Everybody knows that you can hook your 30 gig ipod to your home stereo with a docking device. Now, you can take that latest greatest 10 Terabyte Hard Drive and hook it directly to your stereo! This device looks like a case to externally mount a Hard Drive in, but it also has a backlit touch screen that displays Audio tracks, and a built in power supply, and a remote control, not to mention a USB cable to add more songs. You could install a used DVD drive and play audio files stored on that instead! The beauty of this is that it is potentially much bigger than your ipod's hard drive, and you could play your lossy or lossless files, it would be a regular component of your stereo, and it could be easily upgraded to a larger drive later on.-- EdisonEnvy, Dec 02 2008 Squeezebox Duet http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_duet.htmlI'm not sure how this is very different from products like the Squeezebox or the various Sonos systems... [hippo, Dec 02 2008] Western Digital WD TV http://www.wdc.com/...cts.asp?DriveID=572Media Player for USB Storage Devices [EdisonEnvy, Feb 02 2009] Western Digital WD TV (at Best Buy site) http://www.bestbuy....=1&id=1218008588808Media Player for USB Storage Devices [EdisonEnvy, Feb 02 2009] It may be possible to hack such a drive into a 6th generation iPod "Classic" as they internally use a IDE interface.
I see this becoming a feature of all high-end hard drive enclosures, they'd have a USB connection like they do now but also RCA audio, headphone jack, and fiber optic, as well as a lot more buttons and a screen. Maybe even a pullout remote control.-- Spacecoyote, Dec 02 2008 I was thinking of using a modified version of Rockbox software to create an open source audio machine, sort of like a modded Xbox (Xbox media center). If it was easy to put together with easily available components, and open source firmware, I think it could catch on in these lean times!-- EdisonEnvy, Dec 11 2008 Finally! There is a device called the Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player for USB Storage Devices, I think that this is almost exactly what I envisioned, except maybe the independent display, this works with your TV. From what I've read, the software may need work, but you can hook this thing to any USB drive and to your HDTV/stereo, and play audio/video files, apparently including my beloved lossless FLAC files!
The oldest review on the Best Buy site is from early November, so the device already existed before I wrote the page. I guess that it's "baked" now!-- EdisonEnvy, Feb 02 2009 random, halfbakery