I would stay away from ANY Electrolux regrigerator! I was told that Electrolux products were good quality. How far from the truth! My refrigerator (3yrs. old, model:E23C75DSS4) has been a major disappointment. Many of my problems started right away. 1. The seal on the freezer must not be tight, because shortly after I bought it a had a pound of dead ants on the bottom shelf of the freezer. 2. It is very loud and runs almost constantly. My 30 year old GE was less noisy. 3. The coating, that is supposed to make the stainless steel mudgeproof works very well, but shortly after we bought it it started to bubble up. 4. The doors are not aligned. One is higher than the other and sticks further out. 5. It is supposed to a counter depth. That is absolutely not true. When the doors are opened all the way they will hit the edge of your counter top. 6. The doors are supposed to have a mechanism that prevents them from flying open past a 40 degree angle, unless you want them too. That "stop" does not work anymore. Now we have to hold the door in a position that will keep it from hitting the counter top. 7. By year two some sticky bron fluid had leaked out of the bottom right door hinge, causing it too creak very loudly when being opened. I get sick to my stomach when I think that I paid $2000 for this. It is not worth more than $500. Unfortunately due to the reputation of Electrolux in Europe we did not think that we needed to buy the extended warranty.

I took a quick look at a review for the InstantMusic box and it is just the kind of thing I'm talking about. I actually have a stereo system (receiver, turntable, cassette deck, CD player) hooked up to an Onkyo audio hub (no longer made) which then feeds my Macintosh. Works great. Mine just converts to bits, and the software I use has to convert into the various music formats; this goes one step further. For $40 or so, it looks like just the ticket. The various music formats. There are a bunch of them. AAC, MP3, and WMA are the most popular. AAC is the format used on iPods and Apple's iTunes by default. Apple claims that AAC results in better-sounding files that are the same size as MP3 files. I don't know anyone who has a particular opinion on that, though I'm sure this is discussed to death elsewhere on the Internet. Music you buy from the Apple iTunes Music Store also is AAC-encoded. One disadvantage is that music from the iTunes Music Store has additional coding that makes it difficult to move those files to a non-Apple player (the main exception being iTunes for Windows). MP3 is the more generic format. iPods can play MP3s as can digital audio players from whoever is left in the business (Apple owns about 80% of the legal digital music business). WMA is a Windows Audio format. I don't know a lot about WMA other than Microsoft would prefer you use it. :-) I have not heard that it sounds significantly better or worse than any other format (including ones I haven't mentioned here); the big issue with WMA is that if you're not using a Windows-based system for playback, it will be harder for you to find a player for WMA-encoded files. Not impossible; just harder. It's not as popular a format as AAC or MP3. The general things to remember about digital audio formats are 1) that the smaller the file, the less good it sounds. That may not be a big deal if you're listening through iPod earbuds or a portable speaker or your cell phone -- it may sound just fine through those devices. It might be a bigger deal if you pipe your music to a quality home stereo. But it costs you pretty much nothing to try it for yourself; and 2) unless you have access to an "uncompressed" digital file of the music (or the original record/tape/CD), once you "rip" it into one of these formats, converting it to another format often causes some audible damage to the file. Then there's the labor that entails. So you might want to think just a bit about the format in which you want your music. It would be a pain to have to convert hundreds of files if you decide to move to another player that can't handle your chosen format.

Thank you SO much everyone! It seems most of you are for the CD fridge. We have a small fridge - the kind found in dorm rooms (not tall and skinny but short) which we could also use but there's no practical space to put that in besides the basement. But our kids aren't allowed to drink soda, my husband keeps only a few beers in the fridge at a time, and I keep my diet cokes in room-temp storage so I don't even know what would go in the small fridge. I'm certainly not willing to keep food down there or regular drinks like juice/milk so I really do think we'd be stuck w/ the CD fridge for most of it. I could keep our old fridge in the basement for holiday meals as well as all the drinks we presently keep in room-temp storage, however I was upgrading to an energy-efficient fridge! why would I want to have the new fridge AND the old fridge, considering that?! Going up in 3 cubic feet in size on for the fridge portion (free food), when I picture gigantic dice of a cubic foot each in size, that seems like a decent (not great, but decent) improvement... (I hope)! Here's what I'm too dumb to figure out: if the fresh food portion of a fridge includes the space in the door/doors - regardless of whether it's a 1990 standard fridge or the new french door kinds - how does that translate based on the new layout? In other words my current old fridge has very little door space; it has only one door and its shelves for condiments and butter. The new fridges have space for at least 2 gallons of milk in the door, but less space for condiments and yet still some space for them. So if the milk will no longer be on the main shelves but in the door, does that mean I'll get all that added space on the main shelves + the additional 3 cubic feet of fridge space? Anyway...thanks for helping me figure all this stuff out!

I got a cassette player just prior to heading off to college, from my parents. My parents didn't even own a stereo - they simply weren't much interested in music at all. But I think they wanted me to fit in. So they told my grandmother that I'd be getting one, and so please give our daughter some cassettes because she might like that... Apparently, my grandmother went to the music shop and bought me 3 cassettes based on what the guy helping her out figured might be nice for a grand daughter of my age... and amazingly, all THREE selections are ones I loved, and still love. (They eventually got replaced with CD's way down the road...) Cat Stevens, Tea for the Tillerman Carole King, Tapestry Gordon Lightfoot - not sure which album but one of his late 60's one. I am quite certain that Grandmother said, yeah, she loves cats, let's get the Cat Stevens one, and there's a cat on the cover of Tapestry, so yes, let's get that! Not sure how Gordon Lightfoot ended up in there, too, but hey, I ended up loving ALL THREE albums!