Loving my new Tower

Well I now have set up and played with my new G3 tower quite a bit. It is quite fast. I feel guilty about how much moola I spent on it and the other things to go with it now, but I'm sure I'll get over it. I also bought a VST Firewire drive . It is also quite fast, but seems a bit finicky. VST is about to release a software update, so that may take care of it.

MacCentral is covers the release of the new low cost Palm IIIe. I love the week of MacWorld with all of its new product releases.(Palm also released a USB connection kit.)

I also picked up a copy of Casady & Greene's SoundJam yesterday. It is a software package containing an MP3 encoder, and MP3 player(which supports streaming MP3), and various extras and interface enhancements. I played with it yesterday for a couple of hours. It sounds good, at least as good as the other products in it's market. I still like the interface on MacAMP better. The encoder is decent, with quality that rivals the other available encoders for Macs.

I also downloaded a copy of the MacAMP 1.0 Preview release . It's interface is what you would expect from @Soft, and it is definitely the leading product in this area. They have added a set of plug-ins that actually display within the player interface that are quite nice. It sounds really good(I'd put it and SoundJam even on this front). My biggest beefs with it now are that it doesn't really do CD Audio the way I want it to. SoundJam will automatically download CD information over the net and it supports encoding, which MacAMP does not. Of course, MacAMP 1.0 is not a finished product and I am interested to see how it progresses. I think that SoundJam will also be worked on quite diligently over the next few months considering the competition and all of the industry focus on MP3.