Comment Articles

Consumer PCs?

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 07 Sep 2001 17:17 BST

For a piffling £1,200 you can buy the iMerge S1000 - a CD player which will not only play all your CDs, but also store the music on them. It looks like a CD player, apart from the Ethernet socket on the back, and the composite video output socket.

Alternatively, you can connect your ordinary PC to the Internet, and download Music Match Juke Box. Connect your PC to a pair of speakers, and you now have a CD player which will not only play all your CDs, but will also store all the music on them. The software is free, and you probably have the PC already.

As with the iMerge device, a PC will offer you a choice of low, medium or high bit-rate MP3 storage compression; the iMerge will also store it as CD quality.

OK, so the iMerge device will become somewhat cheaper around January, and will gain some new features, too. Actually, I lied about the current model being able to play your CDs back; it gets that feature next year. But the difference is academic; it can start playing back something it has "ripped" to MP3 pretty much as it records it. So it's nice, and if you had a thousand-odd pounds lying around with nothing to spend it on, you'd probably get one.

What made this particular toy interesting to me, was not so much the question of whether it would be cleverer to buy a PC and add a new hard disk, or to buy the iMerge itself. What was interesting was the fact that it was being demonstrated by Seagate - the company which makes the 40 gigabyte hard disk inside it.