A fondness for TiVo has encouraged users to refer to it with designated nicknames and/or genders. A teacher friend of mine was recently asked by a student if her husband’s name was TiVo after the child heard her say she would have to tell TiVo about a new TV show. But like any old friend — or spouse — who has been around for a while, TiVo has a few tricks up its sleeve that might surprise longtime users and new owners alike. This column includes just a handful of those tricks and highlights some features that may make TiVo more useful. These tips are for everyday users, not serious hackers, and many others exist.

Remote-Control Codes

Each of these codes is entered one time to enable an otherwise-hidden function, and three chimes signal the code is set. These functions can be disabled by entering the code a second time, or if TiVo is rebooted.

Clock: If you miss having a VCR nearby to tell you the time while you watch TV, TiVo can help. A digital clock can be programmed to show up in the lower right-hand corner of your television screen by pressing “SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-9-SELECT.”

While playing recorded shows, this clock displays the current time and the elapsed time of the program you’re watching. Personally, I check a show’s progress by pressing the remote’s Play button to see the progress bar, and the Info button shows the current time. But the on-screen clock might come in handy when you’re watching TV on a terrible date and you don’t want to get caught glancing at your watch.

30-second skip: One of the glorious functions of TiVo and other DVRs is their ability to fast-forward through commercials. But it takes practice to know when to press Play so as to completely miss commercials.

If you’re unsure about your fast-forwarding technique, TiVo can be permanently set to skip ahead in 30-second increments, by entering “SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-3-0-SELECT.” This code must be set while watching a recorded show. After that, the 30-second skipping works whenever you press the “Skip To Tick” button, which looks like an arrow pointing right to a straight line.

TiVo says this code won’t work for longer time increments, like 90 seconds, and I tried using various increments, to no avail. Still, pressing this button about five or seven times in a row (depending on the show) gets you through commercials with less guesswork.

Disappearing progress bar: TiVo’s progress bar, which shows how far along a program has progressed in terms of the entire show’s duration, appears at various moments, such as when you first play a recorded show or unpause. This indicator lingers on the screen for just about three seconds, but if this seems too long, you can enter “SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-PAUSE-SELECT” to set the progress bar to disappear after less than a second.

I tried this setting on my TiVo, but one second showed only a quick blink of the progress bar, not enough time to see anything.

Number Shortcuts

From the TiVo Central menu, pressing each number on the remote control’s numeric keypad skips directly to a different tool. Some of the more useful shortcuts include pressing “1″ to go to Season Pass Manager (a list of programs that are set to automatically record every episode), “4″ to go to Search Title and “8″ to go to TiVo Suggestions.

Viewing Tips

TiVo can display a programming guide in a TV-Guide-like grid, or as a two-columned TiVo Live Guide that can list future shows for hours or days out. The top of Live Guide gives a detailed description of each selected program, along with its duration and TV rating.

The Now Playing list shows content stored on a TiVo. By default, this list is organized in time sequential order with same-series TV shows grouped into folders. Remote-control shortcuts re-sort this list: pressing “1″ switches from sequential to alphabetical order and vice versa; pressing “2″ ungroups shows to display each title; shows are regrouped into folders when “2″ is pressed again.

Lesser-Known Features

Universal Swivel Search is a way of seeing how TiVo’s various shows and movies are related to one another. It lists details about each program, including actors, directors, tags associated with a show (like love, dating and addiction) and suggestions of similar content. Swivel Search is accessed through the Find Programs menu or More Options while looking at a recorded show.

By selecting a Swivel Search detail about a particular show, such as one of its actors, you can see what else he or she starred in and whether or not that show or movie is available through TiVo or Amazon.com’s Unbox. Unbox downloads movies directly to your TiVo ranging from $2 to $15 each depending on whether you rent or buy a movie.

Plenty of free Internet content can be downloaded from the Web to your TiVo. But TiVo confusingly places this content in two menus: Find Programs and Music, Photos, Products & More. Under Find Programs, a Download TV & Movies section offers Amazon Unbox movies and free TiVoCast content. The latter can be set to automatically download with Season Pass settings, such as The Onion’s weekly video or ExerciseTV’s twice weekly videos.

The Music, Photos, Products & More menu holds content like photos and unprotected MP3s from a nearby computer, podcasts, Rhapsody music, Yahoo! Weather and Traffic and on-screen games. You can even buy movie tickets through Fandango.

TiVo takes up valuable space in a home entertainment center, so it’s important for the company to make sure its content is varied and useful. The codes and shortcuts mentioned can change the way you use this valuable device every day.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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.

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.

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