Gadgetopia

Rip and Burn and Download on a Stereo: The Olive Symphony is a home stereo component that pulls its music from an internal drive.

Take the built-in CD player, for example. When you slip a CD into the slot and press the glowing Play button, the music begins. The song and band names appear on the screen in huge letters, visible from across the room, courtesy of the machine’s built-in two-million-album database of album and track names.

The cool part is that if you send them all your CDs, they’ll pre-install them on the device’s hard drive before they ship it to you.

By pressing one button, you can copy the CD onto the Symphony’s hard drive. The process takes about 45 seconds a song […]

And what if you have 1,200 CD’s? Are you really expected to sit there, drumming your fingers, feeding the box another disc every nine minutes?

Don’t be silly. Olive has made an offer you can’t refuse: it will preload all of your CD’s onto a new Symphony’s hard drive. You just pay for one-way shipping for the discs.

Other integration is just as cool — it has WiFi:

[…] suppose you keep your music collection in iTunes (the free jukebox software) on your Mac or PC upstairs. That music library shows up on the Symphony box, ready to play on your much nicer sound system downstairs.

In fact, the same stunt works in reverse: the Symphony also shows up as an icon in the iTunes software, so that you can play its music collection on your computer. In this age of copy-protection paranoia, you just wouldn’t expect to find this sort of flexibility and simplicity.

$900.