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| Product: Voquette Media Manager 1.5 |
Company: Voquette, Inc. |
| Web: www.voquette.com |
Phone: 650-356-3700 |
| Platform: Windows 9x/NT/ME |
SRP: Free
MD and cassette adapters extra Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
To say that the Internet has changed the way people interact with audio content would be a gross understatement. The Net has given individuals unprecedented options for discovering new sources of news and entertainment. And therein lies one of the big problems with Net audio: It's hard to find what you want from the seemingly endless variety of choices, and when you do find content that you like, you're tied to the computer when you want to listen to it.
Voquette aims to fix both of these problems. To help you find all the music, news and other audio content you're looking for, they've built an easy-to-use and highly customizable website. Here you can search, find and compile personalized play lists of Web content that allows you to listen to a bunch o' the good stuff at once, without making your browser scurry all over cyberspace to tune it in.
If you're thinking this sounds a lot like AudioBasket, you're right, but with one important difference. To use AudioBasket, you have to be in front of your PC. Voquette takes the convenience level one step further by offering a piece of additional software they call the Voquette Media Manager. It allows you to store content for playback later on a variety of devices, the list of which seems to grow with each update. The latest release, version 1.5, supports recording to your PC, cassette recorder, Rio 300/500 MP3 player, Philips Rush MP3 player, Samsung Uproar MP3 player/cell phone and the Sharp MiniDisc.
To utilize a cassette recorder or MiniDisc player requires an additional piece of hardware, a "NetLink Adapter," designed to interface with the VMM. This is where things start to get interesting because, as of March 2001, Voquette no longer sells these adapters on their site, and they don't even tell you where you can buy them. Why? Presumably because Voquette is a company in transition and these devices aren't as important to their strategy as they used to be.
The latest version of the Voquette Media Manager (and the corresponding website) moves away from the consumer audio/entertainment angle and instead focuses more on business-to-business, encouraging employees to use Voquette to gather important work-related news and info. It's a fair assumption that since the software didn't become a household favorite with consumers, the company has decided to try the B2B angle.
Business users will run into the same difficulties home users have. The Voquette Media Manager software isn't very intuitive, it can be confusing to operate, and it has a tendency to spit out cryptic error messages. When it works, it works wonderfully, but there's definitely a learning curve involved. In their defense, Voquette's tech support (available by phone or live on their site) is available for free if you get stuck. Plus, there's an animated Web-based tutorial that'll hold your hand through the learning process.
Once working, the Media Manager becomes your new best friend. It can grab any content you want and store it for later listening. That means that your friend's radio show that airs in the middle of the night can be waiting for you on CD when you wake up. Or if you want to record that live chat with Britney Spears, but have an executive meeting, it can be waiting for you on your mobile phone when you get back to the office. The possibilities are endless.
Past versions of the software allowed users to purchase an upgrade for enabling text-to-speech capability that could, for example, allow users to listen to email in their car. The new version has this functionality disabled but sources in the company say that it'll be back.
In a nutshell, Voquette is a very cool concept in the midst of an identity crisis. Even their literature can't figure out what catchy slogan to associate with the brand. There's "Listen Smart," and "Delivering Sound Information," and also, a holdover from an older version: "Web Audio To Go." The whole enterprise is just a little more confusing than it needs to be. Street Tech readers, savvy lot that you are, probably won't have a problem navigating Media Manager, but your friend who still can't figure out how to add names to his Buddy List may not be so lucky.
- Scott Bass [3/25/01]
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