After watching the 36-to-1 long shot Birdstone spoil heavy favorite Smarty Jones's bid for the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes, my friend Bob and I got to talking MP3 players. First, a little background on Bob. He bought his first guitar with the money he won after he hit a trifecta at the track, and he loves horse racing almost as much as he loves music. He's the lead singer of a band and has an extensive knowledge of punk rock and heavy metal. But he doesn't have a computer.

As both a fan and creator of music, Bob clearly deserves an MP3 player--preferably one with line-in recording for taping his performances. But he shouldn't have to buy a computer just to use it. True, he could buy a player with line-in recording and dub each CD, tape, and record in his collection onto the player's hard drive, one by one (I'd recommend the iRiver iHP-120 for that, by the way). But knowing how many albums he owns, this would be way more than a weekend project.

Herein lies the problem. The long-awaited convergence between computers and consumer electronics has become a mass phenomenon when it comes to music, but there's still no way to experience it without a computer. I liken the situation to the construction of the so-called chunnel (channel tunnel). The chunnel was dug simultaneously from France and England; workers met somewhere near the middle, and that's how they knew it was done. Bob's dilemma is that he's French, and the English aren't digging. He has the stereo but no computer.

What about Bob?
Bob can't be the only one who wants in on the digital music action but doesn't want to bet a whole new computer on the proposition. How can we let computer-phobic types into the starting gate? I suppose we could encourage them to send crates of CDs to a ripping service such as RipDigital, then borrow someone else's computer for a one-time transfer onto their MP3 player. Not a bad plan, but it assumes that Bob's done buying music, which I doubt very highly.

The solution is staring us in the face...how about (shock, horror) a music store? Bob and his noncomputing ilk could bring a promotional, uniquely identified flash memory keychain to any cooperating store--Virgin Megastore would be a good place to start--and browse the music while scanning the bar codes on interesting CDs with the keychain. When he's ready to go, Bob would go up to the counter, plug in his keychain and MP3 player into ports beneath the register, and buy the songs (at a discount, since ones and zeros are cheaper to duplicate than CDs).

	The Wi-Fi SoniqCast Aireo is almost certainly a harbinger of future wireless portable players. SoniqCast Aireo  Check prices

Perhaps these stores would consider giving him a day to preview the music for free and figure out what he might want to return. He could select the stuff he doesn't want on the player itself, then drive past a Wi-Fi-enabled record store to finalize the transaction (assuming that he has a Wi-Fi-enabled MP3 player). I think the extra day would boost sales--after all, we all know that when stores have an all-returns-accepted policy, we're likely to purchase more stuff.

However, for the system to work, it'd have to be technologically easy--we're talking about people who don't own computers, here. I think the keychain that scans and stores bar codes would be the most painless, since it's similar to the way these folks already buy music. At this point, nothing makes more sense than using your own computer to manage the music on your portable player. But until the rest of the population gets onboard, I bet there's money to be made by selling purely digital music to more of the population. The fact that people like Bob don't like computers shouldn't doom them to lugging physical media around everywhere they go; as any jockey knows, you want to carry as little weight as possible when you're on the move.