MP3.com has an incredibly cool new feature called Beam-it. You install this little utility on your computer, put in an audio CD, and click Beam-it: An MP3 version of that CD is then "beamed" to your MP3.com account for instant online listening. Well, sorta. Actually, they just look up the CD in their library of 45,000 pre-ripped CDs and give you access to it on their site. And it works. I just did one, and it took about 30 seconds. Very cool. Now, the drawback over just ripping the CD yourself, is that they just stream it to you, so you don't actually have a copy of the MP3 file (unless there's an easy way to create one from a stream that I don't know about -- I'm sure it's possible). This means you have to go to their site to listen to it, and you need a reasonably fast connection. If you have that, the advantages are: it's *way* faster to rip CDs, you can save a lot of hard drive space (currently, about 5GB in our case), and your collection is much more portable. (I would love, for example, to have easier access to my office MP3 collection at home.) All in all, very intriguing.

But will it last? MP3.com is currently being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (surprise, surprise) for Beam-it and a related, perhaps even cooler, feature that lets you listen to a CD on MP3.com as soon as you buy it online. While they may have a leg to stand on (see the article), I highly doubt, sadly, that MP3.com will survive this case with these features in tact. One question that's sure to come up: Sure, you have to have the CD in your possesion in order to Beam-it, but what's to stop Joe College and all his buddies from sharing the password to one MP3.com account and enjoying a massive, collective library of all their CDs?