This week, I dived into the music blogging world of MOG.com, a Web site where enthusiasts can read, blog and network with one another. Starting today, this site will integrate with Rhapsody, the subscription-based music service, so that MOG users, or MOGGERS, can simultaneously blog about and listen to millions of songs that fuel their online discussions.

Rhapsody is now integrated into MOG’s site for music aficionados.

MOG Inc. prides itself on working as a destination for people who hope to discuss music tastes and opinions, like TripAdvisor.com works for travelers. MOG’s first public beta, or test version, came out about a year and a half ago.

Its use of a subscription model comes at a time when CD profits are lagging and larger social-networking sites are negotiating with record labels to incorporate music streaming. Plenty of people still prefer purchasing music a la Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store, where there aren’t restrictions due to streaming or subscriptions.

Along with built-in Rhapsody, this newly enhanced version of MOG includes other improvements, such as a better search engine and a speedy tool that generates personal profiles for each MOG user according to his or her musical tastes.

I was granted early access to MOG’s revamped site and was most impressed by its fast search tool, which works just like the Spotlight search in Apple’s operating system. Results are narrowed with each typed letter and returned in neatly divided categories. Best of all, music results came back as fast as if they were on my hard drive instead of various MOG pages and Rhapsody’s database.

MOG also does a good job of marrying its contents with Rhapsody in a way that isn’t overly obvious; tiny Play icons beside song titles can be selected to start hearing a tune through the Rhapsody player, which hums along in the background, and similar icons add songs to playlists in one step.

But for a site that prides itself on appealing to music enthusiasts, I found certain genres much more represented than others. The rock music category, for example, had plenty of related posts and coinciding Rhapsody music, but the classical music section was almost nonexistent and country tunes were poorly represented. I typed “Bach” into the search box, expecting to be flooded with results, but saw no music and only one post by a MOG user about why she thought Bach was a great composer. The company says it will fix this in the next couple of months.

Unlimited Rhapsody access costs $13 monthly and is offered free for the first 14 days. But, like all subscription models, it blocks access to music if you don’t pay this monthly fee. MOGGERS who don’t want to pay or don’t plan on using Rhapsody as much can choose from two free options: one that allows users to listen to 25 songs a month and another that only allows free 30-second clips of song.

MOGGERS can upload their own MP3s within blog posts on the site. But linking to Rhapsody songs was easier and faster.

I got started by clicking a giant “Magic Button” icon on the MOG site. This installed MOG-O-MATIC, a tool that automatically searched my computer’s hard drive for all of my music files, then indexed them and created a profile of my music taste on a personalized My MOG page. This tool was also available in the first version of MOG but is 10 times as fast now, indexing 10,000 songs an hour compared with 1,000 songs previously.

I liked that MOG-O-MATIC did some page-creation work for me, making a list of the songs I listened to most recently — regardless of what program I used to listen to the song (iTunes, Windows Media Player or Rhapsody). Another list that was automatically generated from my music showed which artist was best represented in my collection. If you don’t want the world to know about your Barry Manilow obsession, this list can be altered to fudge the truth.

Because MOG-O-MATIC scans your entire music collection, it knows what music you like. A Recommendations page shows you what other MOGGERS with similar tastes are listening to, helping you discover new tunes. I found these suggestions to be pretty accurate, and even discovered a great song on another MOGGER’s recommended playlist called “Summer Teeth” by Wilco. I checked out the page belonging to the MOGGER who created this playlist, and found other tunes that were in line with my musical taste.

Using Rhapsody, I played entire Web pages of recommended songs with one click. Likewise, entire music collections belonging to other people can be played the same way, as long as you have the right Rhapsody account to play that many songs.

I wrote a blog post on MOG about the newest album from “Fountains of Wayne,” and it automatically included a Play button icon, enabling the song I wrote about to play along with my post. This auto-linking is done with fill-in-the-blank boxes that tag each post with music.

MOG isn’t trying to be a social-networking site that enables all things. Instead, it focuses on one thing, music, and successfully improves the way people discuss, share and discover music online.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

Thanks to faster computers and higher bandwidths, many Web sites now contain video of one kind or another. Slow, stuttering footage is a thing of the past, and video-sharing Web sites are hot commodities, demonstrated last year when Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion.

You can browse the Web watching videos until your eyes glaze over, but you can’t easily save any of that video footage to your computer in an organized library. So while your photos, music and email can be neatly categorized and revisited on your computer’s hard drive, videos that you see online may never come your way again.

This week, I tested the newest version of RealNetworks Inc.’s RealPlayer, which offers a distinctly useful feature: the ability to copy any video from the Internet onto your PC, as long as it isn’t protected by a copyright. This player, which was just released in its beta (or testing) version last month, is available as a free download from www.realplayer.com.

RealPlayer 11 copies videos from the Web to a PC with one click; a progress window shows the status of multiple simultaneous downloads.

Once downloaded, RealPlayer 11 smartly runs on Microsoft’s Windows XP or Vista machines in the background, only making its video-copying capability known when a video appears on a Web page in your browser. A tiny message labeled “Download This Video” pops up from the video viewing screen, and when selected, this initiates a download of the entire video. You don’t need to be at the start of the video to copy the whole clip. In fact, you can copy an entire video without watching it (I used RealPlayer 11 to copy videos for watching later when I didn’t have a column to write). Saved videos can be shared with friends, organized into playlists or burned onto CDs.

I tried RealPlayer 11 on my Windows XP desktop and on my Vista laptop, using both Internet Explorer 7.0 and Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 without problems. Being able to copy videos made me realize how many clips I watch online, footage that might otherwise have been forgotten had I not saved it on my computer. Granted, not all the videos that one watches online are worth capturing, but it’s nice to have the ability to save them with just a mouse click.

I missed being able to use RealPlayer 11’s video downloading on my Apple computers, but RealNetworks says it will make its player usable on Macs before the end of the year. The company also says it is working on plans to make these saved videos transferable to portable players, including Apple’s iPod, so that after downloading numerous videos, you need not be tied to your computer to watch them. In the case of longer videos, downloading took more time, and I wished this RealPlayer made it possible to watch videos shortly after they started downloading, like Apple does with movies downloaded from its iTunes Store.

Downloading this new RealPlayer was surprisingly painless — a welcome change compared with my experiences downloading the company’s previous players. In three quick steps, I downloaded RealPlayer 11, accepted a license agreement and adjusted a few settings such as whether or not I wanted to use RealPlayer 11 by default for playing all videos on my PC. I was never prompted to enter my date of birth or email, like RealNetworks downloads in the past.

I visited various sites to retrieve video footage, including YouTube, AOL videos, Google videos, sports Web sites, television network sites and news sites like WSJ.com and AllThingsD.com. Every popular video file format is supported. To save time, RealPlayer 11 lets you download multiple videos at the same time; a small window shows the status of each download, including how much time remains for each download and an option to cancel the download. There are no limits to the number of videos you can download simultaneously, as long as your Internet bandwidth can manage.

I copied numerous videos, including the first episode of my new favorite TV show, ABC’s “Traveler,” a music video from country singer Keith Urban and a National Geographic video on bowhead whales. After gathering a bunch of clips, I organized some of them into playlists and sent others to friends by selecting “Share Video Link” from the top of the screen, entering emails and a personal message about each clip. These emails are sent with embedded links to other sites, like YouTube, and the recipient doesn’t need RealPlayer 11 to see the videos, though a link for this free download appears at the bottom of the emails.

If a video is copyright protected, the “Download This Video” message that enables copying is replaced by a message that says “Video Cannot Be Downloaded” with a one-line explainer on digital rights.

(To the chagrin of content owners, this isn’t as much of an impediment as they hoped, because a large amount of video content is illegally posted online. Even if a video was originally posted in a protected format, someone may have copied it and re-posted it illegally with the protection stripped off. RealPlayer will copy these clips, as it can’t tell whether they were originally meant to be protected.)

In a couple instances, videos didn’t display messages about downloading or not downloading, in which case I wasn’t able to copy the video. RealNetworks says this is a rare occurrence.

RealPlayer 11 can also be used to record live streaming video in real time, like the constantly recording panda camera that was set up to document every move made by Tai Shan, the giant panda born in Washington’s National Zoo two years ago. I tested live recording by capturing a live stream of video from CNN.com for 35 minutes. But RealPlayer 11 can’t be set to record certain programs or at certain times like TiVo does with television.

Though I focused on its video-copying capability, RealPlayer 11 is still a media player in its own right. It is divided into six categories at the top of the screen: Now Playing, My Library, Real Guide, Games, SuperPass and Burn/Transfer. If you pay an extra $30 for RealPlayer you’ll be able to burn your videos onto DVDs rather than just CDs. Real Guide serves as a link to RealNetworks’ suggestions of videos and also lets you search for more videos. If you visit the My Library section while a video is playing, a miniature view of that video appears in the lower right corner of the screen.

Many sites offer to help you email videos or obtain a video’s URL for embedding into your own Web site. But these options often appear only after you’ve watched an entire video, and they don’t help you save videos onto your PC. RealPlayer 11 strikes a healthy balance: It’s useful without intruding on your browser. If you stopped downloading videos from the Web to your PC, you wouldn’t be bothered by its subtle downloading prompts.

RealNetworks will release a second version of this beta before the end of the year, including options for transferring videos to portable players and Mac compatibility. For now, the free download of this first version is smart, simple and fun to use.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

Any video can be copied as long as it isn’t protected by digital rights management. This article erroneously states that RealNetworks Inc.’s RealPlayer 11 can copy any video from the Web, as long as it isn’t protected by a copyright.

If our email from readers is any indication, baby boomers are bugged by a persistent problem: They need a simple way to convert all those vinyl records they’ve been accumulating since the 1960s into digital song files, or at least CDs.

So, this week, we sat down with two devices that are designed to bring new life to the old 45s and LPs that boomers cherish, allowing those oldies to migrate to CD players, computers and iPods.

One device, the $400 LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System by Teac America Inc., serves as an all-in-one stereo and CD burner. It’s a standalone unit that doesn’t connect to a PC. The other device, the $200 Ion USB Turntable (iTTUSB) by Ion Audio, is a turntable that plugs directly into your computer via an attached USB cable.

Ion USB Turntable by Ion Audio, $199

The sight of a record player set up in our office stopped more than one nostalgic passerby in his tracks, as did the sound of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” blaring out from a crackling, fuzzy record.

While the iTTUSB sounds like it might offer a more direct method, its included music-transfer software program is way too confusing and technical for average users, and would make sense only to an audiophile or techie. It also doesn’t automatically detect where tracks on records start and end, forcing users to manually separate each new track. So we simply can’t recommend it for average, mainstream users.

The Teac LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System gets our vote, thanks to an easy set-up process and better overall usability, even though it only creates a CD, not music files on your PC. It requires an extra step to do that. But it does have an automatic track-detection feature.

We would have liked it if at least one of these devices automatically edited tracks, cleaning up record hisses and pops.

Walt headed to a local record store to buy some old favorites for testing, as his vinyl collection was finally discarded in a recent home renovation. Armed with 45s and LPs by Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, Elvis, the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, we got started with the all-in-one solution — the Teac LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System, available from Hammacher Schlemmer. This works independent of your computer — making it more universal and less intimidating for some, compared with the Ion USB Turntable, which must plug into a computer to work.

This device is sturdy and handsome, encased in a black wood frame with a lid that opens to reveal the turntable. Its front side is more modern, with a series of circular silver buttons, a CD drawer and a digital display book-ended by built-in speakers. Aside from copying your vinyl music onto CDs, this unit also plays CDs, records (45s and LPs) and has a radio.

LP-to-CD Recorder Stereo System by Teac America, Inc., $399.95

Even better, unlike the Ion, it has a feature that will automatically detect the start and end of tracks, although it may not work well with some records, due to background noises like scratches.

This LP-to-CD Recorder burns only onto special CD-R or CD-RW discs that have “Digital Audio” labels and are less common than other recordable CDs used for burning mix CDs on computers.

We inserted one of these CD-Rs into the player and placed “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” onto the turntable, turning on Phono mode. We pressed Record, swung the turntable’s arm over onto the outer edge of Side A and pressed Play. The digital display showed track one and counted up from zero to mark elapsed time.

To mark the start of a new track, you can adjust a setting to automatically do so, but in our tests, auto detect was unreliable. If you don’t choose this option, you must press a button called “Track Increment” on the player or its remote. But this option is easier said than done, especially while listening to old favorites. We caught ourselves harmonizing along to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, forgetting our CD-making duties at the end and quickly scrambling for the remote.

After one side was finished, we paused recording to flip the record and pressed Pause again to resume. When the turntable ceased rotating, recording automatically stopped. To make a CD playable on other devices and computers, we pressed Finalize; about a minute later, the CD was done. We finished converting “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” in 45 minutes. Our test CDs sounded good, but the Teac unit has no ability to clean up any scratches, pops or hisses that may afflict your old records.

After we burned our test CDs, we were able to insert them into a Windows or Macintosh computer and import the tracks as MP3 files.

Using the Ion USB Turntable, or iTTUSB as it is called on the box, was a more frustrating and laborious process, thanks to its assembly-required turntable and its geeky file-converting software program, Audacity.

The iTTUSB itself is simple-looking, and it should be; it is being sold at places where mainstream users shop, such as J.C. Penney, Circuit City and Urban Outfitters. This plastic, gray turntable comes disassembled, and Katie followed steps for setting up the platter and balancing the tone arm’s counterpoint device. But this process wasn’t nearly as complicated as using the Audacity software program.

Audacity opened and worked — but only after we followed the manual’s exhausting instructions and got help from the company’s tech support. One step had us searching a list of confusing terms to select our computer’s sound card, a task that would rightfully baffle any mainstream user. We listened to tracks through our computer’s speakers as we copied music onto our computer.

But Audacity’s most glaring problem is its inability out of the box to convert your imported vinyl tracks into MP3s — the main purpose of the product. To do this, you must leave the software program, go to Audacity’s Web site, find the URL link for a third party’s Web site, download an MP3 conversion plug-in and run it within Audacity. The software never explicitly tells you how to do this.

We followed these steps, and it took us about 10 minutes to walk through the process of converting our first track into MP3 format. Most users would never get this far, with good reason. They wouldn’t even understand the instructions.

The Ion/Audacity combo requires you to manually mark the start and stop of a track, so transfers can’t be unattended. If you so choose, you can manually go through each track to edit out the extra noises heard on records, but we can only imagine how time-consuming this process might be.

Next April, Ion Audio plans to introduce its own software program that will come bundled with the iTTUSB. Ion says this will have its own built-in MP3 conversion program, as well as the ability to automatically detect the start of new tracks.

We found Teac’s LP-to-CD Recording Stereo System to be a good, if imperfect, solution to the vinyl-to-digital quandary. It will take time to work through all of these conversions, but after you’re done, your music will be unleashed.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Compact photo printers, the toaster-shaped gadgets made popular by Hewlett-Packard a few years back, can still wow a crowd. They use special photo paper — usually of the 4×6 variety; can accept most digital camera memory cards; and produce beautiful prints right on the spot, making their owners the hits of parties and family gatherings.

These printers are also well-liked because of their ability to work independent of a computer: just plug in your digital camera’s USB cable or a memory card and press print. But because most of these printers have typically lacked good editing options, users were still returning to their computers to make adjustments on important images.

This week we tested three of the newest compact photo printers from HP, Epson and Canon that include features that make them more like mini-computers all their own, including extensive editing options and even internal memory and a CD burner in the HP and Epson, respectively.

But with these new features come higher prices. The $200 Canon Pixma mini260, $250 HP Photosmart A716 and $300 Epson PictureMate Flash cost significantly more than the mini-printers we reviewed almost two years ago. Back then, the most expensive of the three compact photo printers we tested was $200.

We’ve been printing directly from memory cards plugged into these three printers for the past week to see if their higher prices were delivering better results. Overall, we were impressed by the quality of the prints. We were also pleased, though not surprised, to find that the cost of paper and ink supplies has dropped about 10 cents per print, overall. The most inexpensive supply pack, from Epson, offers prints for 27 cents apiece, though this is still about 12 cents more than Kodak Gallery’s online store.

We printed photos taken with two different digital cameras, as well as photos captured on a cellphone’s 1.3-megapixel camera. Neither of the cameras was made by the makers of the printers.

We found the Epson’s prints to be the best overall, even though they cost the least. The Epson produced sharp images with rich, vibrant colors that churned out in just 45 seconds each, the fastest time of the three. And, though we had to do some in-printer editing to produce a red-eye-free image of a friend with the Epson, the final version of this photo also looked good. The Epson is larger and costlier than the others, but the company makes a less expensive, smaller model with the same picture-printing features and quality.

The HP more easily eliminated red-eye with its Photo Fix button, but its other prints looked somewhat less vivid than the Epson’s. And at a speed of two minutes per image, we grew tired of waiting for these prints. The Canon’s images looked sharp, but were slightly yellow in tone when lined up side-by-side with the other prints. They took about a minute each to print.

All three of these compact photo printers have built-in handles for portability, 2.5-inch viewing screens to preview images and optional sold-separately batteries for cordless use.

The $250 HP Photosmart A716 looks much like its predecessors: white and toaster-shaped with accessible memory card slots and a USB port on the front side. But this printer comes with four gigabytes of internal memory, enough to hold up to 4,000 pictures according to HP. We easily saved various images to the HP Photosmart’s memory by pressing a Save button on the printer’s top side.

One advantage to HP’s internal memory: at a party or family gathering, you wouldn’t have to rush to print out as many images as possible before people taking pictures left with their cameras or memory cards. Instead, you could just save the images onto the printer for later. For $70 less, HP sells the Photosmart A616 — the same printer without internal memory.

The HP Photosmart A716 really shines in the editing department, offering image improvement options that truly made a difference. But we weren’t able to easily view multiple photos at once on its screen — this view can only be seen by selecting Print Index View, which is buried four steps deep in a menu. In addition to 4×6 photos, you can also print 5×7s using the A716.

Epson’s $300 PictureMate Flash stands higher than the HP and Canon printers, partially due to the CD burner that is built into its base. This feature lets you copy digital photos onto CDs, which can then be handed out in addition to, or instead of, prints. You can also print an index of the images that are being copied onto the CD.

We quickly burned 50 digital shots from our SecureDigital memory card onto a CD; when slipped into our computer the CD’s images appeared, ready for editing, emailing or Web posting. Epson also sells its PictureMate Snap — the same printer without the burner — for $100 less.

The Epson PictureMate Flash has colorful buttons that are well labeled and easy to understand, including a smart Display button that easily switched our screen’s view from full-screen to thumbnail. At 6.6 pounds, this compact printer weighs in as the heaviest of the bunch.

When we pulled the $200 Canon Pixma mini260 out of its box, we wondered how it would transform into a printer. But after a few clever fold-backs and compartment openings, we were in business. This printer’s most useful button is a round navigational dial, like that used by Canon in its digital cameras. The mini260, like the Epson, easily switches from one image view to the next using a soft key below the viewing screen.

But even with the navigational dial, we found that using the Canon Pixma was more laborious than operating the other two. For one thing, inserting a memory card into its side slot didn’t trigger the printer to automatically pull up the images. We had to first open another menu to see our photos. And a screen filled with options like paper size, type and print quality had to be bypassed before each printout. The other printers smartly hide these settings deeper within their menus.

A host of editing options are offered in the Canon, but even with all of these settings turned on or adjusted for the best results, edited pictures still weren’t as good as those from the HP or Epson. The red-eye in one image, for example, wasn’t fully removed even after we turned on red-eye correction.

In the end, we liked the $300 Epson PictureMate Flash best. If its price tag makes you wince, try the $200 PictureMate Snap, which doesn’t include the CD burner. In our tests, the Epson produced the best prints for the least amount of money in the fastest time per photo. Consumers who are in the market for a portable photo printer won’t be disappointed by this new gadget.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com and Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Over 50 million Apple iPods, and lots of competing digital music players, have been sold by now — as well as over a billion songs and tens of millions of videos, since legal media sales took off a few years ago.

But many folks — even some who own iPods and other players — are still confused over how legal digital music works. So here’s a quick-and-dirty guide to the digital music world, in question-and-answer form. We’ve included the questions we are asked most frequently, plus a few other topics.

What’s the difference between the Apple iPod and all the other portable music players? Some of them seem to have more features.

The main difference is that Apple has created an entire end-to-end digital media system around the iPod, and it works. In our view, and those of most other reviewers, the combination of the iPod’s design, the iTunes music software, and the iTunes Music Store, provides a superior experience to buying a player separately, using software from Microsoft, and buying music from an unaffiliated store.

As a result, the iPod, and the iTunes store, dominate the legal music world, with shares of more than 70% of the market, depending on how you measure it.

Still, players from companies like iRiver and Creative are attractive and have some features the iPod lacks, such as built-in FM radios. And music services from RealNetworks, Yahoo, Napster and others offer an interesting alternative to iTunes.

If I buy an iPod, must I buy music from Apple’s iTunes store? Conversely, can I buy music from Apple, and play it, if I don’t have an iPod?

No, and yes. You don’t have to buy a single song from Apple. You can fill an iPod entirely with music you convert from your own CDs, or which you get from unauthorized download services, or from friends. The latter two sources are probably illegal, but they are technically easy to use. In fact, most of the song files on most of the world’s iPods weren’t purchased from Apple, or anyone else. That’s because the iPod, and iTunes, can play back files in the open MP3 format, and in other non-copy-protected formats.

Conversely, you can set up an account with the iTunes Music Store and buy as many songs, videos, and other material as you like, without owning an iPod. You would simply play back your purchased media on Windows or Macintosh computers. You can play any one song on as many as five different computers. All you need is the free iTunes software, which can be downloaded from Apple’s Web site in either a Windows or Mac version.

Will songs purchased from iTunes play back on non-iPod portable players? Will songs purchased from competing services play back on iPods?

No, and no — unless you use a workaround (see next answer). At the insistence of the record labels, all songs from major label catalogs that are sold as online downloads must be encrypted to limit copying. There are two encryption formats. One is owned by Apple, and the other is owned by Microsoft. The iTunes Store uses the Apple encryption format, and most other legal download services use the Microsoft format.

Any player from any company can theoretically be enabled to use either format, but Apple refuses to license its encryption format to any competing maker of players. And Apple also refuses to incorporate the Microsoft format on iPods. The result is that songs bought from iTunes only work on iPods, while songs bought from most other legal services only work on non-iPod players.

There is one exception. A service called eMusic sells its songs in the open MP3 format, without encryption or copy-protection. Thus, these songs will play on iPods and all other portable music players. But eMusic doesn’t carry the catalogs of the major labels. It has a much smaller selection than iTunes does.

Is there any way around this? Can I legally modify or convert encrypted songs so they will work on portable players for which they weren’t intended?

Yes, but the method is clumsy, especially if you try to apply it to a large number of converted songs.

To convert songs purchased from iTunes to an open format that will play on, say, a Creative player, or in Windows Media Player software, you first must burn the songs to CD. Then, using iTunes or other music software, you re-import them from CD, turning them into open MP3 files that can be played on any player. This works fine, but it has two big downsides.

First, it can take a long time to convert, say, 500 songs this way. Second, the process strips off all the identifying data from the song files, and home-burned CDs typically aren’t recognized by the automatic song-recognition process used by iTunes and other software. So you’ll have to manually re-enter info like artist, album and song title.

Independent site iLounge has a free manual on getting the most from your iPod.

This process works the other way as well, with a big “if.” You can convert Microsoft-encrypted songs this same way, so they become MP3 files that can be played on an iPod. But the catch is that songs offered by the leading Microsoft-based services often can’t be burned to CDs. (See next answer.)

There is some software that claims to efficiently strip the encryption from copy-protected song files, turning them into MP3 files. But these programs are almost certainly illegal under recent copyright laws, and Apple and other companies constantly change the innards of their encryption formats to foil the programs.

What is the difference between Apple’s iTunes store, and competing services like Rhapsody and Napster 2.0? Does one carry more music?

Apple’s iTunes store claims to have more than three million songs licensed from the major labels and from independents. Rhapsody and Napster claim more than two million songs, and Yahoo Music Unlimited claims more than one million. So, iTunes has by far the most music. In addition, iTunes has a strong selection of videos, including 150 television series, plus tens of thousands of audio books and podcasts. Its competitors are much weaker in these non-music categories. Most have nothing at all besides music.

The main difference lies in how the services work. iTunes works like a physical record store: you buy songs or albums, paying separately for each. Songs are 99 cents each, albums are usually $9.99, and videos are typically $1.99. Apple is reportedly negotiating to sell full-length movies as well.

Rhapsody, Napster and Yahoo work on a subscription model: you pay a monthly fee, and can download an unlimited number of songs. For Rhapsody and Napster, the fee is $10 a month if you want only to store and play music on a computer, or $15 a month if you also want to play your music on a portable player. Yahoo charges less — $6.99 a month for a PC-only plan and $11.99 a month for a portable plan.

The upside of Apple’s approach is that, once you buy a song, you own it. It never expires. You can burn it to CD an unlimited number of times, and transfer it to an unlimited number of iPods. The downside is that, to fill an iPod with, say, 5,000 purchased songs, you’d have to spend $5,000.

With the subscription plans, you can fill a portable player for just a monthly fee. But there’s a huge downside: you don’t own the music, you merely rent it. If you stop making your monthly payments, all the songs you downloaded over the years will suddenly expire and become inert and unplayable on your computer and on your portable player. Also, rental songs usually can’t be burned to CD and can only be copied to a limited number of portable players. In order to burn the tunes to CD, you generally must first buy them for an individual price, just as you do on iTunes.

How do I use multiple iPods with one iTunes library on my PC, if I want different music on each iPod?

In the Preferences section of iTunes, you can set up each iPod so it synchronizes only with particular playlists, not your whole library. Just set up a playlist for each iPod, and set it up to sync only with that playlist.

Or, you can set up each iPod so it doesn’t automatically synchronize with iTunes at all, and simply works in manual mode. Then, you can manually drag different songs into each iPod.

Can I copy the songs on my iPod to my second or third computer?

At the insistence of the record labels, Apple was forced to cripple the iPod so it can’t copy music to a computer, out of the box. Copying only works from a computer to an iPod, not the other way. But there are many third-party utility programs, for both Windows and Mac, that allow copying from an iPod to a computer. One example is PodUtil, which has versions for both Mac and Windows. It’s at: www.kennettnet.co.uk/software/podutil.php.

One thing to bear in mind: you can only play any song you buy from iTunes on up to five computers, Windows or Mac. Songs in the open MP3 format can be played on an unlimited number of computers.

Can I share the music in my iTunes software with others?

Yes, within limits. You can set up iTunes on your Windows PC or Mac so that others on your computer network (but not over the Internet) can stream, or listen to, your songs, without actually moving the song file to their computer. The receiving computer must have iTunes installed, and both machines must be enabled for sharing in the Sharing section of the iTunes Preferences panel.

What can I do with an iPod, other than play music on it?

Current iPods can play videos, like TV shows. And most iPods can play audio books and podcasts. Recent models also can play back your photos as slide shows, accompanied by music and fancy transitions. And, with a $20 cable, the iPod can display videos and photos on a TV set.

But there’s a lot of other stuff buried in an iPod. The iPod can display, but not edit, your calendar and contacts and notes, synchronized from your computer. This works with Microsoft Outlook on Windows and with the Address Book and Calendar programs that come with every Mac. Current iPods also have a built-in stop watch and multi-city clock.

You can also use your iPod as a portable hard disk. It can be set up to appear as a regular hard disk on both Windows and Macintosh computers. Any space on the iPod that isn’t occupied by your music, videos, photos and so forth can be used to store any type of file you want, for backup, or for transfer among computers. You just have to plug your iPod into your computer, go to the iPod preferences tab, and check “Enable Disk Use.”

The iPod also has some built-in games. My favorite, Music Quiz, tests your knowledge of your own music. It plays a short clip of a randomly selected song from your collection, then displays five multiple-choice song titles. Your task is to select the right title in the shortest possible time, while a clock counts down the points you can win. It’s addictive.

There’s a ton more to know about digital music, and specifically, iPods. Apple has a series of iPod and iTunes tutorials at http://www.apple.com/support/ipod101/. The independent Web site iLounge (ilounge.com) is packed with tips and tutorials and even offers a free, downloadable 194-page book about the iPod, at: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/download-now-the-free-ipod-book-20.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

How do you dislodge Apple’s mighty iPod music player, and its popular iTunes music service, from their total dominance in the digital-music market? Numerous hardware companies and music services — most backed by Apple’s historic rival, Microsoft — have tried, and failed, with all sorts of approaches.

Some contenders were cheaper. Others had built-in features the iPod lacked, like FM radios. Some had more capacity, or greater battery life. Others relied on monthly subscriptions instead of per-song fees. But the public has mainly yawned, and none of these approaches has gained any traction.

Today, a small New York City company called MusicGremlin Inc. is rolling out a fresh approach to denting the iPod hegemony: the wireless music player. Its new $299 Gremlin portable player has built-in Wi-Fi wireless networking, so it can download songs from an accompanying subscription service directly, without requiring the use of a personal computer.

Not only that, but Gremlin users can wirelessly exchange entire songs right from their players, legally, as long as both the sender and receiver are subscribers to the MusicGremlin Direct service, which costs $14.99 a month. This process, called “beaming,” allows you to share songs with your Gremlin-toting pals, no matter where they are, without ever using a computer or a CD burner. You can even peer into other users’ Gremlins to see what they’re playing and what they’ve downloaded, and pluck any song you like from their devices, if they give you permission.

The Gremlin is available today at Amazon.com, and the company’s own Web site, musicgremlin.com. While it doesn’t require a computer, the Gremlin can synchronize with a PC, but this only works with Windows machines. Its Web site requires Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and Windows Media Player for full functionality. The subscription service, which is optional, is free for the first month and offers unlimited downloads from a catalog of two million songs, about the same size as Apple Computer’s catalog.

We’ve been testing the Gremlin player and the MusicGremlin service, and we like them. The experience of downloading new music from the palm of your hand and sharing it legally with others is refreshing and fun, and can’t be done on our trusty iPods. Plus, MusicGremlin is one of the few iPod competitors we’ve encountered that shares Apple’s strong dedication to a smooth, end-to-end experience, where the hardware, software and online service work seamlessly.

However, this first version of the Gremlin has some major rough spots, in its user interface and in its wireless behavior, that detract from the experience and can get downright annoying. The company promises to fix these, but some other limitations can’t be repaired as easily. For instance, the magic doesn’t work if you aren’t in range of a Wi-Fi network you can use. And limitations imposed on MusicGremlin by the record labels mean that you can’t share certain kinds of songs, including legally obtained MP3 files that you transfer to the Gremlin from your computer.

Also, for $299, the Gremlin holds far less music than the $299 base model of the full-size iPod — just eight gigabytes, or 2,000 songs, versus 30 gigabytes, or 7,500 songs, for the $299 iPod.

The Gremlin player is a rather plain, black, chunky-looking device with none of the visual sex appeal of the iPod. It’s the same width as the base $299 model of the full-size iPod, but slightly shorter and thicker, at 0.76 inches, versus 0.43 inches for the iPod. At four ounces, it’s lighter than the iPod (which weighs 4.8 ounces).

The Gremlin’s color screen is smaller than the iPod’s — two inches, versus Apple’s 2.5 inches. And, instead of Apple’s excellent scroll wheel, the Gremlin uses a clumsier five-way navigation pad, like the ones on some cellphones. The Gremlin’s volume and playback controls are on its side. Battery life is 10 hours, versus 14 hours for the similar-size iPod.

Unlike the iPod, the Gremlin can’t display photos or videos. It can technically play back podcasts or audiobooks, but no podcasts and only a few audiobooks are yet available on the MusicGremlin service. It does include an FM radio, which the iPod lacks.

In our tests, the wireless features worked well — when we were able to get wireless connectivity. We could pick from the service’s huge catalog and download songs at will. The device shows you how many songs are queued up for downloading and reports on its progress in fetching them. If you lose the Wi-Fi connection, the process pauses and resumes later when you’re connected again.

We were also able to send and receive songs via beaming. We saw a list of other users and could easily send them songs and receive beams, giving permission each time.

But the Gremlin often told us it couldn’t find a wireless network, even when we were just a few feet from a Wi-Fi base station that laptops in the room located easily. And, in order to save battery power, the Wi-Fi feature shuts itself off frequently. It can be slow to come back and sometimes doesn’t come back at all.

On one occasion, when we were sitting next to each other with our test Gremlins, the devices couldn’t see each other, because the Wi-Fi on one or the other device had turned off automatically and wasn’t coming back up.

A last-minute software upgrade yesterday improved some of this wireless behavior, but the company acknowledges that more work is needed. (The device can be quickly upgraded by the company with bug fixes and new features, over the wireless network.)

The Gremlin won’t work with some commercial Wi-Fi hot spots, which require a Web browser to connect. But it comes with the built-in ability to connect to T-Mobile’s large network of Wi-Fi hot spots, if you have a T-Mobile account and enter your account information into the Gremlin.

The user interface is much clumsier than an iPod’s. This is partly because there are more functions, like downloading, and the community-sharing capabilities. But some things aren’t well thought out. For instance, it’s not obvious how you get the song-playing display, which shows the album cover, to stay on-screen for more than a few seconds.

To pick a song out of a list, you have to laboriously enter letters of the alphabet using the down arrow, and many functions require lots of arrow clicks and navigating fly-out submenus. Again, the company promises to improve some of this navigation.

We easily synchronized music from our computers to the Gremlin, using a Windows PC and Windows Media Player. You can also view the Gremlin as an added disk on your Windows PC and just drag and drop files between the Gremlin and your hard disk. Only the latter method allows you to copy subscription songs from the Gremlin to the PC.

One really cool feature is the MusicGremlin Web site, which not only allows downloading of songs to either a Gremlin player or a PC, but automatically displays a list of all the subscription songs on your Gremlin.

Both the Web site, and the Gremlin itself, offer you the option of purchasing songs outright, for 99 cents each, just as on Apple’s iTunes service. Unlike the subscription downloads, these songs don’t expire if you end your subscription.

In fact, you could buy a Gremlin and decline to join the MusicGremlin Direct subscription service, just filling your Gremlin with purchased tunes or songs transferred from your PC. But you’d lose the community feature of the Gremlin, because only subscription songs can be shared.

Despite its drawbacks, the MusicGremlin player and service are a great idea done pretty well. There’s nothing else like them in the marketplace, and they represent a fresh approach to challenging the iPod. For some people, a system that cuts out the need for a PC and allows legal sharing of songs may just be the perfect iPod alternative. But the company will have to file off the Gremlin’s rough edges if it’s to succeed.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Great songs, like chocolate-covered strawberries, can be sampled once and adored immediately. This is good news for online digital-music stores, where anyone with an Internet connection and a buck can log on from a computer and download a new favorite tune seconds after hearing it.

Now, XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. is making this audio gratification even more instant. Last month, it introduced the first portable combination XM radio/MP3 player, the $400 Pioneer Inno XM2go. Anyone with this device who likes a song playing on XM can simply press a button and record the entire song onto the player. No computer is required, but you do need an XM subscription, which costs $13 a month.

The $399.99 Pioneer Inno XM2go combines portable satellite radio with a digital music player, but watch out for reception problems.

These recorded songs can’t be transferred to PCs or other players. But they can be bookmarked for purchasing online at Napster’s music store the next time the Inno is plugged into a Windows computer. This purchased version of the song can be used on computers and other devices (but not the Apple Computer Inc. iPod).

The new XM device, made by Pioneer Corp.’s Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc., uses flash memory rather than a hard disk, and can store 50 hours of recorded XM Satellite Radio, plus about 8 hours or 150 digital songs copied from a computer. One half of the player is reserved for XM recordings, while the other half is reserved for MP3 or WMA music files. You can switch between the two modes by pressing a button.

The Inno is at the center of a lawsuit filed yesterday by members of the Recording Industry Association of America, who are challenging the legality of the device’s recording feature.

This week, we tested the portable Inno all around town. We liked the device itself, and enjoyed listening to various satellite radio stations on the go. But we were deeply disappointed with its radio reception, which failed in too many places. And we really didn’t like working with the Napster software when we synched the player with our PC. It was a hassle.

Our verdict: adding live satellite radio and the ability to record it onto a device is a good idea, and may appeal strongly to satellite radio lovers willing to pay $13 a month to subscribe. But, for people who just like music, the radio and recording features didn’t seem like reason enough for us to want to buy the Inno over, say, an iPod — especially given the downsides we encountered.

We liked the overall feel of the Inno, and it wasn’t too tough to get the hang of its buttons and functions. It measures 3.7 inches by 2.2 inches by 0.6 inches — just slightly smaller, overall, than a full-size iPod and a little bit thicker — and its 4.5-ounce weight makes it a tad lighter than a 30-gigabyte iPod. A 1.7-inch color screen on the front doesn’t take up the entire surface, and compared to an iPod’s 2.5-inch color screen, its size was more like the one on the tiny iPod Nano, a 1.5-incher.

The back and front sides of the Inno are decorated in cool gun-metal gray. Shiny black edges give it a modern feel, while its stubby antenna resembles that of a smart phone, but thicker and perfectly cylindrical. This antenna is the device’s only means of receiving radio. That’s a breakthrough, since satellite radio usually requires a large separate antenna or a car antenna. Unfortunately, we found the Inno’s little antenna was too weak.

It’s hard to overstate the reception problems that plague the Inno. We lost reception while driving through a short tunnel, walking through a row home and wandering through our office, away from the window. Even in an office with an entire wall of windows, we had to sit right next to the glass to get XM Satellite Radio reception.

Walking around downtown Washington, just a few blocks from the White House and a few miles from XM’s headquarters, the Inno constantly dropped the XM signal, even though Washington, by law, has no office buildings taller than about 12 stories. Walking just a few feet into a Starbucks killed the signal altogether. When we sat down on a bench in a small park, the reception got much better, but still wasn’t perfect. For a device that’s primarily a radio, this is a killer flaw. Of course, you can listen to the Inno’s stash of recorded music during these signal dropouts, but, when the failures are as frequent as ours were, this need to keep switching modes turns a supposedly pleasurable experience into a huge annoyance.

Optional headphones with an antenna disguised in the headpiece can be purchased for an additional $40, and these added slightly better reception, but not much.

A well-designed button on the right side of the Inno powers it on or off when pushed downward, and puts the device on hold when pushed up. Volume controls are just below this button, also on the device’s side. Three buttons line the bottom edge of the color screen — Mode, Play/Pause and Display — and four directional arrows surround an XM select button below these three.

We checked out XM’s 20 categories of music, over 170 stations altogether, by pressing the right arrow button. We paused in the Decades category to listen to “Sunshine Superman” by Donovan on the ’60s station before skipping to Hits where Daniel Powter’s catchy new pop song “Bad Day” was playing on the “Top 20 on 20″ station.

To record “Bad Day” onto our Inno, we pressed the XM button, chose Record and Record Song. A red “REC” icon appeared at the top of the screen, and went away when the song ended. In one case, we were listening to a station when a new song that we wanted to record started before we could press the right buttons. Thanks to the magic of satellite radio, recording automatically started at the song’s beginning, rather than halfway through.

If you’d like, you can schedule times for your Inno to start and stop recording, and these can be set to record on the current day, every day or on a specified date.

When listening to Elton John’s “Something About the Way You Look Tonight” on a romantic music station appropriately named “The Heart,” we opted to Bookmark the song so that it was set aside in a special category of songs for buying when we connected our Inno to our PC. An option called TuneSelect can be chosen while a song or artist is playing; from then on, a message will flash across your screen whenever that artist or song plays anywhere on XM, so you can tune in.

Before synching our Inno with our computer, we used an included CD to load XM + Napster software onto our Dell PC and typed in a special promotional code given to us by Napster for testing.

The Napster software program is confusing, to say the least. Napster offers three types of accounts: Napster Lite, music-store usage with no monthly fee that allows online listening and purchasing of songs à la carte; Napster Membership, a $9.95-a-month program allowing unlimited music downloads onto the PC — but not for transferring to a player; and Napster To Go, a $14.95 monthly membership that allows unlimited music downloading and transferring to a device.

If that doesn’t confuse you, add the fact that because Napster offers music rentals rather than just buying of songs — like iTunes — it considers purchased tracks to be different than downloaded tracks. Overall, your purchased tracks or previously owned tracks (in MP3 or WMA file format) can be transferred to the XM2go. Downloaded (not purchased) tracks can’t be transferred to the XM2go, but they can be transferred to special, more advanced devices with what’s known in techie land as DRM 10 compliance. XM plans to introduce devices with this technology in the future.

The Inno connects to a PC using a standard USB cable, but it must be simultaneously lying in its special sideways dock, which also powers the device. When the Inno is turned sideways in its cradle, its screen automatically rotates, as do its directional arrows. This cradle also has plugs for an additional included antenna and a line out, for using the Inno with a stereo system.

In Napster’s software program, our Inno was identified, as were the songs that we had recorded and bookmarked. Songs recorded from XM can’t be exported from the player, due to copyright laws. Most of the songs we had bookmarked, including Elton John’s tune, had a Download icon next to their track titles.

But instead of seeing a Buy icon next to our bookmarked tunes, we could only purchase songs by right-clicking on tracks and choosing Buy Track since our account type was designed for streaming music rather than buying it. This type of navigational confusion was abundant in the program, and users would easily and understandably be befuddled by what account type they had and what was or wasn’t included in it.

We dragged and dropped songs onto our Inno player without a problem, and they showed up in the MP3 section of the player when we started it up again. We even created playlists, right on the Inno, combining music recorded from XM stations and our own MP3s. Switching between the live XM stations and our MP3s and WMAs was easily done with the Mode button. XM estimates that the Inno’s battery will last for 15 hours in playback mode and five and a half hours in Live XM Mode.

When it’s all said and done, XM’s Inno is fun to use on the go, as long as you’re not underground or in room without windows. But its spotty reception, confusing software and monthly fee make the Inno a no-go, except for hard-core XM fans.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Books on cassette or cd, longstanding favorites for family car trips, daily commutes and business travel, are nothing new. But audio books have been given new life in the past few years, thanks to online services like Audible.com and iTunes. On these services, you can purchase an audio book in the form of a digital file, download it into your computer, and then transfer the selection to an iPod or other portable music player for use wherever you go.

For most people, this isn’t difficult. But some folks find the download-and-transfer process intimidating, or too much of a hassle. Others worry about downloading any files from the Internet, for security reasons; or they shun the large files required to hold spoken books, due to storage capacity issues on their computers or players.

The front of each Playaway is decorated with the same illustration and title as found on the physical book’s cover.

For these minorities, there’s now another audio-book option, a device we’ve been testing over the past couple of weeks. It’s digital, portable and uses no tapes or discs. Yet it never requires any file downloading or transferring. This new gadget is a digital audio book permanently encased in its own audio player, and it’s called Playaway, from Findaway World LLC — a company in Ohio.

Playaway was introduced just about two months ago, so it has only 32 titles available so far, compared with 11,000 on iTunes and 26,000 on Audible.com. Most Playaways contain only one book, though a few come bundled with two titles by the same author. Each book costs between $35 and $55 — including both the player and the content. The company says the new product is being sold at major stores, including Barnes & Noble, Borders, Office Max and Officemax.com.

You can’t connect a Playaway to a computer, or erase books from it, or add books or music to it. In effect, each Playaway is a book, which happens to come with a cheap player. The Playaway stores its book content permanently on a memory chip inside. The book doesn’t expire, so you can collect multiple Playaways and listen to them multiple times, or pass them on to friends or relatives, like paper books — something that’s harder to do with book files meant for an iPod. All you have to do is replace the battery when it wears out.

Essentially, Playaway is a money-for-time or money-for-hassle trade-off. Over time, it will cost much more than other methods for listening to audio books, but it’s also much simpler. We can’t recommend Playaway for anyone who already has a computer and an iPod or other portable music player, and knows how to do downloads and transfers. But, for other folks who crave audio books and have deep pockets, it might work well.

The device measures roughly three inches high by two inches wide, and is about a quarter of an inch thick in the thickest spot, where an included AAA battery is stored. A Playaway comes with its own set of earbuds, which plug directly into the device. (You can also use your own earbuds if you have a better pair that you’d prefer using.) To start, simply attach the earbuds and press a button to begin listening to your book.

To test these tiny gadgets, we each listened to a Playaway — David McCullough’s “1776″ and Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”; they cost $50 and $35, respectively. We also passed out three other titles to three of Katie’s family members during a holiday vacation that included two five-hour plane trips. Our guinea pigs listened to “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” by David Sedaris ($35), “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People/The 8th Habit, From Effectiveness to Greatness” by Stephen R. Covey ($40) and “Learn Anywhere! Spanish — The Complete Language Course” from Penton Overseas Inc. ($45).

Overall, we liked Playaway, and we found it simple to use when we followed a small sheet of included instructions. But we found the cost of each to be quite high, when compared with the audio books on Apple’s iTunes Music Store — some as much as $18 more. Of course, the Playaway titles include the built-in player, while the Apple titles, which come from Audible.com, require a computer and an iPod for the same portability.

Findaway is hoping you won’t mind paying extra to eliminate the extra steps of online purchasing, downloading, and then transferring the audio file to your portable music player. But, to put things in perspective, you could buy an iPod Shuffle for the price of two $50 Playaways. Better yet, for the price of four “1776″ Playaways ($50 each), you could buy an iPod Nano, which plays audio books, along with music, and can even display photos on its color screen.

Compared with books on CD, Playaways were still more expensive. Dan Brown’s best seller, “The DaVinci Code,” costs about $30 for an audio CD at Borders, $32 on iTunes, and $50 through Playaway.

The front of each Playaway is decorated with the same illustration and title as found on the physical book’s cover, so it looks like you have a mini version of the book hanging from your neck when you use the included lanyard. This is a nice plug for authors who don’t get as well advertised when their book is heard on a standard iPod.

Bookmarks, a popular digital feature, are offered on the Playaway. These are digital placeholders, and up to 50 can be set throughout the book by pressing a small button in the player’s upper right-hand corner. Skip Back and Skip Forward buttons let you skip through your book to the next chapter break or the next bookmark, whichever comes first.

We pressed another button, Reverse, to automatically rewind 15 seconds during an especially detailed part of “1776,” and Fast Forward performs the same function in the other direction.

The Playaway Button, in the center of the device below a tiny grayscale screen, performs four functions: power on, play, pause and power off. Play and pause worked when we pressed this button once, briefly; power off required that we hold the button down until we saw an on-screen, five-second countdown before the player turned off.

The screen itself was minute, but served its purpose. It displayed the current time of the book and also told us what chapter we were hearing. A battery indicator tells you how much juice is left on your AAA battery; books that run longer than nine hours come with two batteries.

We liked Playaway’s Voice Speed button, which adjusted the speed of the narrator to three different paces. But the Volume control was cheap and clumsy. It works only in one direction — up. So, to lower the volume, you first have to raise it all the way to the loudest level, before the control cycles back to the lower levels. You really have to blast the sound painfully, even if what you really want is to make it quieter.

Playaway is easy to use, and certainly very convenient. But unless you have some reason to dislike downloading books, and have lots of cash, it’s not the best way to go.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

But there are still plenty of folks who are intimidated by the idea of storing and playing music on a home computer, or using a portable music player that accepts the computer’s digital tunes. These music-lovers are more at ease pulling a few discs from a tall stack of CDs, popping them into the stereo and sitting back with the remote control.

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested a product that attempts to introduce these low-tech consumers to digital music — without ever involving a computer. The $179 RCA Rip & Go Digital Music Studio looks like a typical shelf stereo, complete with a main unit, two equally sized speakers, a five-disc CD player, AM/FM radio and remote control.

But atop the main unit of this stereo, a small indented rectangle and USB port act as a docking base for a bare-bones 128MB portable MP3 music player that comes with the stereo. Once it’s attached, you can copy songs from your CDs — or even from the radio — onto this player as the songs play on the stereo, by simply pressing Record. The player holds roughly 40 songs, according to RCA, a brand of France’s Thomson.

The Rip & Go also has a SecureDigital (SD) memory card slot — another unusual feature for a stereo — on its front side. If you have an SD card loaded with digital music, you can insert that card and play songs directly from it, which I did easily with the SD card that I keep in my Treo 650 smartphone.

We found RCA’s Rip & Go to be a straightforward product with uncomplicated directions that might bridge the gap for computer-phobic folks who want to experience the advantages of portable digital music. But it’s a very basic and limited solution. Other than the included portable player, the Rip & Go has no means of storing your new digital songs. There’s no hard disk, no ability to copy the files to recordable CDs for later use, and no way to record the songs to an SD card that’s in the player’s card slot.

The only place you can put your digital music is in the internal memory of the included portable player. And that player has a pretty low capacity. RCA says the stereo will also work with certain other players with higher capacity, such as other RCA players and some models from Samsung. But these cost extra.

Plus, the Rip & Go doesn’t add the song title, album and artist information to your songs, even though these are an important part of the digital-music experience. When you play your new tunes on the player, they are identified only by techie file names, which makes it hard to select and identify them.

You can’t use the USB port on the top of the unit that connects the player to attach a USB thumb drive or hard disk to capture the songs. And it won’t work with the best and most-popular portable music player, Apple’s iPod. In fact, it won’t work with a lot of Windows-compatible players either, for technical reasons having to do with the way it organizes files.

Also, Katie and I found the memory-card slot to be an odd feature for the Rip & Go because most folks who are tech-savvy enough to load digital-music files onto an SD card already are using their computer for digital-music storage and wouldn’t likely be buyers of this product.

Katie and I set up the Rip & Go in a matter of minutes, attaching each speaker’s black and red cords to the back of the main unit, plugging it in and setting the display’s digital clock by following a few directions in the manual.

We loaded five CDs into the stereo to test playing and copying a few songs onto the little player. Our first CD, the soundtrack from the movie “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” started playing immediately, beginning with “I Say A Little Prayer” by Diana King.

To record this song onto the included portable player, we made sure the player was plugged into the stereo’s USB port and pressed Record. After a brief message on the screen that said “Reading USB,” the current track’s duration and the player’s remaining space (in hours, minutes and seconds) showed on the display screen.

We continued recording for the next two tracks and pressed Record to stop after the third song on the CD. Using the stereo’s Source button to switch from CD player to radio, we then followed the same process to record a classical selection from the FM radio, starting half-way through the song. You can’t set up times to record songs from the radio — you must be present while they’re playing and start recording manually, which makes it hard to capture whole songs.

After recording from the radio, we detached the little player from the top of the stereo. This player was easy to work, and music that came through its attachable earbuds sounded fine. It has a simple unlit screen with buttons below it labeled Play/On, Last, Next and Stop/Off. Buttons on the left and right sides of the player lock the keys, control playback modes and adjust volume. One triple-A battery can keep the player running for as long as 20 hours, according to RCA.

The player’s technology had detected the start and end of our recorded CD tracks, which was a nice feature. But as expected, none of the songs that we copied onto the player were labeled with the artist, song or album title. Instead, the song’s information just included a name that started with the source followed by a number, such as “DISC 1T08 MP3″ or “FM002T01 MP3.” Other information also shows on the screen, including volume, battery life, the song’s duration and the track number (in relation to the total number of recorded songs).

Deleting tracks to make more room on the player was simple. We attached the player to the stereo again, pressed the Select button on the stereo to choose a list of the named recordings, scrolled with the Rip & Go’s volume knob to find the right track and pressed Delete. Holding down the Delete button will give you the option of erasing all tracks on the player.

But certain tracks, which are already cryptically labeled, are tagged differently on the stereo’s display than on the player. For example, we looked for DISC 1T04 MP3 on the stereo-displayed list of the player’s contents, but only found it within another menu labeled CDREC001. This is because the stereo groups tracks into lists of those that were recorded at the same time — but it only muddied up the navigation.

If you can excuse this obscure track-labeling system and want to give digital music a try, the Rip & Go might be a good introductory product. Just don’t expect too much from it.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com