I'm the proud owner of two sony CD jukeboxes, several years old, and I love them: They contain my CDs and save the space and aggravation of dealing with hundreds of jewel boxes, finding one, opening it, loading it, etc. every time I want to play music.

But what drives me nuts is the Flintstonian interface; you load 200, 300, or 400 disks, and the thing doesn't have the brains to get on the net and retrieve their titles. Last I heard, the MOST advanced way to get the information in was a KEYBOARD, in the top-of-the-line models, to manually type in 400 titles.

My earlier models are even less sophisticated, providing a wheel that changes one letter up and down the alphabet each notch I turn it, and a button to push to confirm each letter and move on to the next letter, rinse, repeat, for every letter of every title of every single disk, ARGH. I only THOUGHT I knew tedium.

When I insert a music CD into my PC, where it's a brief guest, the PC fetches extensive CDDB/Gracenote data: Album title, artist, year, genre, names and lengths of each song, etc. For DVDs there's "DVD Profiler" that grabs the info on the movie. But when I put a disk into a 200-disk jukebox intended to contain it forever, the box sits there, dumb, clueless, with no idea what disk is in it and no way to find out until I tell it, in the most rudimentary, cumbersome way imaginable, a fraction of the data that sits, inaccessible, in huge databases?

Has any company yet had the divine inspiration to put a blinkin' chip and a phone jack, or an ethernet connection, or wi-fi, or even a bloody serial cable to attach to a laptop, or ANYTHING into one of these beasts so it can find out for itself what disks are loaded into it? Or are they still sticking us with a 1950s interface?

And are the newer hard-drive-based units any smarter, presenting a Faustian bargain of trading fidelity -- the inferior sound of those poor squeezed MP3s -- for convenience?

End of rant, thanks for everything.