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Picture this: you go to your local music store, pick up a couple of CDs and bring them home. As you make your way through each disc, you find that you're liking maybe three out of every four songs on it. And that's if you're lucky. Sound familiar? And, when you go on road trips and want to pack up your tunes, do you find yourself with a monster CD tote case containing 20 or 30 CDs? Ever leave one those in your car in direct sunlight? It can end in tears.

Now imagine being able to stuff about 150 hours' worth of music onto a single device about the size of a Pop-Tart, and being able to control it with your car radio, which sees it as a CD changer. Piece all of this together, and what you've got is Kenwood's new Music Keg system, which takes the car CD changer idea to a whole new level.

Some car CD players (including Kenwood's) can understand the CD-MP3 file format, where you can rip and encode MP3 files, and burn them back out to disc (still compressed), and get 10-11 CDs' worth of tunes onto a single disc. But, burn enough of those discs, and you wind up back at square one: toting more CDs than you really want to. The Music Keg combines a 10GB laptop hard-drive with a USB 1.1 interface, and puts it in a trunk-mounted player. It can be driven using most of Kenwood's head units (radios/CD players that can control trunk-mounted CD changers). So if you have long pined to have all your music in one portable place at one time, then this is one keg you'll want to tap. But be prepared for a hefty bar tab, as the Music Keg along with a compatible head unit will set you back over $1,000, and that's without speakers or an external power amplifier. But if you're serious about your car audio, then flip the virtual page and find out if the Keg's got the goods...

Getting the Music Keg installed and configured will likely entail a trip to a professional installer to get the disc unit installed in your car's trunk, and to do the needed wiring. If you're an adamant DIYer, you can do the install yourself, but you'd better set aside a weekend to get it done. Having pulled a few door and dashboard panels off in my day, this is work I'm glad to pay someone else to do. But once the head unit and changer are installed in your car, you're ready to install the PhatNoise Music Manager application on your PC, which is the nerve center of this product. Currently, there's no Mac or Linux version of this software, so you'll need a Wintel machine to run this app. In a case of "it works better when it's plugged in", we discovered (the hard way) that the head unit's flip-face wouldn't open until the unit had power. But after plugging in the eval unit (pictured below), one gentle push on the upper left-hand corner of the face plate opened it electrically. Kenwood face plates are also removable to discourage those seeking a five-finger discount.

Once the DMS' driver installs (it's currently not digitally signed for XP), you see two hard-drive letters added to your My Computer window, one called PHATSYS, the other PHATDATA. The PHATSYS volume contains the DMS's OS, which is Lynuxworks' BlueCat Linux, and this volume eats about 15MB of disk-space, a very svelte OS install by today's standards. The remainder of the disk is partitioned for music and other data. Both volumes use the FAT32 file system, and so are readable as garden-variety data disks to which you can copy any data you want. In terms of form factor, the DMS' HD/cradle configuration very much resembles Iomega's Peerless series of removable USB hard-drives.

Evaluation Unit: Kenwood sent the head unit, Music Keg, and speakers in particle board enclosures, and the large enclosure had a step-down transform/power converter to provide Music Keg with 12V DC.

PhatNoise's UI is pretty straightforward, and resembles other MP3 library managers (RioPort Manager, WinAmp, etc.), except that it's tailored to talk to the Music Keg's DMS (Digital Media Storage) hard-drive, a 10GB laptop drive, in a cartridge form factor. PhatNoise can also be used to burn CDs, and can also be used with Creative's Nomad II portable audio player.

We did come across a few glitches in the interface, however. For starters, you can overwrite existing "discs" (directory entries, actually) without being warned you're about to do this. Most of the UI is drag-and-drop, and once you've ripped/encoded your music, you can switch to the Devices screen, where you can drag and drop individual songs, or entire albums to the device, to be written at the end of your ripping/organizing session. And this brings us to the other awkward bit in the UI: there are two buttons, one which says "DMS Sync" and the other says "Save/Eject DMS". Using DMS Sync updates the song/album listings to using PhatNoise's colored text coding scheme, but doesn't actually copy any files to the DMS, whereas Save/Eject DMS is where the actual file I/O occurs. This isn't a show-stopper, but it did make for some confusion early on.

Another minor annoyance was when we inserted the DMS cartridge into its USB cradle, there was about a 10-second lapse while the unit was recognized by the OS, and initialized itself for use. After this slight delay, the DMS was ready to work with, and worked fine.

PhatNoise can rip to wave, OGG, MP3 and WMA formats, although the Music Keg only plays back MP3 or WMA formats. According to PhatNoise (www.phatnoise.com), they'll be implementing support for FLAC (free lossless audio compression), which delivers 2:1 compression, as well as Audible's new secure format for spoken word content. Music Keg currently cannot play secure WMA content. Digital Rights Management will increasingly become an issue with devices like Music Keg, Nomad, Rio, iPod, et al. as these devices scale their storage capacity and features. For instance, Music Keg looks to Windows like a USB hard drive, so not only can you write music material to the drive, you can just as easily copy songs from the Keg to a friend's PC, which is sure to raise the ire of the RIAA and content producers. But the upside for users is that you can copy any data to the DMS drive, and tote it around. In addition, PhatNoise offers additional DMS drives in larger capacities of 20GB ($199) and 30GB ($299) direct on their web site. Later this year, there'll be a 60GB cartridge, and a USB2 cradle to dramatically increase copy speeds.

The PhatNoise application can encode MP3 at data rates of up to 320Kbits/sec, and WMA up to 128Kbits/ses, which is odd, given that Windows Media Player can encode WMA up to 192Kbits/sec. For most musical material, WMA's 128Kbits/sec data rate is adequate to get very good sounding 11:1 compression. We did our encoding tests using MP3 at a data rate of 192Kbits/sec, and were impressed both with the speed of the encoder, and on the resultant sound quality on playback. Our test machine was a Dell Inspiron 8000 notebook with a Pentium-III 700MHz CPU, the Intel 815 chipset, and 128MB of PC100 SDRAM system memory.

With as much storage capacity as the Keg currently has, you could drive across the United States and back and never hear the same song twice. But this is both a blessing and a curse, because car audio displays, like PDA and cell phone displays, have very limited resolution and screen real estate. And, in trying to scroll through hundreds, if not thousands of songs, you might find yourself in a head-on encounter with the business end of a phone pole, at which point what song you want hear will suddenly seem less important. You can build pre-defined play-lists to help alleviate this problem, and PhatNoise even has voice prompting, where you can record (using a PC sound card microphone) names for your play-lists, genres, albums and artists, so as you hit the scroll button, you know what you've just selected without having to take your eyes off the road. But what this device begs for (as do increasingly complex onboard climate/nav/audio systems) is a voice-driven UI, where you tell the device what you want, and it just does it. The emerging field of telematics technologies (car-based computers/PDAs/agents) will help drive these innovations, which will also benefit products like the Music Keg.

Music Keg uses MP3 files' ID3 tags, and sends this information to the head unit as CD-text, which the head unit can then scroll to tell you what song/artist/album/genre you're listening to. We tested with Kenwood's KDC-X759 head unit, and despite repeated attempts, we couldn't get CD-text/ID3 tag information to display even though according to the doc's it's supposed to happen automatically, and despite pushing all the buttons lots of times, all we got was basic disc/track number information.