When was the last time you had fun listening to music? We're not talking about dancing or playing conductor while prancing around the room. We're talking about the experience being fun.

The new Qsonix Q100 Digital Music System ($5,495) has taken the dull task of storing and retrieving music to a new level by combining a 15-inch touch screen monitor and a 160-gigabyte or 400 GB server.

The task of setting it up was extremely easy _ I had the system up and running in about five minutes. You simply attach the monitor to the back of the server, attach the audio cables to your amplifier and turn it on.

Getting used to the touch screen was another matter, but once you become familiar with it you will be amazed at what you can do. Even a person who is all thumbs, like myself, eventually begins to move data around the screen like a pro.

The system uses the AMG music database, which is only available online. This means the server should be able to reach out and touch the Internet so it can retrieve information pertaining to CDs being stored. This includes album covers, a full track list, artists' names and genre. The folks at Qsonix are working on a way to also retrieve liner notes and other information on the albums and artists. This is much more extensive than the information you get with Gracenote's CDDB music database, which is used by many other music server manufacturers.

This enables the touch screen to display all of this data graphically, allowing you to select music by album cover, year, artist or genre. It even breaks the genres down into subcategories.

Getting it to work is a simple task of dragging what you want to hear (displayed on the left side of the screen) into a playlist (which you create on the right side of the screen). Once that's done, you simply drag the playlist down to either Zone 1 or Zone 2, depending on how your system is set up.

The only problem with this is that you can't simply drag the music down and hear it simultaneously in both zones. Instead, you have to move it into each zone separately and hit play for each. This means that music being played in Zone 1 is out of sync with the same tracks being played in Zone 2. Hopefully this will be rectified as they work on a new version of the software.

Other features include:

• You can play music in two zones, load new tunes and manage your database all at the same time.
• A 70-minute CD is loaded in 4-5 minutes.
• Entering data for "custom" created CDs is made easy through a data entry wizard.
• It supports a wide range of CD playback qualities including "lossless" compression. The quality you choose affects the number of CDs you can store on the hard drive.
• A soft fade control allows you to fade out the end of one track as the next one fades in.
• A fast preview feature allows you to hear the first few seconds of any song stored on the server.
• You can store up to 7,500 CDs depending on the compression you choose and the capacity of the hard drive.

More information can be found at www.qsonix.com.

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