Author: Jake

Jake blog's many places on a variety of topics, including travel, tech, baseball, and writing. You can read more of his technology articles on Delighted Robot. Jake occasionally posts about great food at Daily Munch.
Shareware

Predixis MusicMagic Mixer

With hundreds of albums in my music collection, creating playlists can be a serious undertaking. Instead, auto-generate playlists from your music collection. MusicMagic analyzes each song in your music collection. To generate playlists, select one song as the building block, then MusicMagic builds a list of songs with similar attributes. Remove songs from the list that don’t meet your specification, or add additional tracks if an old favorite just can’t be left out. Further customization of the list is possible by shuffling the tracks selected by MusicMagic. The size of playlists may be determined by number of songs, minutes or megabytes to maximize the result. In order for this app to work effectively, I recommend using at least 100 albums in the selection process (in this case, more is better). Windows Media 9 Series required. [Windows 2k/XP $29.95]

Media Center PC / Projects

Building a Media Center PC – Part 8 – DVD Backups

For the foreseeable future, DVD will remain an integral part of any home theater experience. At an average price of $20, it doesn’t take long to generate a huge investment in DVD media. If you have small children or pets (I’ve personally witnessed a DVD being dented by dog teeth), putting the original DVDs in the closet while using a backup copy makes more sense, especially considering blank DVD-R media cost less than $1/disk in consumer volume purchase quantities.