Commercial Products
It appears I wasn't the first person with this idea and I definitely wasn't the first person to sell one. A number of big players (and some small ones) have very similar devices. If you want to buy a real commercial product, here's a quick run down of the ones I know of.
These
guys just lowered their price to $599 and the system looks pretty damn
good. The audio card was designed by Harmon-Kardon. They have all
the right outputs including MPEG video support. Unfortunately, the device
doesn't burn CDs and of course doesn't support OGG. The kicker is
according to SlashDot,
You can specify "LINUX ONLY" when you order, and they will ship
it to you with linux (and drivers for the hardware) so that you can do what you want with it.
Given the high quality audio hardware and the floating ground
power-supply, this may be the new MPST platform.....This is a very complete system. They pretty much nailed everything I wanted to do: it rips, burns, plays, has Internet radio capability, remote/TV/LCD interface and digital out
(TOSLINK). Even allows a net connection through ad-banner dial up! It runs $999.99 at Circut CityVery similar to the HP system except SonicBlue has added capability to download to a Rio portable. I don't know if it have TV and Digital out since I've never seen one, but for $1499.99, it better have that and then some....I stumbled across this system in a Sunnyvale used parts store. The device includes a amplifier so you can connect it directly to speakers. There was not any digital output on the model I looked at, and their webpage doesn't have many details. It's unclear how it finds album information and doesn't appear to be able to write CDs. On the plus side, the price is only $449.
I saw this at the Embedded Systems Conference. This is definitely the slickest looking box I've seen. It was all chrome and pizza box thin. Unfortunately, it only has a 20Gig disk, but I'm sure you can upgrade it. It appears they have a local copy of the CDDB database as well as a network connection which mentions Internet radio support. They also allow you to listen and
rip the same CD at the same time, which is a neat trick. I don't think you can buy it yet and I wasn't able to find any pricing information.
This box splits between the HP and the Fullplay offering. Box and control layout is the best I've seen. It borrows the good stuff from the Sony Carousel interfaces without getting too busy. Unfortunately, it appears to be a little Windows centric, using a USB connection rather than a network. I don't know if you can use a USB to network adaptor with it. I called some dealers to try to get a price quote, but they couldn't find the item in their price book.
ZapMedia ZapStation