iNoize.com Makes Music Streaming Faster

Better compression, like Thomson's new mp3PRO format provides, should speed up downloading music files that you intend to play later on your own system. Streaming audio and video are a whole different thing. Streaming, even with a good broadband connection, still doesn't seem ready for prime time, mostly because the buffering makes it really clunky. iNoize.com thinks it has a solution that will improve music streaming on the Internet. The company's SmartSource technology finds multiple sources of a chosen song, then streams from several sources simultaneously to provide a more seamless listening experience. SmartSource assigns each source a piece of the chosen music file to stream to the listener, but the listener hears the music as though it were coming from a single source. If one of the sources disconnects from the network, another source is substituted in, hopefully resulting in an uninterrupted stream of sound. iNoize.com is pushing itself as "The Legal Alternative to Napster." While you can pick the songs you want to listen to and build playlists, the music is streamed, not copied, with encryption intact, so you can't burn the songs you hear onto CDs.