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.

Next month marks the fifth anniversary of one of the most successful products of the digital era, Apple Computer’s iPod music player. Since 2001, potential iPod-killers have come and gone like autumn foliage. Apple claims an astonishing 76% market share in the U.S. for the iPod and an equally amazing 88% share of the U.S. legal music download market for its companion iTunes online store. Over 60 million iPods and 1.5 billion songs have been sold.

The Cover Flow feature in the new iTunes

Still, this autumn, the iPod could face its greatest challenge. Microsoft, after failing for years to combat the iconic gadget, will launch a new assault Nov. 14 with a player called Zune. Unlike past Microsoft music efforts, the Zune will be sold by Microsoft itself, and, like the iPod, it will be tightly integrated with companion software and an online music store.

Not only that, but this week, RealNetworks‘ Rhapsody music service, the best of the iTunes competitors, will announce its own player, jointly developed with SanDisk, which is the second-place player maker, albeit a distant second.

So, this holiday season Apple has made some of the biggest changes to the iPod and iTunes in years. It has redesigned the iPod Nano and Shuffle, cut prices and/or raised capacities on all models, introduced a new iPod search feature, added color games and movie playback to the full-sized iPod, and more. Plus, it has given the iTunes software its biggest overhaul ever, making the software both simpler and more fun to use.

Oh, and it has started selling downloadable feature films, which can be played on computers, iPods, and, soon, via a forthcoming new device, on TV sets.

We’ve been testing the new iPods and iTunes for several weeks, as well as the new movie download service. Our review of the hardware and software follows here. See the accompanying article for our take on the movie downloads.

Our verdict: the new iPods are more versatile and less costly than ever, but the new iTunes software is an even bigger improvement, although it has one big downside — its coolest new feature is so graphically demanding that it doesn’t work right on some older computers.

For the main iPod, the biggest changes are in capacity, price, battery life and software. The base version, which holds 30 gigabytes, is now $249, a $50 price cut presumably intended to put pressure on Microsoft. The higher-end model, at $349, is also $50 less than last year’s version, even though it holds 80 gigabytes, up from 60 gigabytes last year. Battery life for video playback has been greatly improved, to 3.5 hours on the base model, up from just two hours on last year’s model. The bigger model has 6.5 hours of video playback time, up from 4 hours. (Battery life for music is unchanged.)

The iPod’s screen is also now 60% brighter. But what’s now on the screen is even more interesting: There’s now a search feature that lets you find items alphabetically, by using the scroll wheel to select letters. In our tests, it worked well. And, in addition to viewing full-length movies on the full-sized iPod, you can now play classic color games, such as Tetris, Pac-Man, Bejeweled, Poker and Mahjong. Apple sells these games via iTunes for $4.99 each.

In our tests, playing even very familiar games with a scroll wheel instead of a mouse or joystick took some adjustment. But, eventually, we got the hang of it, and the color and detail of the games on the iPod’s screen was impressive.

The iPod Nano also has the new search feature, but it can’t play the movies or games. It has been given a new aluminum skin, like the old iPod Mini had. This has two advantages: It resists the scratches that affected the first Nano models last year, and it allows for a range of bright colors. It’s even a teeny bit thinner and lighter than the amazingly small original Nano. We liked the new Nano and found it worked well.

Clockwise from the left: the 4GB iPod nano, iPod, and iPod shuffle.

The Nano still comes in three versions, but the capacities for each have been doubled while the prices remain the same. The base $149 Nano now holds 2 gigabytes and comes in silver only. The middle $199 Nano now holds 4 gigabytes and comes in four colors, including a hot pink. And the $249 top-of-the-line Nano now holds 8 gigabytes and is black only.

Even greater changes have been made in Apple’s iTunes software, the biggest overhaul since it came out in 2001. ITunes is one of the world’s most popular software programs, much more popular than the iPod itself. That’s because many people use iTunes, which is free, to manage and download music on their Windows and Macintosh computers, even if they don’t own iPods.

But iTunes had been growing long in the tooth. It didn’t do as good a job with video as with music, and was visually boring. So the new iTunes 7, which is still nearly identical on Windows and Macintosh, has lots of new stuff.

The coolest new feature is called Cover Flow, an optional way of viewing your music library. In Cover Flow, the top half of your screen is filled with an array of all your album covers, and as you scroll through your songs with the mouse or keyboard — or, as songs play — the album cover for each appears in the center of the array. Sometimes, if you’re skipping around in a large library, the covers flip by at high speed, finally settling on the one you’re playing.

In a way, it’s just a parlor trick, and it sounds like it’s no big deal. But we loved it, because it reminded us of flipping through a box of old vinyl albums or watching an old jukebox in a diner. It actually helped remind us of albums we’d forgotten about.

If you don’t have the album covers for all your songs, iTunes 7 will fetch them online free, so Cover Flow can work. Cover Flow also works with video clips, displaying either the official art supplied by iTunes, for purchased videos, or just a still from the video for other clips.

Unfortunately, Cover Flow puts such heavy demand on computer graphics systems that it doesn’t work properly or at all on some machines, especially older or more limited Windows computers. While it worked fine on our Macs and on our Dell and Hewlett-Packard Windows desktops, it failed on Katie’s Toshiba laptop and in a virtual Windows machine running under the Parallels software on a MacBook Pro laptop.

Apple has released a revision of iTunes 7 to address Cover Flow issues and some other problems, but the revision didn’t do the trick on our problem machines.

Beyond Cover Flow, iTunes 7 sports numerous other new features. It can now detect when albums were meant to be played without gaps between songs, as on many classical albums and a few rock albums, such as the Beatles’ Abbey Road. In fact, it will go through your library, find all such albums, and eliminate the gaps. This “gapless playback” feature also extends to the new iPods.

This latest iTunes also sports separate libraries for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks and games. And, when you attach an iPod, it offers a much cleaner and more comprehensive tabbed interface for managing the synchronization of music, videos, photos, and other content.

And, finally, you can use your iPod to move content from one computer to another, although this feature only works with content you purchased from Apple.

It’s impossible to know if Apple can sustain its remarkably high market shares in the face of new competition, but it is going into the battle with better products at better prices.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

The world of computer gaming is often associated with “gamers” — mostly men who invest in special controllers, giant monitors and subwoofers for use with violent action games. But a different type of gaming, “casual gaming,” is becoming popular with a different type of user, mainly middle-age women.

Casual games include puzzles, card and arcade games and don’t require hours of play in order to understand how they work or which computer buttons will do what. The game industry sees the casual gamer as a growing market and believes it mainly consists of women over 35.

A character from \”Mystery Case Files — Prime Suspects\”

This week we tested an online gaming service from Big Fish Games Inc., which, since 2002, has specialized in selling downloadable casual games that are family friendly. It now offers more than 300 games through its Web site (www.bigfishgames.com) that are broken down into categories like Puzzle Games, Card & Board and Action & Arcade.

Big Fish isn’t the only player in casual gaming. The leader is generally thought to be RealNetworks’ RealArcade, which we’ve reviewed in the past, and Microsoft and Yahoo also offer casual games. But Big Fish provides an interesting twist — a sort of multilevel marketing scheme where you can earn money for getting your friends to buy games.

In general, we liked Big Fish, which allows you to download a free 60-minute trial of a game to see if you like it enough to buy it. After the trial, you must pay $20 to download the full version of a game. The BigFishGames.com site itself, where users select and download the games, is rather straightforward, offering a variety of fun titles that kept us distracted for hours.

But two other sections of the service — one called My Big Fish Games and another section for online game-playing — each require their own sets of log-in information, totaling three possible log-ins in Big Fish Games. This makes for some unnecessarily confusing navigation around the three sections of this product.

Big Fish Games lets you set up your own Web site with reviews of games that you can share with friends.

We started on the basic site, BigFishGames.com, and right away we appreciated the inviting and colorful environment. Even someone without any online gaming experience would understand how to begin playing a game seconds after logging on by choosing from organized categories like genre, new releases, featured areas or top 10 downloaded games. Games are offered for both Windows and Mac operating systems, though not as many are available for use on Macs.

The Mac games looked and worked fine, but they caused other open windows on the Mac to become reduced in size, something we had to manually correct when we were done with the game.

A discount subscription service called Game Club offers games for less than the usual $20 fee when you sign up to buy a certain number of games per month, such as $7 each if you buy 12 games in 12 months. Using Game Club requires an email address and password.

A link within the BigFishGames.com page directs you to a second Web site called My.BigFishGames.com. Here, you can sign into yet another account by entering your email and password to create your own personal Web page with a welcome message for friends, a list of your top five favorite games and your own reviews of the games.

This personal Web site can be shared with friends and comes in handy when using the Big Fish Games referral reward program, which the company introduced last week. Though not everyone will be willing to solicit their friends, this idea might earn you a few bucks.

This rewards program works when you tell friends about the site and they purchase a game, giving you 25% of that purchase from Big Fish Games. If the friend refers someone else to the site who also buys a game, you and the friend who did the referring each get 25% of that third party’s purchase. There’s no limit to the number of people that this chain can reach, earning you more and more money.

Your monetary award can be sent to you as a check, or it can be used to double your money for use when buying games (a $5 kickback becomes $10 that can go toward games). If you don’t want to receive the money, you’ll be able to donate it to charity starting in October.

If you’d rather play games online instead of downloading them on the BigFishGames.com site, a Play Online tab in that site shows you which games are available for online play. All of these games can be played free in a browser window, but if you’d like to be able to chat with the online gaming community, you must create yet another log-in with a username and password. This third set of Big Fish Games log-in credentials lets others see your username so they can interact with you.

After browsing around and dealing with all of these navigational headaches, we found that the games themselves were really entertaining. The first two games that we downloaded in 60-minute trial versions were about retrieving hidden objects in cluttered pictures — adult, computerized versions of the common picture puzzles found in kids’ magazines. We liked one called “Mystery Case Files — Prime Suspects” enough to buy its full version, which took about 10 minutes to download.

A Big Fish game called \”Hidden Expedition: Titanic\” challenges players to find hidden objects in various room of the Titanic.

Katie nostalgically remembered her elementary-school days when she came across a mystery game called “Nancy Drew — Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon.” This game, a huge 850-megabyte file, isn’t available in trial version, but Katie got it anyway and was hooked on its impressive graphics, amusing characters and cheesy story line.

Smaller downloads like Boggle Supreme and Mahjong Towers Eternity also proved satisfying. In the Mahjong game, you can select from numerous tile layouts created by other Big Fish users.

We tried our hand at online gaming with a takeoff on “Wheel of Fortune,” called “Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters.” Pat’s voice could be heard narrating the rules as we played.

One game called Cake Mania was categorized in the Action & Arcade section of games. The goal of this game is to help the main character bake as many cakes as possible in a certain amount of time — quite a switch from typical action games that would more likely involve traversing minefields and shooting enemies.

But because of the three sections within Big Fish Games, it was hard to remember where we had seen a game that looked interesting to us — on the basic page of games, in the online gaming section or on our own Web page of recommendations.

Big Fish Games says it will offer a unified log-in system in three to four months that will enable you to use just one log-in for all three sections, which is a relief. Until then, things can get confusing on this site. But if you can keep your credentials straight, the games can be a lot of fun without requiring much skill. And if you have friends who agree, you might just make a buck or two through this game Web site.

Email: MossbergSolution@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.

Internet radio is very cool. It allows you to listen to both traditional radio stations from all over the globe, as streamed through Web sites, and to stations that exist only on the Net. The variety of music and talk these stations offer is staggering, but there’s a problem: To listen to them, you have to be sitting in front of a computer.

Many folks would rather listen to Internet radio in rooms where their computers don’t live, or where they’d rather not lug a laptop. To do so today, you have to buy a device that transmits music from a computer to remote speakers. These include the Squeezebox from Slim Devices Inc., Netgear’s MP101 Wireless Digital Music Player and Roku’s SoundBridge M1000.

None of these devices includes its own built-in speakers. You have to attach them to your audio system, and some require you to manage software on the computer that allows them to work over your network, a tricky process.

But, this week, we tested a new Internet radio product that’s totally self-contained and requires almost no setup. It doesn’t depend on a computer to bring in Internet radio, but does the job itself, wirelessly connecting to your broadband service, just like a computer does. And it doesn’t require an external audio system. It has its own built-in subwoofer and speakers, just like a traditional radio. It even looks like a traditional radio, but it does much more.

This new product is called the SoundBridge Radio, and comes from Roku LLC. It’s due to hit store shelves in a few weeks at around $400, which includes a remote control.

By including speakers, Roku eliminates the intimidating extra step of fiddling with wires to attach the device to a separate sound system. With its own sound system, the SoundBridge Radio can also function as an alarm clock, and it can receive your local AM and FM stations over the air, in addition to Internet radio.

Roku’s SoundBridge Radio, priced at $400, includes a remote, built-in speakers and a subwoofer.

And, even though it doesn’t require a computer for radio, the SoundBridge can pull music off your computers wirelessly and play it. It can even play music stored on a SecureDigital memory card.

We rocked out all week, listening to all different types of radio stations, and concluded that the SoundBridge Radio is a decent product, but its user interface could stand some improvement.

In addition to playing roughly 100 preprogrammed Internet radio stations, the SoundBridge Radio also detects and plays music from all libraries within range of your wireless network — without having to install any special software on your Windows or Mac computer. These libraries can include content running on Apple’s iTunes, Real Networks’ Rhapsody, Windows Media Connect and Windows Media 10, as well as services like MusicMatch, Napster, MSN Music and Walmart.com.

To add your own Internet radio stations onto the SoundBridge Radio, you must use a convoluted method involving iTunes. This summer, Roku plans to upgrade its software so as to include many more preprogrammed stations on each device.

The SoundBridge Radio is black and measures 11 inches wide, 6 inches high and 6½ inches deep. Two speakers are built into its front panel, and a subwoofer is built into its rear. A horizontal display with blue-green lettering runs across the front panel, and 13 buttons are built into the top ledge, including a hard-to-miss sleep button and six numbered preset buttons. A headphone jack and SD card slot are positioned on the player’s right side.

We had no trouble setting up the SoundBridge Radio. We plugged it in, and its display screen immediately came to life, asking us a few simple questions, which we answered by pressing the Select button on an included remote. After a few seconds of waiting, we were on our way.

This text in the display screen can be adjusted to one of six different fonts; we chose the average-size type. While the smallest enabled us to see more text, it was impossible to see across the room, and the largest font had to constantly scroll to display song information. Unlike on some other devices, the remote has no built-in little screen of its own.

Navigating through the SoundBridge Radio was confusing at times. A Source menu listed the six sections of the player, including each of our share-enabled iTunes music collections, and read: Play Walt’s iMac, Play Katie’s Music, Play AM Radio, Play FM Radio, Play Internet Radio and System Configuration. The radio itself had a Source button on it that, when pressed, easily retrieved this menu, but the remote had no such button.

The remote does have a Home button (represented by a house icon), but this goes only to the main menu within the current source, not to the useful Source menu itself.

After selecting each of our music libraries, options for how to play the music appeared on the screen, such as by selecting premade playlists or by browsing through and choosing a specific artist. We played a few songs from each of our iTunes libraries, including Billy Joel and Coldplay, and were impressed by the sound.

Music bought on Apple’s iTunes Music Store will not play on the SoundBridge Radio because of Apple’s refusal to license its digital rights management software. Instead, the title of that purchased tune shows up in the display line with a tiny padlock icon next to it; playable music is distinguished with a music note.

But backing out of a song while it played wasn’t as easy as we had hoped — pressing the Back button didn’t do anything. We pressed the Home button, which took us two steps further back than we wanted to navigate.

AM, FM and Internet radio each had its own list of stations. We attached two separate antennas to the SoundBridge so the AM and FM radios could be received, then used seek buttons on the remote and radio itself to find stations. About 100 Internet stations were preloaded on the SoundBridge Radio, but these could be sorted by various categories like name, genre or language.

We listened to various Internet radio stations, including Beatles Radio, Swiss Radio, Smooth Beats, Southern California Public Radio and CNN Radio. But we had trouble with a few stations — like ESPN and Pacifica Radio — that failed to stream content to our radio after five tries. Roku said that this might have been because the stations’ servers were busy.

Without the remote, the Roku SoundBridge Radio functions — but not completely. The six numbered preset buttons are categorized into A, B and C, so there are really 18 places to save a station from AM, FM or Internet radio. You can also use the preset buttons to save specific playlists, as well as lists of search results, by holding down a preset while listening to a song or station in that category. For example, while listening to music from Walt’s iMac, we held down the number six button, and a new label was placed on that button, smartly titled “All songs on Walt’s iMac.”

If the Radio is in standby mode, the time, or the time and full date, can be displayed. Pressing any of the preset buttons will turn on the device and start playing music saved under that preset. Another button brings the Source menu to the screen, but Roku didn’t think to add a select button to the Radio, so we couldn’t navigate far enough to listen to music from the Katie’s Music or Walt’s iMac libraries.

Overall, the Roku SoundBridge Radio is a smart device that needs a little tweaking. If the company really wants to market it as an alarm, it has to understand that users will want to play all of its available music, including computer libraries, without a remote. And navigating with the remote itself needs to be improved so that users don’t feel like they can’t back up out of a menu.

But by designing this receiver with built-in speakers, Roku made it less confusing for average users — a move that might encourage more people to step away from their computers, while still enjoying great music.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com