Byline: Rob Pegoraro

I've got music on my mind again this week. In Sunday's column, I review the two latest additions to the digital-music market, RealNetworks' Rhapsody and Yahoo's Music Unlimited. These two are the latest in a long line of stores that have tried to challenge Apple's iTunes supremacy, but they seem set to do more than just imitate and follow the market leader. Read on to find out how.

Elsewhere in the computing world, the video-game industry had its annual week of wretched excess in Los Angeles, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Mike Musgrove, who's covered E3 for us every year since 1999, filed his report from the show floor.

In Web Watch, Leslie Walker noted Yahoo's new Internet-phone-calling instant-message software, Google's new desktop-search software for businesses and personalized home-page option for consumers, and an additional travel-search option from SideStep. Our software reviews assess Forza Motorsport (much improved from the demo that crashed during Bill Gates's keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in January), Dungeon Lords and AOL Service Assistant (which makes my old Help File item about copying an AOL address book to a Mac obsolete).

Speaking of Help File, this week's installment deciphers a Windows error message and suggests a more flexible way to transfer pictures from a digital camera into Apple's iPhoto program.

DJing For Dollars

The first time I looked at a subscription-music service -- Napster to Go -- I recoiled at the idea of paying rent on my music.

Since then, I've softened slightly on the concept, in that I've realized there are occasions where people will gladly pay for a music service that entertains them and, in the process, helps them find music worth buying. Think of all the people paying Sirius or XM $13 a month for satellite radio.

But those services have other people doing the hard work of finding interesting music. With Rhapsody and Music Unlimited, you have to do the job instead. And not everybody has the time to play record-label scout, auditioning dozens of songs a week.

So I'm glad that both of these subscription services also include personalized Web radio stations. You customize these by telling the software your favorite artists; Yahoo's LaunchCast lets you further refine the programming by rating each song played (a task that I found unfortunately reminiscent of training my e-mail program to filter out spam).

LaunchCast worked as badly as I'd feared, consistently serving up the same songs I've heard too many times on commercial FM. It was like listening to a radio station DJ'd by somebody afraid of getting a call from management if he strayed too far from the approved playlist. My LaunchCast station had yet do more than tip-toe into the realm of the new and obscure.

Rhapsody, however, worked amazingly well. I kept having these "how did you know I'd like that?" moments when the software would play a song or an artist I hadn't heard in way too long. My station's playlists were full of the kind of strange mixes of genres you'll hear all the time on mix tapes and iPods. (Consider this sequence: Simple Minds' "Promised You a Miracle," Public Enemy's "Shut Em Down," U2's "Gloria.") Rhapsody also served up a decent number of artists I hadn't heard before, although not quite as many as I would like.

Still, that's undeniably gutsy, creative programming -- far beyond what I've heard on the air lately. Real, can you please license this software to the FM stations around here?

Game On

The next-generation game consoles unveiled at E3 raise anew a question that continues to baffle me: Why do people spend so much money on gaming-oriented PCs?

Consider the math: An Xbox or PlayStation 2 console will run you about $150 and should never require you to replace any interior components, update driver software or tinker with system settings as long as it continues to boot up. A four-year-old model will play games just as well as one shipped today. Internet connectivity is built into both consoles, and a rich library of games is available for each -- in many cases, the same titles that are released for the PC.

Computers can be purchased for not much more than $150, but if you want to play most games you'll need to spend enough money for a PC with a respectable graphics card. Now, if you want a machine that can handle any titles you throw at it, you'll need to throw down some serious dollars -- and clear some serious room under your desk, as illustrated by these two gaming-oriented PCs: Dell Dimension XPS Gen 4 and Alienware Area-51 5500.

Spending even $300 or $400 (or whatever the cost will be) for an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Revolution when any of them ships seems an outstanding deal in comparison.

Tiger Updates

Apple's first bug-fix update for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger arrived barely two weeks after Tiger itself. Mac OS X 10.4.1 contains a variety of useful security and reliability improvements. I installed it Friday morning without incident.

Unfortunately for those of you with dial-up modems, it's a 37-megabyte download. The simplest option in that case is to borrow a friend's broadband bandwidth: Bring a blank CD and burn the downloaded update onto it, then take the disc home. Or go to an Apple store and ask if you can burn a copy on one of the machines there.

The last few weeks have also seen a more positive development on the Tiger front -- an enormous increase in the variety of Dashboard widgets available for download. The inventory of these tiny programs, which do such simple tasks as looking up weather forecasts online, has grown from about 25 the day Tiger launched, to 63 on May 4, to 210 on Friday morning.

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