DIGITAL L.A. : LYCOS GIVES A BOOST TO MUSIC ON THE NET.

Byline: David Bloom 

One of the more interesting software players for music encoded in the MP-3 format was snapped up last week by Lycos, the search engine-cum-portal that's trying to carve out a space for itself in the online music business.

Lycos (www.lycos.com) had already created a specialized search area on its site to look for MP-3s, the compression standard that's widely used to squeeze music and other audio files into a relatively svelte size while retaining sound quality near that of a CD.

Lycos' MP-3 service has been unique among the major portals and quickly made Lycos the biggest place on the Net - home to 500,000 MP-3 songs and spoken-word files.

Now, Lycos has bought Mediascience Inc., the company that makes the Sonique player (www.sonique.com), creating a package of player, content and portal that should prove quite attractive to folks interested in the burgeoning world of digital music.

And just in case people don't want to use Lycos for their music files, Mediascience plans to keep doing business with companies such as Scour.Net (www.scour.net), the Los Angeles-based search site specializing in MP-3s and other digital media, said Al-Raz Adatia, Mediascience's chief technical officer.

Adatia, understandably a bit excited when I talked with him just before the Lycos deal was announced, said he believes Lycos will give his small company much more visibility as it tries to expand on its current 5 million registered users.

At the same time, he said, the Sonique player will put Lycos on millions of computer desktops, even when people are using their machines for something other than browsing the Web.

``It looks like we have a lot of opportunities to do a lot of interesting stuff,'' Adatia said. ``What's the value for Lycos? We're providing them with a desktop presence.''

Before Lycos successfully wooed them, Mediascience was something of a digital ``Runaway Bride,'' spurning 10 other buyout offers, Adatia said.

``A lot of them don't quite get it. This is about music, emotions,'' Adatia said. ``People want their Madonna record, regardless of the platform. One of the reasons why Lycos is going to be the ultimate partner to us is they made sense. They came to us and said `Here are our pieces; here's why you're the value add.' This deal puts together the pieces.''

The Sonique player has several nifty aspects, some of which mean more to record labels or computer geeks than Joe Sixpack music fans, such as a modular security architecture that handles not only their own anti-piracy encryption system but those of other players as well.

More importantly for fans, however, the player's way of compressing music into the MP-3 format (called a codec) is excellent, good enough to catch the ear of the folks who co-developed the format in the first place, Germany's Fraunhofer Institute.

Lycos' mascot is a Labrador retriever. In this case, it looks like the big dog brought back a winner.

HD-aches

KCET, the Los Angeles public television station, had big plans to take advantage of the high-definition TV revolution. The station hosted an early set of seminars on HDTV, raised millions of dollars to build a new digital production studio and otherwise girded itself for the high-def age.

But eight months after most Los Angeles commercial stations kicked on their digital transmitters, KCET is still waiting to do the same, said spokeswoman Laurel Lambert.

``There was a grant that we were supposed to be getting that hasn't arrived yet,'' said Lambert.

The $861,000 grant for a digital transmitter has been mired in paperwork at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, though Lambert said the station has been assured the money will arrive.

The schedule, which has repeatedly slipped, now calls for the station to start transmitting digital programming in March 2000, almost a year later than early estimates.

In the meantime, Lambert and other station execs are trying to make lemonade out of some very tart citrus.

``The digital studio is built,'' Lambert said. ``We have been building and designing and installing our new educational technology center. And a lot of the equipment needs a lot of testing and installing work that will take until the fall. So it's been all right that the transmitter wasn't ready to go yet.''

Jargon of the week

From a conversation at a recent Net business gathering: She calls her boss, a former movie studio owner now pondering an Internet move, ``one of the highest net-worth individuals in the country.'' You and I would just call him rich.

And from the oh-so-cool catalog of a European design firm, furniture for ``the non-territorial office.'' Files can be locked up in rolling containers stowed in ``garages'' in some corner of such office space. When you come to the office, you roll your container to an unused space and start to work. Hmm, and just where do the alpha males get to mark their space? We'll ask Jay Chiat.

Periodic brilliance

Here's a nifty idea for creating memorable but not easily crackable passwords, snagged from the magazine Internet World: Use the notations for chemical compounds.

I know, I know, high school chemistry made your head hurt. But even something like NaClH2O (which roughly translates to salt water) can upload those headaches to the hackers.

Pokemon everywhere

The many fans of Pokemon, particularly the animated TV show, should check out a recently released album - ``2.B.A. Master'' - of music from the animated TV series.

It includes the show's theme song, another ditty that names all 150 pocket monsters called ``PokeRAP'' and 10 other songs. And ``PokeRAP'' also can be seen in a video on the disc that will play in your computer.

The album's label, Rave Music, has shipped a reported 250,000 copies to stores, anticipating some serious interest among fans.