6. Music playback

H-Fi system

The traditional way of listening to music is to place a CD into a player and play it back through a Hi-Fi system

But now there are other choices as well.

Home computer

For example you can listen to music whilst on the home computer. A media player such as 'Windows Media Player' lists the music tracks on the hard disk and plays them back through the computer's sound system. The sound system may be an audio chip on the motherboard or a dedicated sound card.

Docking station

Another option is to use an MP3 player and a docking system. The dock reads the files from the player and will play them back through its built-in audio system

Streaming

A very recent way of listening to music at home is to 'stream' it directly from the internet.

For a small monthly fee (or even free) there are a number of streaming sites offering a vast library to choose from.

The hand controller of the streaming system displays a downloaded music list. You can select by artist, album, genre or 'Top 100' type of playlists.

Once selected, the track is streamed from the site into your ADSL router, which then sends it by Wi-Fi (or equivalent) into the streaming device. Nothing gets stored in this kind of service. Perhaps this will lead to much fewer people buying physical CDs or downloaded tracks in the future,

Consider: if you can listen to any music at any time by simply subscribing to a number of services - why bother with physical things such as CDs? But then again, will that service be there in 5 or 10 years time? It is an interesting question of what you consider to be a permanent record of your music choices.