.

Henrickson is intrigued by BrowserPlus and said Zimbra has been experimenting with it. It “bridges the gap” between Web applications and the abilities of a local computer, he said, letting programmers “access the file system, make system calls into the computer, drag and drop, access the Webcam.”

But here’s a thorny question: are Gears and BrowserPlus really in the same camp as HTML and JavaScript? BrowserPlus, at least for now, is proprietary, and Gears is certainly no standard. Both must be downloaded and installed, just like Flash or Silverlight plug-ins.

Google, though, sees Gears as an HTML ally. “Gears can be ahead of the curve, trying out new ideas that eventually become a new standard,” Gears engineer Aaron Boodman said. And when new standards duplicate Gears features, Google “will reimplement in Gears,” Pichai said.

Flash and bang
Flash and its new rival Silverlight offer some compelling advantages such as audio- and video-streaming support that make them indispensable for some Web applications.

Photo editing shows off what Flash can do, for example. Start-up Picnik uses Flash to that end, and Adobe has an online rival called Photoshop Express. Neither come close to the full features of Photoshop CS3, but both are impressive displays of serious editing abilities.

Yahoo hopes its BrowserPlus software will help make Web applications more like desktop applications.

(Credit: Yahoo)

“Nothing really comes close to the kind of desktop experience we have in Picnik,” said Chief Technology Officer Darrin Massena, and that won’t change for a long time until HTML standards such Canvas or SVG arrive.

And even if those features do become HTML standards, “it’ll take an incredibly long time to see it implemented across browsers and a long time to see high level of compatibility where you can really rely on it without a huge productivity drain on developers,” he said.

Meanwhile, HTML isn’t the only one improving. Flash and Silverlight are moving targets too.

“With Adobe’s rev of Flash player, version 10, they’ve done a remarkable job of knocking out key things. We had a conversation a year and a half (ago) where we gave them a wish list. They have been really responsive,” Massena said.

Features in Flash Player Version 10 currently in beta version 2, include 3D graphics, special effects, and better video streaming, hardware-accelerated graphics, and text control.

And though Silverlight isn’t good enough for Picnik to “think about switching horses,” the progress from version 1 to the current beta of Silverlight 2 is promising: “If they take a similar-sized leap in short order, say a year’s time frame, they could be in the game,” Massena said. “If they are the first to nail 3D, that could give developers a lot of reasons to use their technologies.”

That’s exactly what Becker promises. “We’re going to be iterating pretty quickly, and each version is going to add new features and functionality,” Becker said. The final version of Silverlight 2 will be released later this year, added Brian Goldfarb, group product manager for developer platforms at Microsoft.

A key part of Microsoft’s Silverlight sales pitch is programmer productivity. It’s based on the same C# and VB.net languages used in Microsoft’s .Net programming technology, so a lot of coders already have a big head start, and Microsoft’s highly regarded programming tools can be used.

Flash, too, has rich programming tools, not to mention some tight links with tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator that are useful for application design. And since Internet users relatively swiftly update their Flash software to the latest version, it’s a much more stable and consistent programming foundation.

It’s clear no single technology will dominate in the near future at least–each camp’s advocates acknowledge their rivals’ advantages. But some see the situation not as chaos but as innovation at its best.

“The Web platform is getting richer and richer,” Boodman said. “I think we’re living in one of the most active periods of Web development right now.”

The J. River Media Jukebox is a stripped-down but free version of the popular J. River Media Center. Popular in its own right, Media Jukebox uses the same interface as its big brother to deliver a feature set that’s anything but little, but strictly limited to music support. Those in search of video and image compatibility will need to download the Media Center.

The program mimics the iTunes interface in a way that could benefit from more inspiration, but it doesn’t stop the extras from shining through. You’ll be able to burn and rip CDs, sync with just about any portable including iPods, tag tracks, and convert files to several popular formats. It has browser support, letting you buy music from Amazon and plug-ins for several services including Last.fm so you can find new music based on your taste. You also have your choice of skins you can download to give your player a new look. Playlists are also supported.

Former problems with encoding have been largely taken care of. Strangely, instead of providing access to CDDB, Media Jukebox uses a proprietary database that works fine with commercial CDs, but not quite as well with backup or free-floating copies. Database crashes are largely a thing of the past, and we didn’t encounter any with the latest release. Many limitations get freed in the Media Center, including plug-in support, and TV recording. The forced start after installing was annoying, though not problematic.