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Sound of Musica
Think the 60 gigabyte hard drive in your $400 iPod is the greatest thing in music storage? An outfit called Olive Media Products will give you a whopping 160 gigs in a device it calls Musica. But it costs $1,100 and won't fit in your pocket.
You might want it anyway. Musica, like its $900, 80-gig sister, Symphony, adds lots of digital tricks, not to mention between 6,000 and 40,000 songs, to your home audio system. And it's meant to live there, since it looks and sounds like real audio equipment. There's no fan in the box, so only the hard drive and the CD player can make noise--and they generally don't.
There are more ways to get music into the machine than you might suspect. While Musica plays a CD, it can rip the songs to the hard drive in formats of varying quality and compression, from decent MP3 to no-compromise lossless FLAC. No time for ripping? Send Olive the discs and the company will do the job for you--for a limited time, free. You can also play your iPod or other portable music player through Musica's USB port (though you can't copy music from the iPod directly). Musica can also make digital copies from analog sources such as cassette decks and turntables, complete with the hiss and crackle you remember from the originals.
Though Musica was designed to be networked, it can work on its own; its built-in database can recognize artist and track information for 2 million albums. But this box really sings when it's connected, by wire or wireless. Tapped into the Internet, it can grab a wider range of album information, play Web radio stations and update its internal software. Over a local network you can edit album information from any computer with a Web browser, copy music files from your PC or Mac (though the process is incredibly clunky) and even stream non-copy-protected music to and from locally networked computers running iTunes. Sonata remote receivers, arriving early in 2006 for $200, will give you a way to stream Musica's collection to other audio systems around the house.
Getting music out of Musica is a bit trickier; the folks at Olive seem to have strange ideas about copy protection. Though you can copy music from it to an iPod, the only music you can copy from it directly to a networked computer is what you've created from analog sources. The only other way to get copies out is to burn them to standard (not MP3) CDs. Worse, the unit can't play copy-protected files like the ones you might buy or subscribe to from an online music service, and it can't play Windows Media files of any kind. Software updates may eventually change that.
Using Musica is a lot nicer close up than from across the room. Its screen blows up the characters for readability only when it's playing music, not when you need to manage the iPod-like menus. The front of the unit has a handy wheel to navigate through menus and fast-forward through tunes. But the wheelless remote forces you to learn a largely different and inferior way of interacting.
Classical music fans may want to opt for Olive's cheaper Symphony model, which comes with an intriguing cataloging system that organizes classical pieces better than most music databases. Big collectors take note: The only way to add local storage is to use Olive disc drives that aren't yet available.
Of course, if you don't care about networking, your music is on CD and you don't mind doing data entry or finding lots of room in a cabinet, you can buy a 400-disc CD jukebox for around $200--or, for $300 or so, a model that will also handle DVDs and multichannel audio discs. And you can always connect any iPod to a home music system with a $10 cable. But Musica, despite its quirks and limitations, joins the Sonos and the Roku SoundBridge as a reasonable way of bringing digital harmony to your listening room.