New Tune Source: Mercora M
Review By Tim Hillebrand | November 30, 2006
Category: miscellaneous (eg, anything else)
We have AM, FM, satellite, and Internet radio, plus iTunes, Zune, Napster, Rhapsody and more for music downloads. Now we have a whole new source of sounds with a suite of products known as IMRadio and Mercora M.
Mercora is an ambitious undertaking with a new concept. Mercora’s goal is to catalog the largest collection of music and artists ever assembled online. Mercora M only works with Windows Mobile 5 devices, both Pocket PCs and Smartphones. It performs as a tuner that connects you to what is obstensively the world’s largest legal online music radio network. People acting as DJs and artists themselves create the content in hundreds of diverse genres.
If you ever wanted to be a DJ, here’s your chance. You can Webcast music that has been ripped from CDs or downloaded from any other network—as long as you legally own it.
Listen to music in near-CD quality from all over the world live. You can search for the artist, song, or album, and save it as a favorite or put it in your library. Once you have found the music you want, you can find similar artists, read artist biographies, and view artist images. You can listen to music residing in your library on your desktop remotely. You can also listen to friends’ music through mutual agreement to expand your musical horizons using this universal tuner.
Mercora M is also setup to allow you to chat with current friends and to make new ones online to discuss your favorite artists. You can tailor the tuner to your specific tastes so that it will find your favorite kind of music and play it for you.
Mercora boasts that its specialized OGG/Voris encoders/decoders produce higher quality sound than MP3 and WMA formats.
You can download Mercora M mobile version and its companion IMRadio desktop version. The desktop version acts as a client for the mobile version in some respects and behaves a bit differently. For instance, you can only add friends by using the desktop client. While the desktop version will continue to play music in any given genre or search results, the mobile version stops after each song has played, and you have to restart it to play another selection, which is annoying.
Mercora supports Internet Explorer 6 and beyond, plus Firefox 1.03 and above. But you must download the ActiveX Plugin for Firefox and the Mercora Music Search Firefox Plugin.
All of this functionality is free during the Beta phase, but there will be a very reasonable charge for this service when it comes out of Beta: $4.99 per month, $14.99 per quarter, or $49.95 per year. Mercora expects that because this price is significantly lower than any other music subscription service, that subscribers will quickly embrace it.
Observations
This innovative service should keep anyone’s head buzzing with favorite tunes, and a wonderful way to discover new ones. However, because the music is a live stream over the Internet, I have experienced buffering gaps, especially when using a phone network connection. It’s great that this universal tuner works as well as it does using a phone connection, but you probably would want to have an unlimited plan, or it could cost a fortune. I tried it in my car while driving, and the reception was so intermittent that it was virtually worthless. Friends tell me that it works much better with a higher broadband connection such as EVDO. I found that it worked more satisfactorily with almost no buffering issues when connected through Wi-Fi—but it is still a problem.
At first Navigation on the mobile version was a problem. It appears that you cannot back up in menus or hop from one area to another without exiting the program and starting over. However, I accidentally discovered that you can move about by using the navigation button. Unfortunately, there is no help file yet that would remedy such seeming dilemmas. There should be one forthcoming by the first of the year.
The search function in the mobile version needs to be on the main menu, not embedded inside another non-related item. Frankly, I rarely scored a hit with the song or artist I wanted in the search mode. On the other hand, I had great success with hits on the desktop version. I wonder why there would be a difference.
It seems to me the best way to use the mobile version is for accessing your favorite tunes residing on your own computer or on friends’ computers. That way it is like enjoying MP3 music on demand using your Pocket PC.
In the Music Station selection mode, I had better luck, but I had to cruise through the entire list of music stations to find the genre I wanted. Then, only one song plays at a time over any given station. When that song has ended, the next song does not play automatically. You have to press Stop and tap play each time you want to listen to a new song. Instead, I would expect continuous streaming within any given genre. This too needs fixing. These problems do not exist on the desktop version, however. I hope the glitches will disappear at the end of the Beta testing stage.
Despite these minor issues, I suggest that you try it. It’s a pioneering approach that deserves your consideration with much to like and appreciate; I think you will enjoy its diverse features.
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