Liquid Audio's focus is twofold: sound quality and copyright protection. Both are of paramount importance to musicians who wish to sell music online, and the company caters to these musicians with accessible technology—there are versions of Liquid Audio's mastering software available for Windows 95 and Power Macintosh—and with customized online marketing programs such as "Indie 1000."

Sound quality is excellent and seems fully the equal of CD, at least on a good computer-based sound system. We haven't yet heard the rival a2b music player from AT&T (primarily because we had trouble with its security features on our PC), but we think Liquid Audio's Liquid MusicPlayer offers much higher fidelity than RealNetworks' RealPlayer. In fact, the quality is good enough to be fully representative of a musician's work, and plenty good enough to enable consumers to build their own CDs, something that is beginning to be a viable option for many enthusiasts in these days of high-capacity disks and cheap CD-R drives. There is already a "Musicmaker" site for those who want to roll their own, but individual Liquid Audio tracks—encoded with secure copyright information—are available on many other sites as well. Music Boulevard sells tracks for 99 cents each. (Editor's Note: "Musicmaker" is no more. Music Boulevard has become CDNow, and tracks now sell for $1.49.)

Liquid MusicPlayer's system requirements are fairly steep: a 100MHz Pentium or PowerPC processor is specified, although we had the player running flawlessly on a somewhat slower machine. If you have the hardware and the storage space (a 5-minute Liquid Audio track will take up several MB on your hard drive), we recommend you give it a try.

Liquid Audio's emphasis on copyright, merchant certificates and security is fairly transparent to consumers, a good thing (cf. a2b music, above). The company has recently concluded a deal with ASCAP which will involve "automated rights reporting" from Liquid Audio-licensed sites. Although long downloads and large file sizes may represent a stumbling block to the widest adoption of this technology at the moment, we think Liquid Audio is well-positioned for the coming wave of high-speed access.

(Reviewed April 26, 1998)