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January 9, 2006
CES Trip Report
CES had the usual gear on display and with the usual technological advances – more megahertz and more megabytes and more megapixels. CES 2006 was the year of the HD display. Sure, you get brighter, more vivid color and resolution but what really excited me was the music collection browsing in Media Center Vista Edition. As an avid and obsessive music collector, I have always felt that a major downside to having one’s collection entirely in compressed format distributed on hard drives throughout the house is that it is difficult to pore over one’s collection. It is even harder to show off one’s collection.
In the LP and CD days, I would spend hours standing in front of the bookcases (often just boards on cinder blocks) poring over the shelves filled with vinyl and compact discs pulling a disc out here and there, reading the liner notes. My collection was hard to miss so when friends and guests came over they would invariably gravitate to the collection and browse through it. In the all digital age, this is hard to replicate. My Roku Soundbridge displays only two lines on its LCD making browsing a large, extensive collection very time consuming.
Enter Media Center Edition for Vista. The user interface is now horizontal instead of vertical taking full advantage of HDTV displays. When browsing your music collection, it displays the cover art in a huge matrix...maybe 30 across by 10 down. You can rifle through your collection this way. It was just like staring at my bookshelves all over again. Mind you the resolution of the cover art images was a bit fuzzy and I doubt you can increase their resolution. Oh, well, at least I'll be able to show off my collection again.
Posted by raza at January 9, 2006 5:00 PM
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