Over the years, I have dealt with about a dozen music playing and CD-ripping programs for Windows. When portable music (MP3 and otherwise) players became prevalent, most of the music management software worked on the paradigm that the computer would act as a master repository, and the device would hold copies of some of the tracks. That made sense when the device had much less capacity than the computer di That made sense when the device had much less capacity than the computer disk. But what if you’ve got a 30 GB player and a 20 GB drive on your computer? Or a 4 GB player but only 3 GB free space left on your drive?I bought my 12-year-old son a Creative Zen V Plus 4 GB player for his birthday, and the old computer upstairs in the hallway at home has only 3 GB of free space on its disk. I helped him get the device charged and the software installed, and told him to try the software and see what worked. I expected to hear him moaning about the lack of disk space on the computer.Instead, he discovered that the Creative Media Explorer is capable of ripping CD’s directly to the player, without hogging any space on the computer drive. Brilliant! I’m sure the clarion cry for more RAM, more disk space, faster graphics, and dual processors for the shared computer will come eventually. But maybe it won’t be this month. Software Development