Of Recordings

Warning: serious geekery follows.

I don’t actually use CDs any more.  I still have piles of them, and I even buy new ones from time to time, but they’re basically decorations.  I pretty much rip them once and put them away.  Unfortunately, my equipment has not kept up, and I don’t really have a good solution for listening to digital music away from my desk.  At the moment my solution is to plug my iPod into the receiver, but that is less than ideal.

I would like a solution that lets me have a single collection of music that I can access from multiple points in my house over the network.  A few candidates I’ve found are:

• The Mvix.  You put a hard disk inside, and then it acts as a music and video player with built in wireless and wireful networking.
• The Neuros.  Similar to the Mvix, but more video-oriented.  Also, no wireless and you must add an external hard drive.
• The Linn (no relation to Roger) Sneaky Music DS (no relation to Nintendo).  Very cute, and has the power amp built in (just add speakers).  But it’s comically expensive.

All three are built on open-source parts, which means they ought to be hackable, which is nice.  The Mvix is the frontrunner.  But at the moment I am leaning towards building a small, quiet mini-ITX computer in an attractive case and running mythTV or something similar.  It would run slightly more than a Mvix, but I like building stuff.

Korg are developing an MS-10 based groovebox for the Nintendo DS.

Recently, Korg seem to have made a point of releasing small, fun musical gadgets in addition to their usual megabucks workstations. Perhaps they have discovered that this is an excellent way to separate me from my hard-earned cash.

(Thanks to Darius for the pointer.)

Update: video demo and more details here.  Two notes from the video:

1. You can apparently use the DS touchscreen as an XY controller, Kaoss pad style.  (Or really, Wavestation style.)

2. You can apparently draw patch cables with the stylus, which is just plain badass.