5. "Gee Whiz" Features

As I mentioned earlier, the Neuros MP3 Digital Audio Computer is really a multifunction audio device. In addition to the MP3 player features, it also gives you an FM radio, which can be a good thing if you tend to tire of your tunes before you have a chance to copy new ones to the unit.

The reception on the FM radio is good, which surprised me since I live in a part of San Francisco where the hills tend to distort most radio signals.

However, an AM band was missing. Some of us like to listen to talk radio or sporting events occasionally and I doubt the addition of another radio band would have made the unit much bigger.

Next on the list of nifty features is the MyFi transmitter, which lets you broadcast audio from your Neuros hardware to an FM radio. This feature lets you play the MP3s stored on your Neuros on your car or home stereo - or someone else's for that matter. The Neuros searches for an unused frequency on the FM band using an AutoScan feature and can then be used to broadcast to an available FM receiver.

The feature works well as long as you remember to keep the earphones plugged in during AutoScan and unplugged when you're transmitting to the FM receiver. I'd imagine that you may need to perform the scan more than once when broadcasting to a car stereo on a road trip, but when remaining stationary, I was impressed with the quality. It was of cool, for example, to bring the gadget to a friend's house and play music wirelessly through the stereo system.

The HiSi feature (Hear it! Save it!) is intended to help you identify songs that you hear while using the FM radio feature of the Neuros player. To use the feature, you press a bright orange button on the player, which stores a 30-second sample of the song that can be identified via the Internet the next time you synchronize the player. According to the documentation, around 95% of the music heard on the radio can be identified in this manner.