13 June 2010
MusicM8 - Your mate?
19/06/10 13:51
This has been and odd week, don’t touch a music server for ages then two crop up together. This week we played with a Systemline 160 and an iMerge MusicM8. Of the two the MusicM8 has been the more interesting.
Here’s a rundown. It’s a single box, in black, pretty much the size of a desktop PC. Not surprising as in effect that’s what it is. It has a terrabyte of disc storage and a CD drive. You connect it to your network where it will store and serve up your music. But there’s more, this unit will rip your CDs too. All for around £800. Tempted?
Good points first. For a massive amount of hard drive and a CD unit its an OK size. If you put a CD in it will rip it for you then spit it out. Along the way it adds album art too. Then you can play your music around the house. I was very impressed to find the CDs I ripped instantly appeared in every iTunes library on our network. No additional set up required, it was just there. Click play and away it goes, instant music even though the data is coming from a Belkin dumb router out in the Hutch (back end of our garden) connected to an Airport Express up to the spare bedroom where the Apple Airport main wireless router live, then back wirelessly to my MacBook.
Bad points. It’s £800 - in Tescos I can get a pretty decent PC, USB disc, including a screen and keyboard for that sort of money. My Mac Mini with a cheap screen and keyboard was I think less than that. Noise - gee it makes some noise when its ripping a CD. Slow - CD ripping on this doesn’t stand comparison with a modest PC which will rip your discs much faster.
Don’t think its MuscicM8 or a PC, no, you need both. So to be truly effective that’s £800 PLUS the cost of a PC or laptop if you’re starting from scratch.
Then there’s the interface. Gee, its awful. Once you’re past the fancy html page that greets you when you log on you’re into a clunky 1980s Unix file browser. This surprises me, this unit is meant to appeal to a non-technical user, they’ll just love this reminder of the way things were.
There’s more. First CD I tried it with it got wrong. Typical classical CD error putting the composers name in the artist field. Not inspiring for free, at £800? It did get the albumart - but stores it in another folder. This means the art doesn’t show up in iTunes and of course it won’t download onto an ipod.
But here’s my main concern not just about this unit but others in the same vein and NAS drives too. Music ripping to a 1Tb drive - we’ve loaded 900 CDs onto this one - exposes you to a massive risk. You have a single drive with all that music and the only thing you can guarantee is that at some point the drive will fail. How responsible is that?
If you’re tempted by the MusicM8 ask the salesman about RAID. One day you’ll be glad you did.
Here’s a rundown. It’s a single box, in black, pretty much the size of a desktop PC. Not surprising as in effect that’s what it is. It has a terrabyte of disc storage and a CD drive. You connect it to your network where it will store and serve up your music. But there’s more, this unit will rip your CDs too. All for around £800. Tempted?
Good points first. For a massive amount of hard drive and a CD unit its an OK size. If you put a CD in it will rip it for you then spit it out. Along the way it adds album art too. Then you can play your music around the house. I was very impressed to find the CDs I ripped instantly appeared in every iTunes library on our network. No additional set up required, it was just there. Click play and away it goes, instant music even though the data is coming from a Belkin dumb router out in the Hutch (back end of our garden) connected to an Airport Express up to the spare bedroom where the Apple Airport main wireless router live, then back wirelessly to my MacBook.
Bad points. It’s £800 - in Tescos I can get a pretty decent PC, USB disc, including a screen and keyboard for that sort of money. My Mac Mini with a cheap screen and keyboard was I think less than that. Noise - gee it makes some noise when its ripping a CD. Slow - CD ripping on this doesn’t stand comparison with a modest PC which will rip your discs much faster.
Don’t think its MuscicM8 or a PC, no, you need both. So to be truly effective that’s £800 PLUS the cost of a PC or laptop if you’re starting from scratch.
Then there’s the interface. Gee, its awful. Once you’re past the fancy html page that greets you when you log on you’re into a clunky 1980s Unix file browser. This surprises me, this unit is meant to appeal to a non-technical user, they’ll just love this reminder of the way things were.
There’s more. First CD I tried it with it got wrong. Typical classical CD error putting the composers name in the artist field. Not inspiring for free, at £800? It did get the albumart - but stores it in another folder. This means the art doesn’t show up in iTunes and of course it won’t download onto an ipod.
But here’s my main concern not just about this unit but others in the same vein and NAS drives too. Music ripping to a 1Tb drive - we’ve loaded 900 CDs onto this one - exposes you to a massive risk. You have a single drive with all that music and the only thing you can guarantee is that at some point the drive will fail. How responsible is that?
If you’re tempted by the MusicM8 ask the salesman about RAID. One day you’ll be glad you did.
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iPod? iPad? What's up?
15/06/10 07:49
Just went to check on the Apple store - it’s down. Why? Usually when there’s a new product being launched. This could be web real estate for the iPad or maybe some new goodies. How about a revamp of the Mac Mini range, now getting long in the tooth. Or 101 other brilliant things Apple could be sliding in.
But back to what I was going to say. We went to the Apple store in Bluewater and had a demo of the iPad. Great machine, despite its shortcomings, but my wife asked the obvious question, how much will this be next year? An item in the month’s (US) Wired noted the original iPod launched back in 2001 cost $400 and stored 1,000 tracks. At an optimistic exchange rate that would have translated into around £200.
In US terms that’s $0.4 per track or 20p in sterling. You got poor battery life, a slow machine and a widdly mono display. It just played music plus a couple of other minor features. Today, on Amazon UK, for £175 (12.5% less in absolute terms) you can get a sleek, colour screen, video playing, iPod Classic with a 160 Gb drive capable of storing 40,000 songs. That’s down to 0.4p per track. Loads more features along with it.
So where will we be when the store comes back online, who knows. But in a years time my guess is we’ll be playing a tad less for an iPad, it will be thinner, lighter and using the same display technology as the newest iPhone.
But back to what I was going to say. We went to the Apple store in Bluewater and had a demo of the iPad. Great machine, despite its shortcomings, but my wife asked the obvious question, how much will this be next year? An item in the month’s (US) Wired noted the original iPod launched back in 2001 cost $400 and stored 1,000 tracks. At an optimistic exchange rate that would have translated into around £200.
In US terms that’s $0.4 per track or 20p in sterling. You got poor battery life, a slow machine and a widdly mono display. It just played music plus a couple of other minor features. Today, on Amazon UK, for £175 (12.5% less in absolute terms) you can get a sleek, colour screen, video playing, iPod Classic with a 160 Gb drive capable of storing 40,000 songs. That’s down to 0.4p per track. Loads more features along with it.
So where will we be when the store comes back online, who knows. But in a years time my guess is we’ll be playing a tad less for an iPad, it will be thinner, lighter and using the same display technology as the newest iPhone.