Baby Baby I Hear A Symphony

Oh Santa Baby, slip an Olive Symphony under the tree for me...

What is that you are asking? Well, I'll tell you a little about it.

At first glimpse, we have a CD player. When you insert a CD, the music begins, and the face panel displays the artist or band's name and the song title courtesy of the machine's built-in two-million-album database of album and track names.

Press a button and copy the CD (about 45 seconds per track, or nine minutes per CD). Now, loading up your library onto the machines hard drive could get a little tedious, so the folks at Olive have made y'all an offer: it will preload all of your CD's onto your new Symphony's hard drive, you just pay for shipping them. And, it can directly copy analog such as cassettes and LPs right onto its harddrive for future CD archiving. (The new machine, the Musica, holds 40,000 songs, that's about 4 straight months of music, and is a much more groovy silver...)

You can search your collection, make playlists and burn shiny new CDs at will. And you can load and update your iPod, without even owning a computer.

Then there is the built-in WiFi (ethernet router as well), enabling home networking with your PC's throughout your home. So you can also listen to internet radio through the Symphony.

The folks at Sound and Vision wrote a glowing review of this baby here. Their bottom line: "An intelligently designed, easy-to-use music server that puts sound quality first."