It may be a bit off-topic, but I felt it may still be interesting for some of you, at least if you're in Europe.

If you can receive NBC Europe over your TV cable, and if you have a TV tuner card in your Windows-98-PC (lot of "ifs", I know...), then you can now get masses of MP3s delivered directly to your hard disk for free - and it's not even illegal! ;-)

There's a new company called radio.mp3. They registered with the German broadcasting supervisory institutions as a regular radio station and pay their GEMA fees for every song they send, so legally they are on the safe side. However, instead of using analogue FM technique as an ordinary radio station, they made a contract with NBC Europe to digitally transmit their signal "piggyback" in the blanking gap (or is it video retrace gap? In German, it's "Austastlücke") of NBC Europe's TV signal. That gap seems to be wide enough to allow for real-time transmission of 128kb MP3 streams, so that's exactly what they do. To decode that signal, you need a TV tuner card and a piece of software, which you can download for free from radio.mp3's site. The best thing is that this software has a "record to disc" button (which will appear when the next song starts after you started the software), so you can easily store whatever they transmit on your hard disk.

They don't charge any money for that - I guess they'll probably start airing some ads later to generate some income. They may even get a share of the "TV and radio fee" that everybody who owns a TV set or radio in Germany has to pay.

I justed wanted to let everybody know, so you can now fill your empeg's hard disks even faster... smile.

Daniel