San Francisco, Calif.-based Olive Media Products Inc. on Wednesday announced the Musica. The US$1,099 device connects to your home entertainment system and features a 160GB hard disk drive. It can store music itself and also streams audio from a Mac or PC.
Built around an IBM PowerPC microprocessor, the Musica features a built in CD-R/RW drive — if you insert your CDs, it can record, tag and archive the music for later playback. The tagging can work independently of an Internet connection — Musica features a built-in and updateable database of more than 2 million tracks. You can also burn your music to CD.
The Musica touts a four-port autosensing 10/100baseT Ethernet switch and 802.11g-based wireless networking. It also sports two USB 2.0 ports.
If you’re disinclined to transfer over all the music you’ve already ripped to your Mac or PC’s hard drive, Musica supports Universal Plug & Play (UPnP) A/V and Apple Bonjour, so it can accommodate streaming to and from iTunes and other products.
The Musica sports gold-plated RCA inputs and outputs; you can use it to record audio from analog sources such as a turntable or cassette deck. It also has SPDIF optical and coaxial digital outputs. A Web-based interface lets you edit the metadata tags, and a built-in seven-line LCD panel displays music and status information.
The Musica supports playback of MP3, AIFF, PCM, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WMA and unprotected AAC files. It can also record in AIFF, WAV, FLAC and MP3 formats, with support for variable bit rate (VBR).
Clad in a silver finish, the Musica measures 17.13 x 11.42 x 3.35 inches and weighs about 13.2 pounds. The package includes a remote control, CD with recovery software, power cord, Toslink cable and RCA cable.