I waited until the dust to settle and a standard to be chosen (at least for the foreseeable future) in the field of Internet music. The chosen standard now seems to be MP3 so I needed to find the best MP3 player and recorder. I tried the rest and picked the best. MusicMatch Jukebox is Mule Dog's favorite to date for playing, recording and organizing all your MP3 music files.

As you can see it is a very cool metallic blue and sits very large on your desktop when open since it has many features that allow you to play, record and organize your music. You can also have the CD cover picture pop up when a song is playing.

The program is actually three movable modules. The top is for playing songs, the middle is a library and the bottom is a recorder or "ripper". The ripper name comes from the speed at which the recorder strips the data off the CD as it compresses the information into an MP3 file. It has some nice controls for playing and recording, enabling you to play back with equalization and record choosing various sampling rates.

You can get a free trial version of this program that will play and organize files. The free version will not record in CD quality though and that requires the $29.99 version. You get free upgrades for life with this software and it also plays streaming video (offer ends in February). Visit their site and take this great program for a spin at