Music Lovers Take Note: Mercora M Delivers the Tunes
November 27th, 2006 Jason Dunn
If you look at the history of portable recorded music, you can see a clear trend: first we had cassette tapes, then CDs. The pre-recorded music gave way to custom-burned CDs with the music the person wanted on it. Then came portable digital media players. The allure of digital audio players was simple: being able to carry more a lot of music in a single device. Since the first digital audio players made their début, we’ve seen a steady march toward higher and higher capacity storage. Today, the largest devices have a staggering 100+ GB worth of storage. Most people don’t have that much music to fill the player, but throwing more storage at the problem can only work for so long - and ultimately you’re still limited to the music that’s on the player. What if you eliminate the local storage factor, and instead stream the music to a wireless device? Suddenly having a lot of space for your music no longer matters. What if you allow the portable device to access a huge variety of music? That’s a game-changing idea, and it’s exactly what Mercora is looking to deliver.
Mercora is a complex system of offerings, but it breaks down to this: if the idea of listening to your entire music library on your Windows Mobile device, and discovering new music easily, is appealing to you then this service is worth checking out. There are essentially three core functions of Mercora: access to 100,000 channels of on-demand streaming radio, over-the-air access to your music collection on a home PC, and access to the music collections of your friends on Mercora M. It’s a paid service: $4.99 USD per month is the introductory price, or $49.99 USD for a year.
The desktop software is installed onto your PC, the assumption being that you have an always-on high-speed Internet connection capable of streaming audio. The install was quick and easy - it only took a few seconds. You can point it at the folders that have your music, and it sound my small sample collection easily. It has an interface that reminders me a little of iTunes, with vertical columns allowing you to click on a genre, then it shows you the artists that match the genre, and finally the songs. The desktop software seems to have elements of a peer to peer client like the Napster of old: you can have chats with people on the Mercora service, presumably ones connecting to your music collection, and they can also browse your music and listen to your webcast (which is something I was unable to test). You can control the quality of the audio stream that your PC uploads: the default is the Ogg Vorbis codec at 48 kbps, which sounds surprisingly good. There’s also a photo element to the software, which presumably means there’s a chance the future mobile software clients will be able to stream photos off your desktop PC as well. There’s some really interesting possibilities with this software, even if it’s not all that polished at the moment.
There is, of course, a Windows Mobile version of the software. I tested the application on my Qtek 8500, a Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone that has an EDGE wireless connection. I was initially unsure if the phone would have a fast enough wireless connection, but overall it worked pretty well. The interface is surprisingly spartan - when you load it up for the first time, it will ask you for your Mercora username and password. After a few seconds, it establishes a connection with the Mercora streaming media server, and the desktop PC client that allows you to access your own music. Accessing the online catalog of music is surprisingly fast and simple: you have the choice between Genres & Styles or Artists. Selecting Genres gives you a huge list of possibilities: everything from blues to cajun, electronics to comedy, gospel to rock. Selecting a genre brings up a list of sub-genres, making your selection even more specific. Who knew that I’d be able to listen to Tom Watts doing beat poetry on my Smartphone with just a few button-presses? Once I selected a sub-genre, it started to buffer the music, and after about six seconds the music started. Every few songs it would have to re-buffer - I’m sure that on higher-speed networks (such as EVDO), this wouldn’t be an issue. A one-click “Add to Wishlist” or “Buy” function linked into Amazon.com or another online service would be a great feature to have. When you’re listening to new music and you like what you hear, it’s unfortunate not to have a way to do anything other than listen.
Just like accessing the music library on your computer running the Mercora server, when you stream music directly off the Mercora directory, it will download album art. Browsing music on your home computer from a Windows Mobile device is pretty cool: it displays the same information as the desktop software. Unfortunately, it seems a bit inflexible in that you can’t start playing a genre or even an album. The software forces you to select a song, and it plays the next song on the album after the first one finished. It would be useful to be able to select a genre and just start listening I’d also like to see some further information offered beyond the band and song name, such as the album the song is on, biographical information.
Overall, I was impressed with Mercora M: it shows a lot of promise, and the idea is sound, even if the Smartphone client has some rough edges and a very basic user interface. In some ways, Mercora is a product ahead of it’s time: it’s rare for someone to have the perfect combination of unlimited, flat-rate high-speed wireless data access, and a Windows Mobile device with a big enough battery to last for hours of streaming music. Constant data transfer is a big drain on battery life - I could feel my Smartphone getting quite warm from the CPU running hard after listening to streaming audio for 30 minutes. As wireless data plans become less and less expensive, and as the hardware improves to allow for greater battery life, services such as Mercora M become more compelling. If they enhance the Windows Mobile software, and add support for accessing photos, I could see myself using this application quite often.
