BY DANIEL MCSWAIN
With a new site design and the addition of a handful of new services, popular P2P online music site Mercora continues to build out its offerings, as the service now features nearly 40 streaming radio channels compiled to represent major musical formats like Jazz, Alternative, and World Music.

Along with the more pronounced move into the streaming radio market, including a revamped streaming radio player, Mercora has also launched a subscription service for support on music-capable mobile devices.

Mercora, which allows users to share their music through the site's client (which Mercora insists abides by all streaming regulations), compiles user libraries into "Mercora Mix Central", which Mercora describes as "a collection of 1,000 commercial-free radio mixes created for your listening pleasure."

Clicking through to Mix Central, users will have to install a plug-in to deliver what the service calls "a high fidelity listening experience". That's not a false claim — all of the streaming music that came through the player (a small pop-up window that displays artist, song and album information, along with a picture of the artist or album art) sounded excellent. The sound quality leaves nothing to be desired, and with virtually no buffering time in the stream, the player delivers a very strong overall listening experience.

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As a tool for music discovery, the Mix Central product also proves useful. Each of the nearly 40 channels is broken down into a rather stunning selection of sub-genres, each its own mix. The music streams are connected to the databases of the All Music Guide, allowing users to click for more information about the artist currently playing, which also includes links to similar artists and styles.

Some time spent exploring the wide variety of genres and styles raises a few questions about how the "Mix Central" product exactly came to be. Despite a deep range of genres and sub-genres, the music on those niche stations doesn't always prove to match up to the advertised style. Other errors were more blatant, like hearing 70's AOR in the "Techno" section, or the fact that clicking on almost any of the "Avant Garde" music channels takes you to different chapters of the audiobook version of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code".

The second major addition to the product is the "Mercora M" service, a mobile service which gives users all of the  features of the Mercora product on their mobile devices. Features inlcude access to your own music library on your PC, access to the Mix Central product, and virtually all of the other features that the Mercora service offers over its web site.

Overall, there is a wealth of music and music information to be found on the revamped Mercora site. The navigation is smooth and easy, and for music fans interested in exploring the wide world of narrowly defined sub-genres while sharing their own music collections for others to hear, Mercora should not disappoint.

From PC Advisor: "Despite the clever and thoroughly modern technology lurking inside, Terratec's Noxon internet radio has been styled with one eye firmly on the past. And it manages to nail the retro look, fusing clean lines with an old-fashioned wireless layout...

"[T]he Noxon is rather smart at presenting options to you in manageable chunks, allowing you to search for radio stations and podcasts by country, genre or both... [W]hen you find a station you like, you can quickly add it to your favourites list from within the main menu, or even honour it by associating it with one of the five dedicated buttons on the front of the unit.

"The Noxon's exterior is constructed entirely of plastic, but it feels sturdy. You get a useful selection of connections, including ethernet, line-out, speaker-out and 1/8in headphone jack...

"In addition to picking up radio, the Noxon can stream music stored on a computer across the network,...

"The all-important sound quality's not bad at all, with the  iRadio delivering a surprising amount of depth and clarity. The 5W speaker should be plenty loud enough, provided you don't live in the Royal Albert Hall."

Read the entire article at PC Advisor.