Audio

This is such a good idea I wonder why nobody’s done it well before.  Altec Lansing sent over their XT1 Portable Audio System for notebooks. A DVD-ROM equipped notebook is essentially a giant portable DVD player combined with an iPod with a larger color screen, but most notebooks have terrible internal speakers.  Adding external speakers solves the problem at the cost of portability — even if you did shlep them with you, you’d be dragging along another power brick, too. The XT1 siphons power off your notebook’s USB port which greatly simplifies setup and enables easy portability. Both Windows and …

Musicmatch is one of several music playback programs for PCs, along with offerings from Microsoft, Real, Apple.  With a good multimedia sound system — I’m working on reviews of THX systems from Klipsch and Logitech — you can use these programs to listen to music at your PC.  The programs also allow you to transfer music to portable devices, or stream music around your house with various add-on gadgets (though access to copy-protected music is usually not available in that scenario). The programs now also offer access to online music stores for purchasing music (by track or by album) or …